Art of the Anecdote Redux
Spotting and Capturing Stories in the Wild
“You know, sometimes I feel like my whole life is just a series of loosely related wacky misadventures.”
—Todd Chavez
I thought we would be back to having parties by now. I really did. When this whole thing first began and the news was pushing a narrative that we’d all be back to normal after a three-week lockdown, I knew that was ridiculous. I work for one of the world’s largest networks of healthcare professionals who treat immunocompromised patients and one of them told me very candidly at the time, “Buckle in for at least eighteen months and tell your friends, too.” So I told my friends and my friends were all like, “Haha no this will not last eighteen months.”
Well here we are.
We did manage to have one party in the brief, golden window during which all our friends were fully vaccinated and before the delta variant began causing breakthrough infections. That time is over now and it’s back to no parties for the foreseeable.
I have some outdoor space so perhaps soirees will be possible sometime before we die and time makes fuels of us all.
Last winter, longing for parties, I wrote an article on how to tell a great anecdote because oral storytelling is one of my favorite things and one of the big reasons I like being at parties. Not why I like hosting parties, because I never get to tell a fun anecdote at a party I’m hosting. Mostly I get to serve snacks and—if very lucky—eat snacks.
I think I have said this before in Shelf Life and I’ve said it many other places as well. Here’s the issue: I’m not actually an interesting person. I’m very boring. I have a desk job and I spent a lot of time behind a computer screen and I don’t really do any wild stuff. I’m old. I have a fairly regular sleep schedule. I am, however, an interesting-adjacent person. Something about me attracts interesting people, I don’t know what it is. Maybe I am a calming influence with my personal dullness. Interesting people gravitate toward me and get trapped in my orbit. I am a black hole into which interesting people fall.
So I’m always around interesting stuff happening. Sometimes I’m there in person for the interesting stuff or sometimes I hear about it firsthand, like Joseph Smith getting the Book of Mormon directly from an angel: A Very Reliable Account of Events™. The reason I have such a vast stock of hilarious and engaging anecdotes to tell at parties is because I’m always around hilarious and interesting stuff when it happens, even though I am a desk jockey and sleep junkie living in, essentially, hermitage. I’m fun to be around because I have advanced-level social skills like how to introduce two strangers to each other so they have something interesting to talk about, and telling hilarious anecdotes into awkward silences.
Don’t get me wrong: There are other things to do and say at parties that are not telling stories; and you can tell anecdotes for other reasons than to amuse people (for instance, to convey information or illustrate a point you are making). But I always think it’s a good idea for everyone to have at least one pocket story on hand that they can tell really well. If you don’t have one you might wonder why you need one, but if you do have one you will find it comes in unexpectedly handy.
To recap the most critical aspects of my previous article on the topic, a story requires four qualifications to be an anecdote:
Short
Narrative
Interesting/amusing
Biographical incident
And further requires five elements in harmony to be a crowd-pleaser:
Ammunition
Embellishment
Misdirection
Commitment
Brevity
I spelled out the whole list for you but this article is chiefly concerned with Item Numero Uno, ammunition. Unless you are one of my interesting friends who are out in the world doing interesting things all the time, your life might not have a whole pile of interesting or amusing biographical incidents from which to derive short narratives. I suspect everybody has a few, if I do, being myself one of the most boring people on the planet. But there’s good news—you can get them from other places than your own personal experience.
Wouldn’t telling somebody else’s anecdote be stealing, though? No. This is the oral tradition: Stories are passed from person to person and retold, that’s how all this works. You have to cite your sources, though—if you’re telling a story about something that happened to a friend you should not claim that the thing happened to you. Further, always give the rightful owner of an anecdote the opportunity to tell it if they are present. If you’re telling it, you can put yourself in the story if you want to but keep the truth of your friend’s experience as theirs.
There’s three main places to mine for anecdote material, then: Your personal history; events happening around you in realtime; and personal experiences of your friends and acquaintances that you have direct, firsthand knowledge of. We’ll go over how to sift through all the boring detritus of everyday life for anecdote ammo in those specific places.
Don’t go farther afield than firsthand reports for ammunition (don’t retell a friend’s friend’s friend’s story, eg), as those have probably already made the rounds in your social circle if they’re any good. Definitely don’t steal anecdotes from TV shows you’ve watched, comedy routines you’ve heard, or other cultures’ folklore. That’s always a bad look and will only embarrass you.
