(P) Lea Thau speaking in Bucharest next month about live storytelling

Peabody Award-winning producer and director Lea Thau is speaking next month in at The Power of Storytelling (October 17-18) about how to find and tell a great story. Here’s a preview Q&A with her about telling live stories on stage, what makes a good storyteller and how can companies benefit from this skill. Why is storytelling important to you? I grew up thinking I’d become an academic. That’s what my parents were. In grad school I studied comparative literature – very theory-oriented, sterile, and far removed from actual stories. Afterwards I worked at the U.N. and was confronted daily with amazing stories, staggering stats, curious facts from around the world, but the stories got lost in the big machine – policies flourished, stories not so much – and it was a lonely life amidst lofty ideals in the midtown high rise. Then I went to help build The Moth, a simple gathering of storytellers and listeners once a month in New York City. But the interest was enormous, and I discovered that stories can satisfy a primal, human need for connection – mine and that of many others. Good storytelling has a unique ability to celebrate, at once, the diversity and the commonality of human experience: It shows us that the world is vast and diverse – full of paths we have never walked – yet it has the power to bring us together across cultural, social, and geographical divides. What do you think makes a good storyteller? For live storytelling, the ability to be present with the audience is the single most important factor. This does not require professonal training, it requires courage. Stepping out on stage in front of a live audience, without notes or podium or powerpoint to hide behind, often to share something very personal, is terrifying – ask anyone who’s tried it. If the storyteller shrinks in the face of this challenge and shuts out the audience – delivers the story without connectting –the story dies, almost completely, and no amount of editorial finess or inherent drama can save it. On the flip side, a story with structrual flaws or average content can soar if the storyteller is vulnerable, open, present. In stories produced for radio, there is less pressure on the storyteller, but the fundementals remain the same: can the storyteller speak openly, honestly, without reserve or misguided attempts to make things seem better, prettier, less gritty than they truthfully are? In all forms of storytelling, the greatest challenge for a director/producer is to help the storytellers get past their own blind spots. We all have a tendency to think we know what the story is and what it all meant and where it’s emotional truth lies. Often we don’t. A good storyteller is someone who is willing to walk the emotional minefield, question his own blind spots and tell the truth without protecting himself or others from the sometimes ugly reality.