Have a Story for Every Letter of the Alphabet

rules-for-living | alphabet-anecdotes

August 28, 2025

Years and years ago I saw this piece of advice, but for the life of me I cannot remember where I found it.¹ Nor really can I recall if there was more to it than what follows, but I do think it’s an incredibly useful bit of advice.

Have an anecdote or story to share for every letter of the alphabet.

The reasoning should be readily apparent. By preparing twenty-six anecdotes, you have a trove of tales to share with anyone you meet. Keeping them varied and on a broad range of subjects means that you are able to contribute a witty tale or appropriate story to most any situation.

To go further; there’s a scene in Reservoir Dogs where the undercover cop is being taught about how to lie convincingly. His superior tells him that to make a story convincing you must know every detail and deliver it casually. Learn the story perfectly to be able to tell it imperfectly.

You can apply this for yourself as well. The catch is that you’re not learning to deliver a monologue. You need to refine the story each time we tell it so as to learn to tell it better next time. What was a useful detail to leave in, what could you have left out, where did you start losing the audience? Those sorts of things.

Two important things to remember:

1. It will take time to accumulate your stories. Don’t wait until you have all twenty-six stories to start socialising. You need to do some living to even generate these anecdotes!
2. This is not a cure for anxiety or difficulty felt around socialising. Having stories prepped will not be much or any help if/when your brain fogs up.

Finally, there is perhaps a little irony to the fact that the first of these rules that I am posting is one where I have not taken my own advice. I have three, maybe four of these stories in my head. I do intend to polish and post them as blogs eventually, and indeed one letter’s story is already available at time of this writing: N. Eventually™ all of them will be online, and a nice little list is available here.

1. Some Day™ I’ll probably write up a rant about living in an age of information saturation, where it’s increasingly difficult to find what you’re looking for. But that is not today. ↩

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