You don’t need to cook with diapers to be impressive

I’m in the kitchen with my brother. It’s our first time cooking Christmas dinner for the whole family. 

Then my uncle butts in. 

“Do you want to know the right way to cook that risotto?”

“We got it, Uncle, it’s ok.”

“Are you sure? I can share some of the secrets I learned in Italy. There’s a reason I usually cook Christmas dinner…”

“Well, yes, there is, but then you also charge your own family - a lot - for the meal…”

“It’s a small price to pay for such amazing food!”

After hours cooking, we proudly serve beef bourguignon with a white risotto, and everyone loves the food.

But my uncle would not be upstaged:

“Have you tried my salad? It’s incredible.”

“Uncle, it’s lettuce, croutons and some salad dressing.”

“Ah, but it takes real technique to make that dressing! I even filtered it through a baby’s cloth diaper…” 

🤦‍♂️

This will immediately improve your stories 

I’m often asked for storytelling tips, and this is what I usually say: 

“Sure, there’s an easy hack to make any story a lot better.”

“Great! What is it?”

“We’re doing it right now.”

“What? We’re just talking to each other!”

“Exactly.” 

Dialogue is the hack. People actually talking to each other, instead of “I talked to my boss and she said…”

Dialogue makes stories shorter. I wrote the story above in my book, but when I tried to post it I realised it was a little too long for social media. So I changed almost all the narration into dialogue, and the whole thing went from two large paragraphs to the twelve lines I used here. 

Dialogue makes stories feel real: if you start giving context the characters already know, the conversation sounds unnatural, so you have to build it into the dialogue instead. 

For example: I can’t say to my brother, “Our uncle is such a pain, he keeps trying to be the centre of attention and talks about how great a cook he is after he went to that Italy course” - he knows all of that already, it would sound really forced! So I have to use my uncle’s actions and our reactions to them to show how annoying he can be. 

Dialogue brings stories to life because it focuses them around a specific moment in time (in this case, my brother and I cooking Christmas dinner) instead of saying something like, “I have an uncle who’s a real pain. He learned how to cook in Italy, and he normally cooks Christmas dinner, but one time…” 

That would be me telling you what happened. When I use dialogue, I’m showing you. 

Want to impress your family? Put dialogue in your stories, and leave the baby diapers far away from the kitchen 🤘

-Francisco 

PS: Didn’t know I had a book, did you? Even I forget sometimes 😅

You can check it out here.

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Getting clarity through your story to stand out from all the other coaches, speakers and entrepreneurs out there 

2. If you dream of speaking at a TED-style conference, we can find your idea, book the talk of your dreams and deliver it with impact

3. If you (or your team) got any storytelling challenges, I’m sure there’s something we can do together ;-)

Thanks for reading! Reply any time.