Philipp Humm

Philipp Humm teaches storytelling as a mechanical skill with a short list of techniques, against what he sees as needlessly complicated advice elsewhere. His central distinction is between summarising a story and zooming into it: weak storytellers report what happened from a distance, while strong ones drop the listener into a specific physical moment and let it play.

The techniques are concrete enough to apply immediately. Stating the location first is one — naming a living room or a conference room makes the listener build the scene themselves, which is also why piling on descriptive detail afterwards works against you.

He teaches from analysis of stories told well in public rather than from invented examples, breaking down what a good teller does in the space of twenty seconds.