TBEX15 North America Fort Lauderdale Don George

TBEX Closing KeynoteDon George

We Are All Storytellers

The Art & Heart of Sharing Your Journey

Storytelling: An ancient and abiding human impulse

• Humans making sense of their experience• Sharing the sense that they make

Every moment, every experience, contains the seed of a story.

• Great stories can be short or long• Your first assignment as a storyteller is to live

deeply • You can only describe an experience as deeply

and richly as you have lived it

The Art of Storytelling: Focus

• Fundamental importance of details• Details are building blocks of story

Your second assignment is to give your experience a larger context.

Ask yourself: • What’s this all about?• What’s the meaning here?

Source: Aesthetic Apperceptions

The Art of Storytelling: Extracting meaning from the everyday

• Each of you has a truth, a profound truth, to share and that truth is the bridge to a larger human truth• All great travel stories are the record of two

corresponding journeys: a journey in the outer world and a journey in the inner world• Travel writer’s story is the interplay between these

worlds, between these journeys

Source: Fab Features

Travel writing is not a license for self-indulgence.

• Your anecdotes and examples always have to be in the service of your point• And your story always has to have a point, a lesson• Your writing should evoke the steps that led to that

lesson—what did I learn? And how did I learn it?

The Heart of Storytelling

• Cultivate the fine art of vulnerability—open yourself up to a place• You can only absorb a place as richly and deeply

as you open yourself up to it

The Heart of Storytelling

• When you do so, you enable and forge connections• These connections are ultimately the subject of

great storytelling—and the effect of great storytelling

As that brave, open-hearted soldier said, this is the

potential of great travel storytelling: to make us all think how big the world is,

and give us all a kind of hope.

I look forward to connecting with you!• Website: www.don-george.com• Twitter: @don_george • FB: www.facebook.com/don.george.travels • Books: Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing

and The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George