How to Tell a Story

I read, hmmm maybe skimmed or perhaps read and then forgot, the synopsis of this book.So even though I read the synopsis I was expecting something different. I was expecting a curation of awesome stories with a smattering of ‘advice' or analysis of why the story is so good. Sigh. Girl, it's in the title: ‘how to' and ‘essential guide'. It's heavy on the ‘advice' and light on the fantastic stories. The stories seem truncated, and when you shrink an already short story they feel like fragments; it's unsatisfactory. I understand that they're supposed to be a guide rather than a collection of stories. I tried to shift my expectations, but I disliked the way that the book is organized and it's tone. It feels like: Braggy tone (The Moth is so renown, yeah but I've never heard of you), obvious point, repetitiveness, and then unclear examples (what did that exemplify, was that a complete story, is the example section at the beginning or the end of a story, was that a snippet of the story or the quote etc.).It felt like a lot of telling (although in a haphazard way because there's a lot of voices, like when five people try to explain something rather than just one), when I'd prefer to be shown first and then have the well crafted, full example broken down. I also got irritated in that I felt that it was harped upon that the stories have to be true and then they used MADE UP examples. WHY?! I understand why they used the story of Little Red Riding Hood as an example, but when she talked about the made up example of a person going to law school when their parents owned a clown school I was confused and pissed. At least one of the people who worked on this is a curator, so why are there fake examples?Maybe I'm not the audience for this, things might be obvious to me because I've taken a creative writing class and a poetry class, a lot of it sounds Theatre speak and like drama class exercises (also familiar), for part of a job I sat in a children's creative writing after school program, had decent English teachers, and read widely.I adore Neil Gaiman (and especially love hearing his voice), [a:Malcolm Gladwell 1439 Malcolm Gladwell https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1564001739p2/1439.jpg], [a:Mike Birbiglia 3390625 Mike Birbiglia https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] and [a:Hannah Gadsby 18140595 Hannah Gadsby https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]. [a:David Litt 16253547 David Litt https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1585159414p2/16253547.jpg] also shares a moment of handing Obama tangled headphones. Parts of this were great, but it was always the stories. Guess I should just seek those out.