I
enjoy the story of the new prisoner spending his first night in jail. The evening meal was a somber
affair until one prisoner arose and called out “Thirty-seven.” The dining room erupted in hyster-
ical laughter. Another rose and won instant hilarity by saying “One hundred and fourteen.”
“What’s going on?” the new prisoner asked his cellmate.
“Well,” he replied, “the prison library has only one book of jokes and, as everyone has memo-
rized them, all we have to do is call out the page number of the joke.”
Keen to win favor with his compulsory companions, the new prisoner borrowed the book and
started to memorize the jokes. Within a couple of weeks he felt confident to join in. At the end of a
somber meal he rose and called out “Ninety-seven.”
The silence was palpable.
“What’s wrong?” the new prisoner whispered to his cellmate.
“Well,” came the reply, “you picked a good joke, but it was the way you told it.”
Delivering your story—the art of effective storytelling—is analogous to learning any new skill,
such as driving a car. You begin by driving up and down a driveway before tackling rush-hour traf-
fic on a wild, wet, winter’s night. At first you need to concentrate, deliberately, on how to slowly re-
lease the brake with one foot, while depressing the accelerator at just the right speed with the other.
At the same time you need to keep your eyes on the road, shift gears with one hand, switch on the
blinkers with the other—and also keep your hands on the wheel. At first the complexity of the task
may seem daunting, but as you acquire the behaviors they become second nature and you drive
through heavy traffic without consciously having to think about when you depress pedals or put on
blinkers. You may have heard people say, “Oh, he or she is a good storyteller,” as though that ability
is something that is innate and unattainable by most others. I find it more helpful to think that
CHAPTER 2
Guidelines for Effective Storytelling