Have you got a story that will knock our audience’s collective socks off? We want to hear from you!

The Mystery Box Show is currently seeking new storytellers for all of our shows throughout 2013! If you are feeling adventurous and want to share a story with our audience, simply follow our pitch guidelines to get the process started. Here’s how it works:

• E-mail pitches@mysteryboxshow.com with a brief paragraph (three to six sentences should cover it) describing your story. The only stipulations are:
  • Your story must be true. We are not a showcase for fiction or flights of fancy. The stories shared on our stage are about events that have actually happened.
  • Your story must be personal. The story must be something you experienced first-hand. No stories that a friend told you, or that you heard through word-of-mouth. This must be your story.
  • Your story must be related to sex or sexuality in some way. There is lots of room for interpretation here. Your story could be anything from your first kiss to the time you walked in on your roommate watching pornography. It could be about the time you had to give your son or daughter the dreaded ‘sex talk,’ or the time you realized that your gender was more fluid than you had previously thought. Feel free to get creative. No subject is too risqué or too tame, too funny, or too serious. We want to hear it all.

Please do not include any YouTube links or attached documents containing your full story. We just want the barest outline to start out with. This makes it more exciting for us to hear your full story when we meet for the first time in person.

No need be nervous about pitching. It’s not as tough as it sounds. After all, we already want to hear from you.

Here are some storytelling tips you may find useful when deciding what you want to pitch to us:

• Have a solid beginning. Jump right into the action. You’d be surprised how little prefacing needs to happen in order to set up a story. Figure out the first really dynamic moment in your story and try starting from that point. .
• Be aware of your timeline. Tell the events of your story in sequence, keeping in mind how one moment leads to the next.
• Establish what the audience doesn’t know. You know all of the details about your story already before you begin. The audience, however, comes to you with fresh ears and may need certain information to make things clear. Think about the elements that make up your story and determine whether new listener would be confused or lost by any bit of information. Don’t take anything for granted.
• Know what’s important. The audience will only follow you so far down a side tangent. Recognize what parts of your story are crucial to your through line and make those the focus of your storytelling.
• Stakes! What are the different ways this story could turn out? Why should the audience care whether they turn out one way or another? What makes you care? (another way of saying this is “What’s at risk?”)
• Know your turning point. Many stories have an identifiable moment where expectations crumble, or a larger meaning becomes clear. Focus on driving towards this point in your story.
• Have a solid ending. A good story often has an ending worth reflecting on. Perhaps you have learned something, experienced a triumphant success, a spectacular failure, or have had your perspective shifted.
• Know your opening and closing lines. This may seem contradictory to the idea of an unmemorized story, but it can be useful to think of the first line as the momentum that plunges you into the storytelling, and the final line as the perfect gymnastic dismount to head for once the story is over.

OUR PROCESS

The Mystery Box Show has a specific process for cultivating the stories that eventually end up on our stage. If you’re interested in appearing with us, here’s what you might expect to go through with us.

• The Pitch. Detailed above, this is the first time we will hear from you and determine whether your story sounds like a good fit for The Mystery Box Show.
• Story Meeting. If your pitch is successful, it means we want to hear more! We will arrange a time for you to meet our producers at a coffeeshop or somewhere similar. You will be asked to tell your story, uninterrupted, while we may take notes with questions we have or thoughts about how the story will work most successfully on stage.

  It is important to note that until we hear a storyteller’s story, we cannot say for certain whether it is a good fit for our show. If it is, we will look for the best date for the story to fit in (it may be the very next show, or months away… but if we want the story, we want the story!). Either way, we will send an e-mail a few days after the story meeting to let the storytellers know whether we would like them to appear with us on stage.

• Story Notes. Our producers will go over the story notes and e-mail them to you after the Story Meeting. If we think that your story is right for The Mystery Box Show, we will work with you to make sure the story is the strongest it can be by the time it is ready for the stage. This may include more Story Meetings.

note: We encourage you to attend one of our shows before you pitch us a story, or at least have a look at some of our past storytellers. This will give you a good idea of the kind of storytelling we bring to our audiences.

We look forward to hearing from you and getting you involved in our next live show!