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When it comes to being attractive to women, you have to know how to talk to them. Nobody wants to just answer the same ten questions that they get on every date that they have ever been on: what do you do for a living, where do you live, what do you do for fun… you want to have an actual conversation. You want to be able to tell them about yourself and your awesome life. You want to be able to show off your wit and even to humblebrag just a little.
And to do that, you’re going to have to be able to tell stories.
People who are good with women are good at telling stories. Full stop. It’s one of the most important parts of being able to carry on an interesting conversation. When you can captivate a woman’s attention, you can touch her emotionally. If you can touch her emotionally, you can touch her… well, you know. It’s an essential skill to have when you’re trying to get better with women, and frankly, most guys are just doing it wrong.
You see, telling stories seems like it should be instinctual; A happens, followed by B which causes C, which leads to D. Simple, logical, easy.
And completely incorrect.
Storytelling, especially when it relates to meeting women, has a structure and a rhythm to it. Do it correctly and you can have people eating out of the palm of your hand. Do it wrong and you’ll see girls checking their watches and wondering how much longer they can politely be expected to put up with you before they’re allowed to get up and walk away.
If you’re going to want to be a master storyteller, you’re going to have to learn the basics.
The End Is The Beginning
Before you even start telling your story, you need to know how and where it ends. A good story is like a good joke: it’s all a lead-up to the punchline. The last thing you ever want to hear when you’re telling the story is “And then what happened?” when you reach the end. This is your number one indicator that you’ve messed up; all you have done is ramble on for five minutes, ten minutes, what have you and wasted everybody’s time. It means that your story doesn’t have a definite ending, and you need to go back to the drawing board.
The reactions you do want are simple. You want a laugh, a “Oh, that’s so cool!” or “That’s interesting!”, an “aaaaawww” or “That’s adorable!”
What do these all have in common? They’re positive emotional reactions to your story, and by transference, to you. You’ve made someone else feel good, which in turn makes you more attractive.
The Transition
The transition is what lets you launch into the story. Just leaping in is an option, but it can feel forced and awkward; it can be done, but you’ll have to hook immediately, otherwise it comes across as random. There’s phrasal lead in, where you say “Hey, that reminds me of this time…” or “Wow, that’s like when I…” “Check this out…” “The funniest thing happened…”. There’s the cold read of the person you’re talking to, where you use them as the transition: “You remind me of my buddy So-And-So. Actually, it’s funny, I was hanging out with So-And-So yesterday when…” Then there’s the observational transition, where you use someone else as a springboard into your story. Observational transitions can be incredibly useful because you can bank them in advance; with practices, you can make a canned observation sound natural. Otherwise, you use your environment, or even the person you’re talking to to transition into your storyIf someone at the party has an absurd hairstyle, you can use it as a lead-in. If the woman you’re talking to mentions she went skiing in Vale, you can say “You know, I never did like skiing. The last time I went…” and you’re off.
The Hook
This is the part that makes the listener’s ears perk up. You want to seed this as close to the beginning as you can in order to capture their attention early. The longer you take to insert the hook into the story, the less of a chance you have of capturing people’s attention; take too long and the hook becomes part of the background noise. If you’re going to tell the story about something crazy that happened to you while you were on vacation, you need to lead with it.
“Yeah, the last time we went on vacation, we went on this photo safari in Tanzania. It was kinda awesome; I mean, you’re running around in the savannah in this open-top car, just, like, right there in the middle of it. The thing is, being so close to all the animals can be kinda risky. At one point, this elephant decided it didn’t like us, so it chased us all the way down a hill. It was trying to kill us, y’know?”
This is an example of a poorly set hook. Your target’s attention is already wavering before you ever get to the fact that you were staring down death in the form of a two thousand pound pachyderm.
“Last time I went on vacation, I nearly got killed by a rampaging elephant.”
MUCH better. Launching into your story like this will make people take notice early on. The hook is akin to Alfred Hitchcock’s Bomb Theory.:If a bomb suddenly goes off in a scene, you’re surprised. But if you know the bomb is there in advance, you remain in in anticipation, waiting for it to explode and wondering whether the heroes will escape it in time.
Your hook is the bomb; you want your audience to know it’s there, waiting to go off.
Characters
Characters will make or break your story. The dullest story in the world can be enlivened by the proper use of characters. “I went to the store, I got caught in traffic, I saw a homeless guy on the corner, I had a fight with my girlfriend over the phone because I was late for dinner,” is a boring story in and of itself. Now let’s say that the homeless man you saw on the corner was actually a balding, bearded cross-dresser wearing Daisy Dukes, high heels, a crop top and a tiara and he’s actually trying to help by directing traffic.
