There’s a moment most of us carry somewhere. The year everything changed. A family story that only you remember properly now. The thing you try to explain at parties when someone asks what happened, though it takes a few tries to land the way it deserves to.
Most people carry a story like that for years before ever putting it into words. The usual explanation is that a lucky few are simply born storytellers, gifted from the start. It’s a tidy explanation. It’s also rather far from the truth.
What Forty Years on Stage Actually Teaches You
Sita Brand has spent four decades telling stories, in prisons, on stages, in funding rooms, and in the moments that actually mattered. She trained with the Jungian storyteller and author Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés and was ordained by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Her view, after all that time, is refreshingly plain: storytelling is method. Method can be taught, practised, and picked up again whenever life calls for it.
The same handful of techniques hold a story together whether you are writing it down, telling it aloud, pitching an idea at work, or trying to explain, properly this time, what actually happened that year. Learn the structure and the rest follows. That is the whole premise behind StoryLab.
A Skill, Built Week by Week
StoryLab is a six-week course, run over Wednesday evenings on Zoom with the same small group throughout, a maximum of twelve people so that everyone gets proper attention rather than a lecture. Each week takes on one part of the craft: why the story matters and how to open with impact, what is actually at stake for the people in it, a structure flexible enough to hold any story you tell after this one, how to build a scene the listener can actually picture, and how to bring a character, including yourself, properly to life.
The final week is the one people quietly dread and, almost always, the one they end up valuing most. It is the edit: learning to cut the parts you love so the story underneath can finally breathe. By the end, you leave with one complete story, written at around 1,500 words and told aloud from memory in five to seven minutes, along with a method for building the next one using the same steps.
Who Tends to Turn Up
StoryLab suits people who already know they are holding a story worth telling and are ready to finally give it proper shape. Some arrive navigating a career change and needing the words for what they have learned. Some are holding a family story that deserves to be written down before it fades from memory. Others already use story at work, in teaching, leading or fundraising, and want the craft behind it rather than guesswork.
It helps to know what sort of course this actually is. StoryLab sits somewhere between a writing class and a performance workshop, a small, structured space built around one purpose: taking a single story, your own, and giving it the shape it has always deserved.
What almost everyone arrives with is curiosity rather than experience. People who came to Settle Stories’ taster sessions in the past have described feeling relaxed enough to tell a properly personal story for the first time, and leaving with something unlocked that had sat untouched for years. Most arrived thinking of themselves as complete beginners. That tends to matter far less than people expect.
Where to Start
If six weeks feels like a leap, How To Find And Tell Your Story is a two-hour taster session on 3rd September, a gentle way to test the water for £16.50. If you already know StoryLab is the one, early booking secures the course at £247 rather than the standard £297, with payment plans available either way.
READY TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP?
StoryLab begins 23rd September. Book your place at settlestories.org.uk.
Whichever story you have been carrying, it is worth telling properly. This is where you learn how.
