What is a Story Bank and How Can it Help You With Your Speech (Part 2)

In the first part of this article, you have already learned what a story bank is and how to begin adding examples to it through clear titles. Telling a good story takes time, which is why in this part of the article, we’ll be sharing how you can build the other three columns of your story bank: which include memorable details, descriptions, and takeaways.

Column two in your story bank should be key names, dates, and locations. Because impromptu does not require you to cite sources, it can be hard to sound credible in your speech. So, the best way to maintain credibility is to memorize as much of the “who,” “when,” and “where” of your story as possible. For instance, in the story of “Hachiko – The Dog Who Waited,” your bullet points might look like this:

· Who: Dog, Hachiko. Owner, Professor Hidesaburo Ueno.

· Where: Tokyo, Japan – Shibuya Station

· When: mid-1920s, 3PM every day

There is quite a lot of information here. Even if you can’t remember it all, having some of these facts will elevate the quality of your speech. Otherwise, it would be similar to us trying to recommend you a book without remember the details. Imagine if we said, “There’s this story about a woman who lived somewhere in Asia. She was famous for her band that was called, um… OK never mind what it’s called but yeah, the story was called umm, Jazz Sounds? Jazzy, maybe?”

You see our point? Good.

Column three: The description of the story. This is where you focus on what happened, and why. We suggest writing a paragraph with the same language style you would want to present this story in a speech. For instance, you can interject your own opinion in the description for more originality so that even if the audience has heard of the story, they’ll still learn something new from it. While you don’t need to memorize the exact wording, preparing this ahead of time will make it easier to remember. This means that if you end up choosing this story as one of your main points in a competition round, your prep time won’t be spent figuring out how to describe it in an effective way. Instead, it’ll be spent more wisely figuring out how to link the story to your prompt. Okay, let’s hear an example of the description:

In the early 1920s, there was no dog more loyal than Hachiko, the dog who waited. Hachiko and his owner, Professor Hidesaburo Ueno, would walk to and from the train station each day. But one day, the professor didn’t show up. He had died while teaching, but of course, his loyal dog couldn’t have known. So, every afternoon at 3PM for nine years, Hachiko would show up at Shibuya train station, waiting. Soon, train riders started to notice and would feed him. The story eventually reached one of the professor’s old students who wrote an article that reached all of Japan, and later the world. His loyalty was so powerful and touching that upon Hachiko’s death, the dog’s ashes were buried next to his owner, and his fur was preserved at Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science.

With the description done, let’s move to our last column: broad takeaways. Here, you can list out keywords that would help sum up the moral or lesson of the story. Think of the story’s impact as you’re making this list. For instance, in “The Dog Who Waited” example, we could write words like, “loyalty,” “dedication,” “friendship,” “connection,” or “routine.” For a more advanced list, you could tie the story to well-known sayings that you know or have looked up, like “Dogs are a man’s best friend” or, “The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.” These broad takeaways will help you associate your story with a variety of different prompt topics so that it would be easier for you to recall this particular story later on.

There you have it, the four columns needed to build the foundation of your story bank! But these columns won’t fill themselves, so it’s time to get writing! Good luck!