Meanwhile your girlfriend is a transplant from Brooklyn who’s insanely jealous and she’s angry at you because she’s half-convinced that the reason you’re late is because you were busy flirting with women at the Whole Foods and she’s threatening to break up with you for the third time that week. And as she’s yelling at you, you’re too busy watching the crossdresser, who you have to admit actually has surprisingly nice legs.
Suddenly your story is much more interesting. The actual events are as nondescript as you can get, but it’s the characters who make the story work. You don’t have to have an amazing story full of excitement and adventure when the characters are unique. One of my favorite stories to tell is about the time I was at my favorite bar with my girlfriend when a dude walks in, hits on my girl, grouses at the bartender, hits on another girl at the bar and eventually leaves.
Except the guy? He’s a male escort clown1.
You don’t have to populate your stories with crazy, over the top characters. You just want to make your characters unique and vivid. How they look, what they did, who they resembled. Giving characters voices and mannerisms will add interest to your story and make it far more engaging and memorable. Just be careful not to go overboard; you want a caricature, not a comprehensive word-portrait.
Unanswered Questions
Let’s face it: half of the time you’re telling stories, it’s because you want to brag about yourself a little. You want to let the woman you’re talking to know that you’re cool, that you do cool stuff, but you can’t just out and out say it. So you bring it up in stories.
The problem is, it is incredibly easy to sound like someone who’s trying far too hard… if you’re telling a story about your vacation to Vegas with your model girlfriend and you got upgraded to the VIP suite because you won $20,000 in a poker tournament, then the two of you ended up having dinner with Jeremy Piven at this incredibly expensive restaurant and then went and had bottle service at Rain, nobody is going to believe you. It may be God’s honest truth, but you will look as though all you were doing is trying to score cool points and impress everyone with how awesome you are. You think you’re looking cool. Everyone else thinks you’re a lying douchebag.
Instead, you want to leave out all of the cool bits; allude to them instead. Not only does this make the story much more relatable, but all of these unanswered questions bait women into asking about them. Suddenly you’re not bragging, you’re just answering her question. “So my girlfriend at the time just got done with a big project at work and we celebrated by going to Vegas. I had a great run at poker, so our room got upgraded. It was crazy. One of the guys, this high-roller at the table ended up taking us out to dinner, then we went and hung out at this club.” What was your girlfriend’s project? How much did you win? Who was the high roller? What club? All of these little unfilled details gnaw at the part of the mind that hates ambiguity and uncertainty.
Check In
Check in with your audience on occasion. These are little phrases you use to help keep people’s attention on you. “You know what I mean?” “You know what that’s like, right?” “No, seriously, check this out.” “Can you believe that?” These tags ask the person you’re talking to to become more involved and invites them to relate further to your story. It’s a very small thing that works wonders.
Use Sensory Language
The axiom that men are more logical and women are more emotional applies even with storytelling. One of the most common mistakes that guys make when telling stories is that they tell them…well, like guys. Guy stories tend to be very “Just the facts, ma’am.” The details they give are factual; it was 7:30 at night, it was an Audi A4, she was watching Sons of Anarchy on TiVo, it was two weeks before he broke up with his wife.
These don’t make for compelling stories for women. When you’re telling a story to a woman, you want to use more emotional and sensory language. You want to describe how you felt about things, how it smelled, what it tasted like, whether it was awkward or comfortable, warm or cold, exciting or dull. When you’re talking about a trip to an exotic tropical island, you want to create a sensual and emotional picture for them. You want to explain how warm it was and how you’d never seen water so blue and clear before. There were so few lights around that at night you could see the stars like they were diamonds laid out on velvet and you could smell the jasmine on the wind and how relaxing the sound of the tree frogs were.
Keep It Short
This is the last and most important point: brevity is the soul of wit and a long story is the death of the attention span. You don’t want to let your stories drag on. The longer you talk, the more likely it will be that you’re going to lose their interest. Keep your stories short and to the point; if your story is taking longer than a couple of minutes, it’s too long. You need to edit the fuck out of them and cut away the fat. If you need to, write them out in advance and just start trimming bits until you have something that works.
And don’t forget: practice counts for everything. Take time to tell your stories in the mirror. Learn how to find the proper pace of the story; not too fast, not too slow. Once you get into the rhythm and the structure of story telling, you’ll find that you’re the life of the party and that women will find you much more interesting.
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- there’re pictures of him online too. I’m not linking to them. You’re welcome [↩]
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