(photo: Lars Ploughmann, flickr)

Eric Nelson’s recent Ploughshares article describes the “10 times in life when writers have the upper hand.” Writers who can tell stories out loud and off the page, that is. As Nelson says, “With the right kinds of stories, you can sell anything, including yourself.”

I have a friend who writes monologs, and I’ve come to appreciate the amount of work that goes into shaping this material, polishing it, honing it, and then, hardest of all, making it sound spontaneous, fresh, alive. The impact of his stories on the page versus what happens when he “tells” them is transformative.

In the days before television, storytelling was a much-appreciated front porch gift that we’ve mostly lost track of. Even writers, who should be superb oral story tellers, may limit their audience to the glowing rectangle. We keep our best stories, the personal, true ones, locked up inside.

The organization The Moth (“True Stories Told Live”) sets out to preserve and celebrate oral storytelling, and a book of 50 “brilliant and quietly addictive” stories from its archive has five stars on Amazon. Like my friend’s work, the best stories display honesty, vulnerability–and a little structure. This is not the same storytelling as effectively recounting “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”; these are true stories of the kind familiar to This American Life addicts.

Life situations when Nelson says a good story—or the ability to put one together—comes in handy include childcare (“It’s easier to keep a car full of kids from hitting each other by entertaining them with stories than hoping their iPad batteries hold out”), the classroom—from first grade to adult education, parties, job interviews, dates, the doctor’s office, therapy, on juries, in political campaigns, and at the DMV (where everyone is bored silly “except the writers. They’re too busy working on their stories in their head”).

Nelson refers to a recent article by Neil Gaiman about being asked to appear at The Moth—something out of his comfort zone, and so a good reason to do it, Gaiman says. Something he says about the importance of stories really resonates, given this week’s news events: “And the gulf that exists between us is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race or attitudes, but we don’t see the stories. And once we hear them we realise that the things dividing us are often illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are no thicker than scenery.”