Happy Saturday, Storytellers!

We’re back, after an unexpected hiatus the past couple of months. I’ve missed writing these, and I hope you’ve missed reading them! And if you haven’t, that’s okay too. I'm not keeping score.

Last month, I took an impromptu trip to visit my friend Shelly of Creative Camp, who lives in London. Time with Shelly is always delightful because we have fun creative adventures together. While I was there, we took an afternoon to check out the Wes Anderson exhibit at the Design Museum.

As a long time Wes Anderson fan (dating all the way back to Bottle Rocket, introduced to me by my aspiring screenwriter boyfriend/now ex-husband), it was fun to step into the world of a storyteller whose work I've admired for decades. There were storyboards, costumes, sketches, miniatures, Polaroids from on set, and all the meticulously crafted details that make his films instantly recognizable.

What made the exhibit even more enticing was the timing.

A few weeks prior, while I was in Boston visiting another friend, we realized there were a handful of Wes Anderson films I hadn't seen. We decided to fix that and queued up The French Dispatch. I loved it.

In fact, I loved it enough that it may have bumped The Royal Tenenbaums out of the top spot in my personal rankings. I need at least one more viewing before I'm willing to make that official, but it's definitely in contention.

So there I was in London, standing in an exhibit dedicated to Anderson's work, seeing the props from a film I'd watched weeks earlier in Boston, when something clicked. The best part about a story is the insight behind the story.

Which brings us to the film.
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The film is presented through the lens of a fictional American magazine published in a small French city, putting together its final issue. Rather than following a single storyline, the movie unfolds through a series of articles written by the magazine's staff writers, each of whom are introduced in the opening scene.

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At first glance, The French Dispatch looks like a collection of unrelated stories. There's an imprisoned artist, a student revolution, and a kidnapping, each covered by a different writer with their own quirks, obsessions, and perspective.

Every story is filtered through the eyes of the journalist writing the story. We don't just learn about the artist; we learn about the writer who chose to cover him. We don't just witness the revolution; we experience it through the eyes of someone trying to understand it.

The audience isn't simply learning what happened. We're watching people make meaning from what happened. And that's a storytelling technique speakers and writers often overlook.

We spend a lot of time focusing on the event itself—the breakup, the promotion, the diagnosis, the business failure, the trip that changed everything. We assume the event is the story. But the event is rarely the most interesting part.

Think about the difference between these two openings:

"My daughter was born at 31 weeks."

And:

"For years, I thought the lesson of my daughter's premature birth was resilience. It took me much longer to realize the lesson was surrender."

The first tells us what happened. The second tells us what happened and invites us into the journey of understanding that followed. That's the story above the story. It's the layer where reflection, perspective, and meaning live.

More often than not, it's the difference between an anecdote your audience hears and an insight that stays with them.

Try this

I want you to think about a story you tell often. You know the one.

Maybe it's the story about how you started your business. Maybe it's the story about a difficult season in your life. Maybe it's a story you've told so many times, your friends can all practically recite it with you.

Now, instead of focusing on the events, get curious about the meaning.

Ask yourself:

• What happened?
• What did I believe about it at the time?
• What do I believe about it now?

That last question is where things get interesting. Most of us are pretty good at recounting events. We can tell people what happened, who was there, and how it all unfolded. But the stories that stay with us aren't usually the ones that describe an experience. They're the ones that reveal a transformation.

That's the layer Wes Anderson keeps returning to in The French Dispatch. He doesn't just show us the event. He shows us the people trying to understand it.

As speakers and writers, that's our invitation. Don't stop at the anecdote. Take your audience one layer deeper. Show them not just what happened, but how your understanding evolved. Let them see the journey from experience to insight.

Because the story matters. But the story above the story is where the meaning lives.

Until next week,