Storyworthy Read online

  Grant slowly comes to understand that these children are not just smelly, expensive pests. They are interesting and compelling human beings, despite their youth and small stature.

  The five-second moment in the film happens when Grant and the two children are perched in a tree, resting for the night. Grant has Tim and Lex nestled in each arm as he talks to them about the plant-eating dinosaurs that they’ve just fed by hand.

  Here’s how the original screenplay reads:

  Satisfied, Tim settles in for the night. Grant shifts too, getting comfortable, but something in his pocket pinches him. He winces and digs it out. It’s the velociraptor claw he unearthed so long ago in Montana. Yesterday, actually. He looks at it, thinking a million thoughts, staring at this thing that used to be so priceless.

  LEX

  What are you gonna do now if you don’t have to dig up dinosaur bones any more?

  GRANT

  I guess we’ll just have to evolve too.

  TIM

  What do you call a blind dinosaur?

  GRANT

  I don’t know. What do you call a blind dinosaur?

  TIM

  A Do-you-think-he-saurus. What do you call a blind dinosaur’s dog?

  GRANT

  You got me.

  TIM

  A Do-you-think-he-saurus Rex.

  Grant laughs. Both kids finally close their eyes, but after a moment, Lex pops hers open again.

  LEX

  What if the dinosaur comes back while we’re all asleep?

  GRANT

  I’ll stay awake.

  LEX

  (skeptical) All night?

  GRANT

  All night.

  Grant lets the claw fall to the ground.

  It’s important to remember that Grant used this same claw at the beginning of the film to frighten the boy he didn’t like. It’s a boy he thought was smelly and stupid. Now he has let his fossilized claw go. Instead of holding on to this precious bit of ancient dinosaur, Grant is now holding on to children — one who made him laugh a moment ago and the other whom he has comforted like a father. This is Grant’s five-second moment. It’s the most important moment of the film. It’s a moment of true transformation. This is why he tells Lex that he will have to evolve too. The word evolve is important and purposeful. Grant has already evolved. He sees these children as something new and wonderful. His genuine laughter at Tim’s joke, his comforting assurances to Lex, and his release of the fossil are all designed to signal this momentous change. These are the indicators of Grant’s five-second moment, and therefore form the climax of the story.

  Grant likes children. In fact, he loves these two, and he could presumably love others. As a result, he and Sattler will live happily ever after.

  This is the end of the movie. More must happen, but only because Grant’s story of transformation is set in an action-adventure film on an island full of dinosaurs. As a result, there is unfinished business. Exciting encounters with velociraptors and electric fences and walk-in coolers. But the rest of the film only seeks to wrap things up.

  How will they escape the island? Who will live and who will die (though if you know anything about storytelling, you would have known this right from the start)? How will our heroes conquer these impossible odds?

  But none of that is important to the story. In this tree, Alan Grant changes his feelings about children. He likes them. Loves them, even. Story over.

  Imagine if I asked you to join me for a movie about a middle-aged man who must learn to appreciate and love children so he can secure his relationship with the woman he loves. Would you be excited about the offer?

  Probably not. But place that heartfelt, deeply resonant story on an island full of dinosaurs, and your opinion may change. And you’ll probably leave the theater thinking that the movie was great. You’ll find it lingering in your mind and heart longer than any dinosaur movie before or since. You’ll think it was because of the action and suspense, and that might be some of it, but deep in your bones, you’ll love the story because it wasn’t about dinosaurs. It was about transformation and love.

  Another example: Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first (and best) of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films. You might think it’s a story about a man who is trying to find a religious artifact before the Nazis can get their hands on it. You might even think that it’s a love story between Indy and Marion.

  Nope. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a story about a man who lacks faith. He does not believe in God. Indiana Jones is all science and no spirituality. Then, in his most desperate moment, he finds faith when he needs it most.

  That is the real story of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a story about a scientist who finds God.

  Don’t believe me?

  In the beginning of the film, Indy makes it clear that he doesn’t believe in all of the supposed religious power contained in the Ark of the Covenant. He’s hunting for it because of its historical value and not because of its potential to alter the course of World War II. When a military officer asks if the Ark of the Covenant contains the actual Ten Commandments, he says, “Yes, the actual Ten Commandments. The original stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Horeb and smashed, if you believe that sort of thing.”

  “If you believe that sort of thing.” It’s clear that Indy does not.

  When the officer asks Indy about the light emanating from the ark in a picture that he shows them, Indy says: “Who knows . . . lightning . . . fire . . . the power of God or something.”

  Indy is dismissive. He is clearly not a believer. He regards lightning, fire, and the power of God as one and the same. This is just a picture to Indy. It doesn’t represent the truth of the ark in any way. The tone of his voice speaks of a lack of faith of any kind.

  Yet at the end of the film, as the Nazis are about to open the ark for the first time, Indy, who is now tied to a pole with Marion, closes his eyes and tells Marion to do the same. He warns her to look away. If the ark was merely an artifact, Indy the scientist would want nothing more than to see what it contained. He’s spent the entire movie risking his life for this very moment.

