[BLANK AUDIO] We've spent a fair bit of time talking about the nature of stories. So let's now go ahead and turn to those instances where the stories are the way you actually organize the speech. And now there are a couple ways you might approach this. You might want to use the story as a general structuring device. So the key points in the narrative become the key points in the speech. A few months ago, I was working with someone on a speech, she wanted to talk about Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Her mother, who was born in India. And her experiences as one of three Indians growing up in a small island community here in the Northwest. So we have a lot of elements floating around, and needed a way to unify them. What she ended up doing was using the story of Ram and Ravan, which is at the heart of the Ravana Festival, as the structuring device. So what did this look like? So she opened up with a story about her and her family putting up lights for Diwali. So we get a sort of nice family snapshot here at the beginning. Then she jumped back to the story from this Indian epic, she's talking about the king's family. She talks about how Prince Ram was exiled for 14 years, about how he and his wife and his brother faced challenges. Then she jumps over to her mother, who grew up in India. She talks about how her mother faced challenges, her mother's father died. Ram's father died while he was in exile. Ram showed kindness and charity, her mother showed kindness and charity. She talked about how Ram fought and defeated his enemy, Ravan. Then, she talked about how she, the speaker, confronted ignorance in her small hometown and hosted the island's first Diwali festival. She then ended by talking about how Ram returned home after his exile and was welcomed back and how this lesson of family and community is taught by Diwali and by her mother. So there, the narrative of Ram and Ravan is the structuring device. We zig-zag a little bit from the story, it's analog in her life. A little bit from the story, it's analog in her life. But that story allowed her to collect the various things that she wanted to talk about and put it together in a speech that made sense. That narrative structure was providing the driving logic to the speech itself. So that's an instance of one story providing a structure. Now, you might have multiple stories, but they're linked together thematically. To me, this often feels like a reverse topical structure. So you tell the story, hit the theme, tell the story, hit the scene, so on and so forth. So Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian author. And she does tons of talks, and she gave this TED talk on the dangers of simply having one story about a person. So she starts off by talking about her early childhood. So she read lots of Western stories. So when she started to write, she was writing about experiences that she didn't really have. She talked about ginger beer, she didn't know what ginger beer was, but she would write about it. The problem was she had only one story, and it was a western one, so then she found African literature and that was transformative. Then we go on to the next story. So she grew up in a middle class family and had live-in help, a young boy. And her mother told her a story about this boy's poor family. So she was surprised to learn when she visited the family that they could do lots of different things. She had had only one story about him. She goes on to the next story, she goes to school in America and her roommate had only one story about Africa. And so the roommate had all sorts of wrong assumptions. Then, she continues to sell stories, her first novel, her trip to Mexico, and so on and so forth. Each time she's got a story, she's showing how that story illustrates the theme. That only having a limited understanding of another person or another culture can be so damning. Then she ends, her conclusion, her end section, is a longer section walking through all those various vignettes, those various stories. And thinking about what she or others would have done if they'd had more than one story. And then that leads to our final conclusion, which is, stories matter. They can hurt, but with a broader sensibility, they can also heal. It's a great speech, it's really interesting to listen to. And her anecdotes are more or less arranged in a chronicle structure. She starts off with her early childhood and ends more or less in present day. But you can see that as sort of a reverse topical structure. She tells the story, then discusses the value, so that's another option. But finally, another final option is, you might simply tell the story and then discuss the values. This is that sort of fable model, where you talk about the story and then have the moral at the end. Kim Weitkamp is a speaker, performer, storyteller. And she had this bit where she talked about one of the teachers she had growing up that had really influenced her. So, she starts out the speech with some background. Her teachers would write her mom about how distracted she was in class. Okay, but then she got this new teacher, this fantastic teacher. That's our inciting incident. Then this new teacher sees her talking and outgoing nature as wonderful. And it builds to this climax of the teacher writing to her mother about how wonderful Kim was. And then she spends the last quarter of the bit talking about the value of that teacher's comment, what it had taught her. Basically, the moral of the story. So, in that case, we have the story with the value at the end. It's a short bit, it's probably about four minutes. Most of it's the story, but we've got an explicit ending that discusses the meaning once the story's completed or near its completion. And I think that's probably a good model for short speeches, where you're only really doing one story. So, you can use story structure all the time. If you've got a single story, or if you've got multiple stories. If you've got values threaded throughout, or they're only discussed at the end, whatever. Really whatever best fits values supporting the occasion. But since, as audiences, we are so familiar with that basic narrative model, it makes it much easier to follow along with that speech. [MUSIC]
