Don’t Be Afraid to Go Off Script When Storytelling
Being able to go off script when you’re telling a story is a crucial part of the skill that you need to learn. When you tell the same story to multiple different crowds, you might have to adapt your story on the fly for a few different reasons.
One reason could be that someone in the audience interjects with something relevant to the story. Instead of just continuing without addressing it, you need to be able to weave it into the story naturally.
Going off script can also be useful when you’re talking to an audience who may have recently experienced something traumatic in one way or another. Let’s say someone in your audience recently was involved in a car accident.
If you then go and tell a story that at some point involves a car accident, you might either de-emphasize that part, remove it entirely, or change it up so that you’re not being insensitive to that person.
This isn’t always necessary, but sometimes avoiding the possibility of upsetting someone when you’re trying to get a point across with your story is worth the bit of effort it takes to adjust it.
When you go off script, it’s important to be able to rein yourself back in when you need to and to make it smooth. You don’t want to go off track and go so far off that you can’t get back on track easily.
If you go wildly off track, you can forget where you were in the story, and you may end up having to repeat yourself a bit. Even if you do remember, it can be awkward to just snap back to a completely unrelated part of the story.
By only going lightly off script, you can easily transition back into your main story without it being too jarring for the audience. You want these smooth transitions because if you don’t do it smoothly, you might have people in the audience getting lost.
Once you’re able to master cleanly going off script, you’re going to be a much better storyteller because you’re going to be able to tell stories in so many different situations and never have it be awkward.
This type of skill is great because it makes your stories feel really natural when you tell them, even if they’ve been rehearsed over and over again, since you’re adapting to different situations.
This helps make your audience feel more comfortable.
Don’t Expect Every Person to Respond the Same to Your Story
You might encounter a surprising moment when you’re telling a story and someone responds in a way you completely didn’t expect, differently from everyone else that you’ve told that story to.
At first this comes as a shock, and it can then go on to be disheartening. You might think you told the story wrong, or that other people before were just responding kindly without actually liking your story.
In reality, you have to consider that so many people have had so many different experiences in life, that there’s bound to be differences in how people react and relate to parts of your story.
For example, if you were telling a story about how your friend wronged you, and the person you were telling the story to was upset, you would naturally be confused. After all, you didn’t accuse the person of doing anything wrong.
If the person you were talking to had done something similar to one of their friends, it might have been a sore spot for them hearing the same story from the other side. People with varied experiences will have all kinds of strange reactions to stories.
Even if you’re not seeing some people get offended by your stories or anything like that, you might still see some people getting moved by your story more than others, and some people reacting very little to it at all.
A lot of people’s reaction to stories has to deal with relatability, so if someone in your audience wasn’t able to relate to the story you were telling, they probably wouldn’t react to it very much.
Since you can’t control people’s life experiences and reactions they’ll have, you should adjust your stories slightly to expand more on how situations you’ve encountered made you feel, allowing for more relatability from your audience.
If someone in the audience has shared that experience with you, they already know how you felt. Don’t rely on that, though, and include more details on your reaction so that those who don’t share the experience can still understand what was going on.
You’ll also simply have to deal with times when people have strange reactions to your stories. If people are consistently having adverse reactions to your story, you should change it, but if it’s infrequent, you should write it off as a strange instance.
