Storyworthy

The Five Seconds That Hold Your Life

On July 12, 2011, a man who had been resuscitated from death, held at gunpoint, jailed for a crime he did not commit, and stalked by an anonymous group that mailed a thirty-seven-page smear packet to three hundred families in his town walked into a basement café in lower Manhattan to tell a story about pole vaulting. He did not want to be there. He had spent two years inventing excuses to avoid it. His wife had kicked him in the shin to make him stand up when his name was finally drawn out of the canvas tote bag.

This is how Matthew Dicks fell into the work that would take over his life, and it is also a clue to the slightly counterintuitive argument of Storyworthy. Dicks has survived enough catastrophe to fill three memoirs. He almost never tells those stories. The book you are about to absorb is a thirty-year argument that a man walking his fourteen-year-old dog at two in the morning in his underwear, in a sudden Connecticut rain, is more powerful than a man with a gun to his head. And it is an argument that you, sitting wherever you are reading this, already have a hundred such moments hidden in plain sight, any one of which could change the way someone you love looks at you forever.

Dicks's claim is more precise than that. He says every great story ever told is about a five-second moment in a human life, and the entire craft of storytelling is the art of bringing that single moment to the sharpest possible clarity. Find that five seconds and you have a story. Miss it and what you have is a romp — a cotton-candy account of something that happened, fun to hear, gone by morning.