Rules of the Game (20 page)
Authors: Neil Strauss
8.
   
Find Your Stories
Now you know what you want to convey. But how do you convey it?
Welcome to storytelling day.
Though most women tell guys that learning to listen is important, in the early stages of an interaction, learning to speak is more important. This is because it's your job to demonstrate you're worth spending the night talking to.
Your vehicle for doing this is your past. Rather than telling women your best qualities and most charming foibles, stories allow you to show them. They also prevent you from blitzing a woman you've just met with generic questions about where she's from and what she does for work. And they provide the opportunity not just to fascinate a group of people but to inspire them to share their own stories in return.
Your tasks today will lead you toward the generation and performance of the perfect story.
You may be lucky enough to be a great storyteller alreadyâable to hold
court at countless dinner parties with the tale of that one time you had to break into a drugstore in Cairo at three in the morning to get aspirin for your girlfriend.
Or perhaps you're less loquacious, unable to think of stories on the spot or to hold anyone's attention long enough to share them. I've heard hundreds of men claim that their lives aren't interesting and they have no stories to tell. This is just another limiting belief rearing its head. It doesn't matter how small a town you live in, how little you may have traveled, how normal your family is, or how old you are, you do have interesting stories to tell. You just have to find them.
So think of the memorable moments in your life, whether they're pivotal experiences that shaped who you are as a person or just funny, trivial anecdotes that you enjoy sharing. They might be:
ironic and embarrassing, like the time you went to relationship counseling with your girlfriend, and the therapist asked her out afterward;
adventurous and exciting, like the time you were scuba diving, your regulator broke, and a school of barracudas swarmed around you;
sexy and awkward, like the time the married woman sitting next to you on the plane tried to have sex with you in the lavatory;
naive and touching, like the time your hamster died and you thought it was sleepingâfor seven days;
small and poetic, like the time you were eating a burger and suddenly realized the meaning of life;
dangerous and heroic, like the time you saved a girl from some guy who was threatening to beat her up outside a club in Rio;
current and confusing, about something that happened only minutes ago, like a girl you don't know coming up and asking if you'll take her sister home;
anything you want them to beâas long as they don't evoke negative emotions in listeners or hint at negative qualities about yourself such as misanthropy, stinginess, unhappiness, prejudice, anger, or perversion.
Now think back over your childhood, family life, school, work, travel, recreation, and dating experiences, from your earliest memory to what you did last
night. Extract from those experiences eight personal stories. Then give them intriguing names (like “The Magical Hamburger Incident” or “The Festering Hamster Story”) and write them down in the space below:
1.
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2.
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