Kate Bland, Kerry Shale and I met last night to talk about future TSTL’s. Up to now we’ve been asking people we happened to know but we want to cast our net wider all the time. Rather than people just waiting to be invited we wouldn’t mind if they put themselves forward.

Everybody’s got a story in them. Possibly a story or three. The danger is when you think you have more than three. I volunteered to do the first one at the first event back in September, thinking it would be easy to come up with something. I found it more difficult than that. I had to discard my first idea and my second, largely because when I went for a walk in the park and said them to myself they didn’t have the shape of a story that would work spoken out loud. They all relied on some piece of information that was difficult to introduce. Either that or you couldn’t tell them without giving the punchline away. They didn’t trip off the tongue. I finally decided on one about how I got a suit made because I had told it to some people at dinner parties and I could tell it held their attention, largely because it had a plot twist three-quarters of the way through.

Talking to Kate and Kerry we concluded that the stories that an audience can hold in their head have beginnings, middles and endings. The ending is the hardest bit. Obviously it helps if you’ve got the kind of delivery that people warm to but the acid test is, have you told them the kind of story that they will then go off and tell somebody else? It’s not as easy as you think but it’s not impossible either. If you think you’ve got a story that you’d like to tell at a future TSTL event, please get in touch and we’ll talk about it. Our rules are: it has to be true, it must be told without notes and it can’t be any longer than 12 minutes.