Tell me again...

Can we still tell stories to each other?

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes about the moment she realized she could make the story happen. She could take something insignificant—a hallway encounter, a classroom blowup, a party that veered into chaos—and turn it into something vivid. Mythic, even.

She says, “The other kids always wanted me to tell them stories of what had happened, even—or especially—when they had been there.”

They wanted to hear it again, reimagined and retold. It made it more alive to hear it the second time around.

It makes me wonder—is this the power of storytelling?

That we can make small things big, and quiet moments loud. That we can give something that almost slipped away another chance to live. A story well told can stretch time. Collapse it. Slow down a moment, or speed it up. It can remix the past with the present, and nudge the present toward the future. It can transform the ordinary into something that sticks. A look. A line. A silence that, in the retelling, becomes almost deafening.

When I think of this skill—to tell a story well—I realize these are actually the people I seek for my films. The ones who can not only let you in to show you what’s going on, but reflect on it and spin it back—colorfully, or succinctly, or directly—proving they have a grasp of their own reality and this wonderful art of telling. When you find someone who’s great at it, you know they’ll make a wonderful documentary participant.

But are we—those of us living our lives off-camera—still telling stories this way?

I don’t mean performances. Or pre-scripted monologues. I mean to each other. In the kitchen. On a walk. Driving down the road. The kind of story you tell someone when you’re sitting together, half-laughing, half-pausing, trying to get the shape of it just right.

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Songwriters, though written and rehearsed, continue to be some of the most inspirational oral storytellers. They weave personal memories, present experiences, and future uncertainties into lyrical forms that not only move us through melody, but through narrative.

It’s not just music—it’s storytelling with emotional architecture. I think about the way recent albums like The Killers’ Pressure Machine, Youth Lagoon’s Heaven Is a Junkyard, Lucy Dacus’ Home Video, or even

S.G. Goodman

’s The Way I Talk unfold like short stories—each with a beginning, middle, and emotional turn.

And her brother's back at home tending to her daddy's land
He's farming for the businessman
Who takes the profit from his hand
With calculation to the dollar of a chemical demand
No, not in years took from a man
Will you try hard to comprehend

And her mother heard the devil on the midday radio
She listened to him tell her she should have some more to show
But he blamed it on her neighbor at the local dollar store
A tale as old as time to turn the poor against the poor

I worry—outside of entertainment—we’ve replaced the kind of everyday storytelling that Lamott describes with something flatter, faster, and a bit more shallow.

I worry that we’re outsourcing this very human way of connecting—telling one another—to corporations telling stories to us. That this passive form has changed the way we experience stories in our own lives.

Because too many conversations now begin with vague or secondhand sources like:
“I saw on [so-and-so’s] wall…”
“Someone posted…”
“This lady on TikTok said…”
“I was listening to a podcast…”
“I was watching YouTube…”

Rarely:
“I felt it myself…”

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The stories we repeat are often borrowed from platforms, not drawn from our own lived lives. They’re curated—not shaped over time in our own mouths, but shared instantly, before we’ve even figured out what we really think about them.

Influencers like Jenny Hoyos tell you “The Secret to Telling a Great Story” is to make your stories shocking, viral—and all in under 60 seconds. That’s her golden rule: you have one minute to get in, get attention, and get out.

She recommends starting with a question—one that “people can’t stop listening to”—then adding conflict, building tension, and finally delivering a satisfying resolution. All in under a minute.

Let’s be honest: she’s not teaching you how to tell a great story. She’s teaching you how to hijack attention. How to manipulate the brain’s reward system—dopamine, anticipation, payoff. It’s not about meaning or connection. It’s about metrics. It’s about generating the kind of content that earns 45 million views.

I’m not against the structure, but it’s not something Jenny has originated. Using questions to frame a story, planting roadblocks, building stakes—these are ancient tools. The bones of oral tradition, epic poetry, campfire myths. They’ve shaped human storytelling for thousands of years.

But Hoyos and her kind have hollowed these tools out. What’s left is a skeleton of story—built not to nourish or move us, but to perform for the algorithm, and to send us looking for more. We’re no longer being invited into a shared moment; we’re being baited. The goal isn’t resonance—it’s reach.

And that matters. Because when we reduce storytelling to a formula that maximizes clicks rather than connection, we’re not just changing how we tell stories. We’re changing how we experience them—and, by extension, each other.

I’m not here to knock the internet, the tool I’m literally using to speak to you. I’ve learned plenty from strangers with iPhones and captions. But I am wondering: where are we exercising our own storytelling muscles?

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Maybe the issue is this: to tell good stories, you actually have to live life. I know I sound like I’m 90—but I will die on this hill.

Curren and I were eating ice cream outside the other day when a car of teenagers pulled up. They got out silently, dragging their half-asleep bodies into the ice cream shop, faces buried in their phones. One by one, they emerged with their cones, climbed back into the car, and closed the doors behind them. Still no talking. No music. Just...nothing. It was eerie.

Curren remembered being a jackass as a teenager—blasting music, laughing too loudly, riding around with your friends like you owned the town. It was chaotic and annoying, sure, but at least it was alive.

What we witnessed that day was not alive. It was muted. Numb.

And I honestly thought: What stories do these teens even have to tell?
They weren’t aware of their surroundings. We were openly staring at them, and they didn’t even notice. There was no scene unfolding. Just a transaction—scroll, sugar, silence.

How can we expect anyone to have a deep, funny, awkward, or moving experience off-screen if they’re never fully present for one?

And it’s not just teens. All ages. Boomers might be the worst when it comes to starting conversations with: “I read somewhere—wait, let me find it…”

We're outsourcing life to the feed. We're reporting back not from our experiences, but from someone else’s post about theirs.

Maybe good stories require discomfort. Boredom. Embarrassment. Surprise. Maybe they require being there.

And if no one’s truly there anymore… what happens to the stories?

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So I ask again:

Are we still telling stories, longer than 60 seconds, out loud?
Are we still sharing memories and making them more colorful each time?
Are we still building mythology from the mundane?
Are we still making each other laugh with the same story we’ve told ten times, but still add a new detail—just for effect?

I hope so. And if we’re not, let’s try.

Because that’s where some of our deepest connection happens. In those spaces where a person is not just consuming a story, but receiving it.

Where they feel seen inside it. Where they say, “Tell me again.”