The 3 Ingredients of Powerful Storytelling: Joseph Romm (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Joseph Romm’s talk titled “The 3 Ingredients of Powerful Storytelling” at TEDxTralee 2025 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

A Memorable Moment

JOSEPH ROMM: One of the most memorable moments of my life happened when I was 24. I had been studying physics at MIT, but traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, since I was obsessed with him and his language. I remember a joke I heard: “There’s no such thing as American English. There’s English, and then there are mistakes.”

I had come to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform Richard III. For a Shakespeare fan, they are the ultimate tribute band. I followed them everywhere. After a masterful matinee, I had dinner nearby. At the next table, a group of nuns was trying to make sense of this play with its over 50 characters.

But who can resist nuns in need? So I introduced myself and explained the main characters and their various grudges. Then, one of the nuns gave me the most memorable compliment of my life. She said, “Are you a member of the cast?” For one brief shining moment, I felt like I was.

A Lesson from My Daughter

But I was no storyteller, as I learned two decades later when I had a daughter. When she was 3, she started saying “blah blah blah” to me. But I was okay with her repeating things she heard if she used them correctly. So I asked her if she knew what “blah blah blah” meant. She paused and said, “It’s when daddy says something that doesn’t matter.”

So, dang, she did know. That hit me hard. Since I got my PhD, I spent years researching and promoting clean energy. But until I had a daughter, I had no idea how often I said things that didn’t matter. So figuring out what words matter became my mission, my holy grail, a quest that has led me here to share with you why I believe Taylor Swift is a modern-day Shakespeare.

The Power of Storytelling

And if you listen to the magical poetry of their stories, you’ll learn their secrets too. I never realized that my dream would lead me to do a climate change blog for 12 years that reached 1,000,000, with Rolling Stone Magazine naming me one of 100 people changing America in 2019. But I realized that I had a long way to go to become, you know, a storyteller at that point. But my daughter inspired me to study the great storytellers and their great stories. And I realized that while we often learn their structure, the hero’s journey, we rarely learn the words and phrases that make stories memorable.

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The Three Key Ingredients of Great Stories

So I did what a scientist does. I dove into those stories deeply to determine their core elements, and I found 3 key ingredients common to all those poetic potions.

First, what is the most overused word in stories and the most underused? The most overused word is “and.” “And” is the word of exposition, not narration. “I woke up and took a shower and went to work and blah blah blah.” But the most underused word is “but,” which introduces the conflict and the tension that we expect in great stories. It’s often followed by a sentence with the word “so” or “therefore” that resolves the tension. A student once asked me for a popular example. I said, “You may remember that famous song by Carly Rae Jepsen: ‘Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy,
But here’s my number, so call me maybe.'” All of the great stories have a high ratio of “buts” to “ands.” That’s as true of Shakespeare’s plays as it is of Swift’s songs, especially her 10-minute masterpiece, “All Too Well,” which has 11 “buts.” So the first secret is fewer “ands,” but more “buts.”
The second secret is to use the memory tricks the great bards used to remember their long heroic stories and ensure their audiences remembered them also. These tricks are called the figures of speech, like rhyme and metaphor and foreshadow. But the bards sang their stories. That’s why those who don’t gain fame are called unsung heroes. So one way to master these secret weapons is to study how they’re wielded by modern-day bards, the singer-songwriters.
My daughter showed me many, but Swift is the best storyteller, a modern-day Shakespeare. And like him, she’s been accused of being too popular. And like him, if you only know her early work, you’ve missed a lot. Remember, Shakespeare’s first three plays were Henry VI Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, not exactly Hamlet and King Lear. Swift loves figures of speech like foreshadow, as we see in her song, “I Knew You Were Trouble When You Walked In.”

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Analyzing Taylor Swift’s Storytelling

That’s overt foreshadow. We know how that song is going to end. But “All Too Well,” the opening of “All Too Well” is more covert. “I walked through the door with you. The air was cold.” That’s first-rate foreshadow for a boyfriend who turns cold. But then Swift gets cryptic. She says she left her scarf behind and, quote, “you still got it in your drawer even now.” Swift’s never-returned scarf is so famous Saturday Night Live even joked about it. But here, it’s cryptic.

How does she know where the scarf is years later? And it’s clearly the start of their romance, so why didn’t she just take it back when she could? The answer is the scarf isn’t a scarf. It’s a metaphor, as Swift makes clear near the end. She says this man mails back her things, but “you keep my old scarf from that very first week because it reminds you of innocence, and it smells like me.”

So she didn’t just lose her scarf. She lost her innocence that very first week. That’s why she can’t ever get it back.

Also, does Swift really expect us to believe the scarf still smells like her years later? No.

So why the cryptic words? Well, “smells like” is a callback or allusion, another figure of speech, to the famous song by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which is about the same kind of lost innocence. That’s how Swift writes songs, which brings us to the 3rd storytelling secret. Every word must be chosen for a reason. That’s how Shakespeare wrote plays.

Shakespeare’s Masterful Wordplay

Take his famous lines:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.”

These lines have long confused people. They say that “to be” is to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Well, you’d feel as besieged as Hamlet if your father died, your mother married your uncle, your father’s ghost returned and said your uncle murdered him, and you needed to get revenge. That’s a lot to take for a college kid. You might even say he lost his innocence. But that means Shakespeare is also saying that “not to be” is the same as ending your troubles by taking up arms against them. That’s odd.

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Isn’t ending your troubles the obvious choice? Also, you can’t take arms or weapons against the sea. That would be futile. So that line is often called a mixed metaphor. But is it likely Shakespeare made such a simple mistake?

No. The mystery is solved when we remember every word is chosen for a reason. Shakespeare is saying that by taking up arms for revenge, Hamlet is ending himself—ending his troubles and himself. We know that’s what he means since that foreshadows the actual end of the play where Hamlet does take up arms. He does kill his troubles, but at the same time, his troubles kill him in his duel with Laertes.

So the metaphor isn’t mixed. Taking up arms for revenge is futile. It’s self-destructive. It’s the same as choosing not to be. Every word in the play drives home this meaning.

Conclusion: The Three Secrets of Magical Storytelling

So if we want to tell magical stories, here are 3 practical steps:

Cut the ancillary “ands,” but add tension with those beautiful “buts.”
Listen to Taylor to learn the figures of speech. Use metaphor, foreshadow, and irony to make your stories more memorable.
Choose your words wisely. Like Shakespeare and Swift, every word should have a purpose. If you don’t know a word’s purpose, take it out.

Now you may be thinking you’re not a gifted storyteller. Well, here’s a bonus secret: No one is. Storytelling isn’t a gift you’re given. It’s a skill you pursue. Every great storyteller works hard at it. As Swift herself has said, “You have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.”