  But this does not happen. Instead the scientist has become a believer. Just as the ark is about to be opened, Indy finds faith in its power (and therefore in God), and it’s his newfound faith that saves his and Marion’s lives. The Nazis die, faces melting off their skulls, leaving only Indy and Marion alive.

  This is Indy’s five-second moment. The moment he finds faith. The moment he believes in the power of God.

  This is how most big stories operate. At least the good ones. Big stories contain these tiny, utterly human moments. We may be fooled by whips and snakes and car chases, but if it’s a good story, our protagonist is going to experience something deep and meaningful that resonates with the audience, even if the audience doesn’t fully realize it.

  Another one of my more popular stories is one called “This Is Going to Suck.” I will tell it in full in chapter 13 (and you can watch it on the “Storyworthy the Book” YouTube channel), but essentially it’s a story about an event that took place in my life when I was seventeen years old. On December 23, 1988, I was involved in a head-on collision — 1976 Datsun B210 versus Mercedes-Benz — that sent my head through the windshield and embedded my legs in the underside of the dashboard. Minutes after the accident, I was dead. I was lying on the side of the road without a pulse or respiration. Paramedics administered CPR and brought me back to life. All this sounds like the makings of a great story, but the story isn’t about the car accident at all.

  Like Jurassic Park, the real story isn’t about the big thing. In fact, when people talk to me about the story, they rarely mention the car accident or my near-death experience. Instead, they speak about my five-second moment, when I find myself alone in the emergency room two hours after the accident, waiting for surgeons to operate on my ruined legs. Upon hearing that I was in stable condition, my parents decide to check on the car before checking on me,
leaving me alone, frightened, and in terrible pain in the corner of a cold, sterile emergency room.

  Except it turns out that I’m not alone, because my friends from McDonald’s find out about the accident and quickly fill the waiting room, making the kind of noise that only a gang of teenagers can make. When nurses realize that my parents aren’t going to make it to the hospital before I am rolled into surgery, they push my gurney to the other side of the emergency room, prop open the double doors to the waiting area, and allow my friends to stand in the doorway to see me. The girls tell me that they love me, the boys shout extremely inappropriate things to make me laugh, and they chant my name as I am rolled down the hall to the operating room.

  This was my five-second moment. It was the moment when I realized that I had family after all. My friends were my family, and they remained the only family I had and the only family I needed until I met my wife fifteen years later. It might be the greatest five-second moment of my life.

  Audiences cry when I describe the opening of those double doors. If I’m not careful, I often tear up myself. But no one ever mentions the accident or my death or my miraculous return to the land of the living. The moment that they connect with is the moment those emergency-room doors open and I discover that I am not alone.

  The accident itself is like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park or the car chases and poisonous snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s big and compelling and remarkable, but it’s ultimately just a car accident. Without my friends showing up in the emergency room when I needed them most, it’s just another car-crash story. Turn on the news at 11:00 PM and you’ll see that they are a dime a dozen.

  Without my friends arriving at my time of need, there is little for the audience to connect to. But add my friends to the mix, and everything changes. We’ve all felt alone at some point in our lives. We’ve all been let down by loved ones, perhaps even by our parents. We’ve all had moments when we are unexpectedly lifted from pain or despair by the kindness of a friend. This is what people connect to. Few people will ever understand what it’s like to crash through a windshield or awaken to paramedics performing CPR on your body. But feeling alone? Forgotten? Lost? We all know that feeling.

  Without Alan Grant’s transformation from a man who despises children to a man who loves them, Jurassic Park is just another dinosaur movie in a long line of dinosaur movies, simply with better special effects. None of us will ever know what it’s like to be chased by dinosaurs or electrified by fences or trapped in a kitchen with velociraptors. But we all know what it’s like to have something large and seemingly implacable standing between us and love. We all know what it’s like to want something that the love of our life does not. We all understand how difficult relationships can be and the joy that comes with finally making them work.

  If you think you have a story, ask yourself: Does it contain a five-second moment? A moment of true transformation? Your five-second moment may be difficult to find. You may have to dig for it. I was more than three years into my storytelling career when I finally told “This Is Going to Suck.”

  Why? It took me that long to realize that the story shouldn’t end in the back of the ambulance. You might think that a story with a near-death experience should end with the near-death experience. For a long time I did. How could that not be the most important moment? It’s hard to imagine that a person’s death and return to life might not be the most compelling part of a story, but in my story, it’s not. It’s merely a necessary detail to get me to the end. The real ending takes place in the emergency room.

  Besides, with near-death experiences, you don’t realize that you’re dead or dying until after the fact. In both of my experiences, when my heart stopped beating and I stopped breathing, I had no idea that I had died. I was only told much later about how close I had come to death.

  If you’re not aware that you are dying, there is no moment of change or transformation. It’s a simple matter of slipping from consciousness to unconsciousness to death. Thus no five-second moment.

