Story telling is not just limited to books and movies. Stories infiltrate our life in thousands of ways. Often we are either the story teller or the story receiver and we do not realize that we are engaged in the act of storytelling. Kids are expert story tellers, so are Grandparents when they share family history. Gamers tell stories as they play. Even a simple television commercial can be a story in thirty seconds.

We don’t think of ourselves as story tellers, but guess what we are.

Have you ever gone to work on a Monday and a coworker asks, “How was your weekend?” Then you tell them about the shopping trip with all the sales you lucked up on or ball game you went too. You are telling a story.

Not all stories are good ones and not all stories are worth telling. This is true. The skill of storytelling is like anything else. Some of us are good and it, some of us are not and some of us can tell average stories. It is the interesting, heart felt, tragic and scary stories that we tend to remember the most. The key is engaging the story receiver’s emotion. It is the listener, viewer, reader who determines if the story is good or not. The story teller may think the story is good and be completely wrong.

As a writer the exchange of story from the teller to the story receiver fascinates me. I want to know what makes the receiver remember the story, why was the story worth the time of telling and why would you want to repeat the story? It is the psychology of the story that is the game changer for me.

I challenge you to be aware of the stories in your life. Notice when you are on the telling end and the receiving end of a good story. What makes you remember a story? What makes you repeat a story? Most importantly what makes you really like story or fall in love with a story?

~Lori O’Gara