Understanding Stakes in Storytelling

Do you find yourself struggling to remember what you read? This has been a continual difficulty for me and is a main reason that I started this reading project. I wanted to read more books, but more importantly, I wanted to experiment with different ways to help me remember what I read.

One of the most powerful ways I’ve found to remember what I read is to apply basic summary frameworks during and after the completion of each book. In this article, I’ll highlight the most powerful frameworks that you can write in the back of the book, in a journal, or in your notes app upon completing a book.

The best part about these ideas is that they take a short time to complete but can greatly enhance your reading memory and comprehension.

The One Sentence

Last week, I had breakfast with my friend DT Slouffman. He’s a contender for the most interesting man alive and one of his roles is teaching the art of storytelling at a college. In that course, he writes the following sentence on the board as a tool for students to apply to fiction:

________ wants ________ but ________ so ________ .

What I love about this simple sentence is that it requires you to identify the protagonist, his or her desire, the challenge, and the path towards growth, resolution, or fulfillment. Going backwards, it identifies the change required to overcome an obstacle by the main character. It’s an encapsulation of the hero’s journey and it forces you to consolidate the book down to one sentence. If you can then remember this one sentence that you crafted, chances are you’ll be able to recall a large portion of the book.

Here’s a One Sentence example I made from The Great Gatsby (yours may be quite different):

Jay Gatsby wants Daisy but she is married so chaos and death ensue.

I purposefully kept this one simple and short. I could elaborate on each fill-in part and you might choose to do so. The lack of a joyful resolution immediately identifies the work as a tragedy. By highlighting death, I immediately think of those situations in the book. I can picture Daisy and Jay as I did while reading the book. For properly recalling a book, sometimes you just need a simple hook that calls up other memories. This One Sentence framework is that hook.

The One Thing

A major focal point of this reading project is to attempt to remember just One Thing from each book that I read. It’s counterintuitive and may even sound wasteful, but I found that if I tried to remember many things from a book, I would forget them all, but if I just remembered One Thing, I could usually recall it, and it would in turn unlock other parts of the book.

This idea is easier to impose upon works of non-fiction, but I’ll provide ideas for fiction as well. Here are a few ways to remember One Thing in different types of books:

* For self-help books, instead of trying to remember One Thing, simply implement One Thing, immediately. If you are reading a book about personal finance, implement one idea from the book in relation to debt, budgets, or investments. If it’s a book about fasting, begin fasting. Running, apply one of the tips on your next run. You will always remember that book if you implement one idea into your daily routine.

* For biographies and works of history, try to remember one story from the book. For example, in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, there was a story about Einstein being invited to a women’s prayer group in the USA during WWII. They prayed together in a circle and when it came to Einstein, he took out his violin and prayed through his instrument without saying a word. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall. That story helps me recall why Einstein was in the USA at that point, what he was working on, and other aspects of his story.

* For works of fiction, write out the One Thing you can’t get out of your brain. Maybe it’s a theme you see across a variety of books. Perhaps the protagonist confronts a problem you’ve had in the past and your One Thing is how that person dealt with their situation.

In general, you want to highlight the One Thing that stood out to you the most about that book. If you can remember that, it will help you to remember other parts of the book as well.

Identifying Stakes

This is another tool that my friend DT teaches his children and students. The idea here is that most books will present things of value or desire that are put at risk. That creates a stake and that stake must be paid by the end of the book. The exercise here is to create a two column list in the back of the book, in your journal, or in a notes app and write the stake on the left and its resolution on the right. If a stake is introduced and not resolved, you have a sub-par book (or movie, or tv show, etc.).

Here are a few stakes from The Great Gatsby:

* Jay Gatsby builds a mansion across the lake from Daisy in an effort to impress her with his wealth. That can’t just remain neutral, either it will have an impact or not. The stake must be paid in one way or another.

* Jay tells Daisy’s husband Tom that she never loved him. That creates a stake that must be paid in one way or another by Daisy’s response.

* Daisy’s husband’s mistress is killed by Daisy and Gatsby in a car accident. That creates a stake that must be paid through the legal system or through personal revenge.

By highlighting these stakes and payments, you are generating your own framework for the book and are actively seeing each stake through to its conclusion. This will help you to remember key occurrences in the book. This tool can be applied to nearly all fiction and many works of non-fiction, including biographies and histories.

What are some tools you apply to the art of reading that help you remember what you read?

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