  Similarly, it took me more than five years to tell the story of my arrest and near-confession for a crime I didn’t commit, because that story also lacked a five-second moment. When I finally told that story in a Moth GrandSLAM championship in 2016, my fellow storytellers came to me after the show and said, “You were arrested and tried for a crime you didn’t commit, and it took you five years to tell the story?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Until this week, I didn’t know how to tell it.”

  If possible, go listen to that story on the “Storyworthy the Book” YouTube channel before reading on.

  In that story, it wasn’t until I thought long and hard about that period of my life that I realized that the interrogations, the police intimidation, my near-decision to confess to the crime out of fear, my arrest, and my trial were not the most important parts of that story. In the end, it’s a story about standing in a mop sink in a dark closet in the basement of a police station, trying to decide if I should confess to a crime I didn’t commit. In a moment of desperation, I ask a God I don’t believe in for help, and, a little like Indiana Jones, I somehow receive an answer. It’s a story about a young man taking one step closer to a faith that has eluded him for so long.

  It’s a tiny moment in an enormous story filled with police officers, interrogation rooms, handcuffs, jail cells, and a courtroom trial, but what people rightly remember about that story is my five-second moment in a darkened closet when I was alone and calling out for help. And it took me five years to find it.

  So dig. Search. Hunt. Fight for the five-second moment. Allow yourself to recall the entire event. Don’t get hung up on the big moments, the unbelievable circumstances, or the hilarious details. Seek out the moments when you felt your heart move. When something changed forever, even if that moment seems minuscule compared to the rest of the story.

  That will be your five-second moment. Until you have it, you don’t have a story.

  When you find it, you’re ready to begin crafting your story.

  STORY BREAK

  This Book Is Going to Make Erin Barker Very Angry

  Sometime in the second year of my storytelling career, I’m sitting at the bar with Erin Barker, a two-time Moth GrandSLAM champion, one of the finest storytellers I know, and the host of the Story Collider, a storytelling show featuring scientists and science-related themes. I’m performing in her show tonight, telling a story about my high-school biology teacher.

  “I heard you won the slam last night,” she says, referencing a Moth StorySLAM at The Bell House in Brooklyn the night before.

  “I did,” I say. “But I almost lost to a stand-up. He was funny as hell but just didn’t have enough story. But he came close. If I had five or ten minutes with him, I could turn him into a really good storyteller.”

  Erin grabs me by the wrist and pulls me in close. “Don’t you ever give away our secrets.”

  I loved Erin’s reaction. When it comes to story slams, I am exceptionally competitive. I want to win every time. For a while, this made me feel like the biggest jerk in town. But it turns out that most of my favorite storytellers, Erin included, are just as competitive as I am when it comes to competitive storytelling. We want to win. We want to be recognized as the best.

  For the first four years of my storytelling career, my sights were set on storyteller extraordinaire Adam Wade, who had won a then-record twenty Moth StorySLAMs before retiring from the slam circuit.

  My win total at the time of this writing is thirty-four. I’m not sure if this is a record. The Moth now hosts StorySLAMs in more than two dozen cities, so there’s no telling if or where someone is racking up as many wins as me. But I like to think it’s a record.

  In fairness, the winning has also helped me quite a bit. It was winning so often at The Moth that first got me recognized by producers, directors, and the people who wanted to learn this craft from me. It’s part of the reason that I am able to travel around the country and the world telling
stories. It probably helped me land this book contract.

  But unlike in many other competitions, storytellers root for their fellow storytellers to succeed. We never wish misfortune on other storytellers. We honestly want to see them perform well. Unlike baseball, where I hoped the opposing batter would strike out, or in football, where I would wish for a fumble, or even in poker, when I am pleased when an opponent draws a bad hand, I never want my fellow competitors to freeze up, fall apart, or tell something cringeworthy. I want them to do their best. I just want to do slightly better.

  Erin let me know that night that I was not alone in my zeal to win. In fact, when she beat me in my first GrandSLAM, she was the only woman in the show. When she was named the winner, she turned to her nine male competitors and said, “Suck it, boys.” The perfect response.

  I wonder what Erin will think of this book. I’m giving away our secrets — or at least mine — in a big way.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Finding Your Beginning (I’m Also About to Forever Ruin Most Movies and Many Books for You)

  So you’ve got yourself a five-second moment — a moment of transformation or revelation or realization. This is good. You’re already a better storyteller than most people in the world.

  Truly. Tell a story about a real moment of meaning from your life — a five-second moment — and people will want to hear more.

  More good news. You’ve also found the end of your story. Your five-second moment is the most important thing that you will say. It is the purpose and pinnacle of your story. It’s the reason you opened your mouth in the first place. Therefore it must come as close to the end of your story as possible. Sometimes it will be the very last thing you say.

  Knowing your ending is a good thing. When I write fiction, I have no idea where my story is going to end. As odd as it may sound, I have never accurately predicted how any of my novels were going to conclude, and many novelists operate similarly. John Irving claims to always know his last sentence before beginning a novel, but I’m not sure if I believe him. Even if I do, he’s John Irving. For us common folk, writing is often the means to the end. We discover the conclusions and resolutions through the process of writing the book.