Festival Feature: The Art of Storytelling
September 7, 2024
NOTE: A version of this story appears in our 2024 South Dakota Festival of Books guide, produced by South Dakota Magazine.
As the youngest of eight children in a boisterous Irish family, it was often hard for Lian Dolan to get a word in edgewise. “I used to rehearse my material for dinner in the bathroom,” Dolan says, with a laugh. “What am I going to say that my older brothers and sisters will actually listen to, because when you’re the youngest of eight, you are not interesting in any way, shape or form.”
In hindsight, those were some of her earliest lessons in storytelling, a craft she has grown to master in a variety of mediums, including magazines, novels, radio and podcasting. She’ll share some of her storytelling advice with festivalgoers at a session called “It’s All Storytelling.”
One of the first lessons she learned was the importance of being a good listener. Picking up on structure, watching for reactions and identifying what resonated with an audience helped her put together her own stories. “For maybe 10 years I said nothing at the dinner table,” she says. “I’d listen to my father, who was funny, and my siblings, who seemed smart and sophisticated, tell the stories and shape them. Then you sort of leap off the cliff and start doing it yourself. You figure out that things need a punchline, or they need to be about something more than your life. The key ingredient was listening to the smart and funny people around me.”
She further honed those skills at Pomona College, where she continued writing and hosted a radio show. Then she went to work as a production assistant in the film and video department at Nike. Dolan has written magazine columns for O, The Oprah Magazine, Pasadena Magazine and Working Mother Magazine. She is the author of five novels, including 2024’s USA Today Bestseller The Marriage Sabbatical. Her podcast Satellite Sisters, an award-winning talk show that she created with her four sisters, began on radio in 2009 and is now a top-rated podcast for women.
It’s a varied resume, but no matter for whom she’s writing or speaking, the nuts and bolts of storytelling remain the same. “Every story starts with the basics — a beginning, middle and an end — and somewhere in there is a lesson, punchline or something much more dramatic,” she says. “Start small and personal and then open up to a wider lesson or take a big cultural trend and bring it down to personal level.”
The best stories have staying power. She still recalls a humorous story involving a root canal, followed by a trip to a department store, which she told on her podcast. “I told that story 10-plus years ago, and once a week, people will email me about it. I’m just astonished, because if I didn’t tell that story that trip would have just been forgotten. But I’m reminded of it every week. It’s not a story that’s going to change the world, but it’s brought a lot of joy to people over the years. There’s nothing better than that.”
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