You can also just make stuff up wholesale but I don’t think it’s ethical to pass them off as real-life incidents. If you’re telling a fictional story, just say so.
Anyway, assuming you have a good grasp on what elements make a good anecdote, it should be fairly obvious what kind of content we’re looking for as the seed of the story. Events that make good anecdotes usually feature either:
An improbable occurrence; or
A strong reaction from you or others who witnessed the event.
A strong reaction in this case could be a lot of laughter, or it could be something that inspired an emotional response—anger, happiness, disappointment, and so on. An event that inspired a strong response from the people who experienced the event will let you evoke a sympathetic reaction in your audience if you tell it well.
An improbable occurrence is my favorite kind of event to tell an anecdote around, when something happens that is out of the ordinary or unexpected, as this type of event by its nature gives you excellent opportunities to misdirect the audience as you tell it. Misdirection is key because people love to be surprised by a narrative.
You’re reviewing your life history looking for events that were improbable or that evoked a strong reaction. As you’re screening through looking for events, remember the advice of John Gardner that I referenced in a previous article on plots: Every story begins one of two ways, either a stranger comes to town or a person goes on a journey.
Okay well not every story in your whole life will start that way, but what Gardner was getting at is that most stories begin with a disruption of the natural order of human life, and most of the notable disruptions of human are caused by . . . a stranger coming to town or a person going on a journey. I humbly suggest that when a stranger comes into your life or you go on a journey, you’re meeting a new person or meeting new people. Meeting-new-people situations are rich soil for cultivating anecdotes. Most of my personal best anecdotes come from those situations, for instance:
Starting a job at a new workplace;
Moving to a new location alone;
Going on first dates with new romantic prospects; and
Weird things happening while traveling (especially cultural misunderstandings when I’ve traveled outside the states).
Anywhere that the ordinary day-to-day flow of your life was disrupted somewhere, look for anecdote ammunition.
As you’re going through your life history, make note of the events you come across and within those events look for the improbable, the implausible, the unlikely, and the profound. Write them down as you come across them. Anytime you tell someone about an experience of yours and you get an unexpectedly enthusiastic reaction, remember that story and make a note of it. It’s anecdote fodder.
Once you train your mind to spot these occurrences in your history and make a note of them, you’ll be prepared to recognize them more easily when you come across them in real time. The human brain is purpose-built for spotting patterns, and particularly for spotting things that are unusual or out of place. That’s one of our most basic brain instincts—where the pattern is disrupted, there’s danger. Where the tall grass is moving out of sync, a predator could be lurking. Train your brain to notice when an event has an unusual or unexpected twist or outcome, when something surprises you in an exciting way. Then write it down so you don’t lose it. Review it later for pocket-story potential.
Not only will you be picking up fodder for your oral storytelling routine but if you ever sit down to write that memoir you’ll be ahead of the game. The plural of anecdote is memoir.
What kind of stories are not suitable building blocks for crowd-pleasing anecdotes? First of all, stories in which a person is embarrassed or even humiliated, unless (A) that embarrassed person is you, the storyteller; or (B) that embarrassed person demonstrates true and persistent bad behavior during your story. Everyone feels satisfied seeing a villain get their deserved comeuppance, yes, but most people don’t enjoy listening to a mean-spirited or embittered storyteller.
If you are telling a story in which someone’s bad behavior results in a karmic turnabout, make sure that person is both anonymized and not anywhere close to being part of the social circle in which you are telling the story. We’re talking none-of-these-people-will-ever-meet distant. Don’t tell stories on known people to make them look bad. That only makes you look bad.
Don’t tell a story for the amusement of others if it breaks a confidence—no matter how long it’s been since you received the confidential information or how badly you may have fallen out with the person who told you something in confidence. Look, I’m still keeping secrets for people I left behind ten or twenty years ago, some of them I dislike very much. Although events you were present for or participated in are fair game even if you were not the main actor in the story, other peoples’ secrets are never yours to tell.
Finally, I mentioned cultural misunderstandings when traveling above as a good place to find fun stories. Notably, the fun stories I find there are about my lack of understanding in a place that is foreign to me. Stories about travelers misunderstanding American culture and appearing “foolish” or stories about Americans encountering a new culture and finding it hilariously backward compared to our own are just retellings of American ethnocentrism and nobody needs more of those.
I hope we’ll all be back to socializing soon. Wear your mask, I implore you. Please, won’t you think of the extroverts?
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