A lot of people come to True Stories Told Live and think “could I stand up in front of a room full of people and tell a story?”

The answer is you can but – just like the best performers – you will need to practise.

Some people seem to have a natural flair for taking the raw material of their personal experiences and shaping it into simple, memorable stories. That adjective “memorable” is really important. The best stories are the ones that audiences can easily explain to somebody else. They don’t have any tangents or surplus details. Like a good children’s story, they don’t contain any information that the listeners don’t need to know.

The rest of us are not quite so keen to put ourselves forward. We might have a couple of life experiences that would make a good story – but only if we really practise. Even the people who seem to have this natural flair have worked on it.

If you think you’ve got a story to tell, the best thing you can do is tell it to yourself: speak it out loud in the car or on a walk in the park. Until you’ve said it out loud you won’t know whether it’s a story or just a collection of anecdotes.

It doesn’t matter which group you belong to. Our ten-minute limit is your friend, not your enemy. There is no story that can’t be told in ten minutes. You simply have to get rid of the parts of your story which don’t need to be there. And then practise more.

In the two years we’ve been organising True Stories Told Live we’ve seen hundreds of people telling stories and this is what we’ve learned. If people are really nervous about telling their story they’ll work very hard at it and do it very well. If people think they can wing it on the basis of their natural charm, they’re wrong, no matter how experienced they happen to be.

We’d be delighted to hear from you if you’d like to tell a story at True Stories Told Live. Please get in touch via mail@truestoriestoldlive.com and one of us will go for a cup of coffee with you and talk about whether you could.