BookYol

Concept

The Five-Second Moment

The five-second moment is Matthew Dicks's idea that every good personal story is built around a brief instant of change, realisation or transformation, and that the storyteller's job is to find that moment first and then choose only the details that lead the audience to it.

Dicks argues that stories are not about events but about change: who you were before a moment and who you became after it. When a story feels flat, it is usually because it has no such moment, or because the teller has buried it under a list of things that happened. Finding the five seconds turns a sequence of events into a story. Once you know that the story is about, say, the instant you realised your father was afraid too, you know what to keep and what to cut: everything that sets up that instant stays, everything else goes, however funny or true. The moment rarely sits where you expect. It is often small, internal and quiet rather than the dramatic event around it. This makes the idea useful at work as well: a case study or a pitch lands when it shows the moment a customer or a team saw something differently.

A real-life example

Gül, a hospital administrator in Mersin, wants to tell new staff a story about a night shift during a power cut. Her first version lists everything that went wrong. Looking for the five seconds, she sees the story is really about the moment a frightened patient took her hand and she stopped thinking about procedures. She rebuilds the story around those few seconds and cuts half the events.

How to use it

  1. 1For a story you want to tell, write one sentence: in which few seconds did something change for me?
  2. 2Keep only the details that lead to that moment and cut the rest, however true or funny.
  3. 3Check that the audience can tell how you were before the moment and how you were after it.