How to Tell a Story That Neither Judges nor Preaches

Confabulation is a monthly live storytelling series in Montreal where people share true, unscripted stories about family, relationships, work, change, humour and city life. Hosted by actor and comedian Matt Goldberg, it welcomes performers from varied backgrounds and turns ordinary experiences into collective moments of recognition. Performances at MainLine Theatre use pay-what-you-can admission, reflecting the series belief that honest storytelling should be accessible.

The challenge is to tell the truth without making the truth serve a tidy lesson. A compelling story can hold contradiction, discomfort and uncertainty without treating them as failures of craft. Told well, it gives the audience something to consider without telling them what to consider. That is the heart of storytelling that neither judges nor preaches: sharing a particular experience while leaving space for people to find their own way into it.

Truth needs room for complexity

A true story has no obligation to make its characters behave well. People can be selfish, mistaken, awkward, generous and contradictory within the same afternoon. The temptation is to smooth those edges, especially when an audience might respond more warmly to a character who arrives with an obvious lesson attached. Smoothing them away can turn a person into a device and make the story less honest.

Begin by separating what happened from what the narrator thinks it meant. “My sister stopped speaking to me after the wedding” is an event. “My sister was jealous and wanted to control me” is an interpretation that may be accurate, partial or wrong. Both can appear in a story, provided their different weight is clear. The audience needs enough information to follow the conflict without being directed toward a predetermined verdict.

Complexity also requires care with other people’s privacy. A story can reveal the narrator’s behaviour without publishing every identifying detail of a friend, colleague or relative. Names, workplaces and recognisable family circumstances can be changed when they are not essential. This is particularly important in a community-based event, where performers and listeners may know one another outside the room.

Context can broaden responsibility without erasing individual choices. A person may have made a damaging decision while also facing insecure work, cultural expectations or limited choices. Naming those conditions does not excuse the decision; it makes the story more accurate. In a Melbourne story set around Brunswick, for example, a missed shift at a small bar might involve more than carelessness. Rent pressure, poor rostering and the BYO culture of nearby pubs may all shape the evening, but none removes the narrator’s responsibility for what happens next.

Start with what the moment felt like

Exposition is rarely the most vivid way into a story. Instead of beginning with years of background, place the audience inside a moment and let the history arrive when it becomes necessary. A hand gripping a phone, a delayed train announcement or the silence after someone leaves can establish more than a paragraph of explanation.

Specific details should do narrative work rather than decorate the scene. The temperature of a Sydney ferry, the roll of a commuter’s suitcase across a terminal floor and the glare off Circular Quay Harbour can establish time, place and emotional distance. The same details used repeatedly can reveal what the narrator noticed and what they were trying not to notice. Precision creates trust, but only when the precision serves the story.

The narrator’s inner state should remain active too. Fear can appear as an urge to leave, anger as attention to a minor irritation, embarrassment as a sudden interest in cleaning a kitchen bench. These outward behaviours are often easier to convey than direct statements of feeling. They also leave room for the audience to recognise emotions that the narrator has misnamed.

This approach does not remove context; it gives context a reason to appear. A story might begin with an argument on a Brisbane bus during a humid summer evening, then move backward to explain why the narrator had stopped answering their father’s calls. The scene comes first because the audience can feel its pressure. The explanation follows because it illuminates the stakes rather than delaying the action.

Find pressure without delivering a verdict

A story needs pressure, but pressure does not require a villain. Useful tension can come from incompatible needs, unfinished obligations, a decision with no clean outcome or a character trying to say something they do not understand. The audience stays interested when the outcome remains uncertain and when each choice narrows the available choices.

Avoid framing ordinary people as symbols of a larger problem. A difficult neighbour is not automatically a symbol of urban isolation, and a difficult parent is not a reliable explanation for a family’s entire history. The narrator can recognise a pattern without presenting strangers as evidence for a theory. This protects the integrity of both the story and the people described in it.

Humour can be especially useful here. It can reveal the distance between what someone says and what they mean without settling the matter. A joke may carry affection, panic or embarrassment all at once, and the audience can accept more than one interpretation. Timing matters. If the performer explains why a joke is funny or adds a sentence confirming that the real point was vulnerability, the ambiguity collapses.

Conflict becomes more truthful when it comes from competing responsibilities rather than from a lecture about virtue. Someone might need to care for a parent while also keeping paid employment, maintain a friendship while refusing to lend money again, or remain in a community while seeking distance from it. These pressures resist neat moral sorting. They also reflect the kinds of choices many listeners recognise in Australian cities, where work, family, housing costs and cultural expectations often occupy the same limited hours and spaces.

Keep the context, cut the lesson

Context should help the audience understand why an event carries weight. It should not arrive as a prepared moral. If a story depends on unfamiliar customs, institutional rules or cultural references, explain those elements plainly and briefly. The test is whether the explanation allows listeners to see the event more clearly, not whether it demonstrates the narrator’s wisdom.

In Australia’s crowded content market, hardship stories are often packaged as clean arcs of resilience. A podcast might reduce a year of unemployment to a breakthrough, while a branded campaign might turn family sacrifice into a slogan. Live storytelling can resist that machinery by preserving the unresolved parts. A person can leave a difficult job and still miss the routine, find a new direction and still feel frightened by it, or help a relative and still resent the time it took.

This does not mean avoiding a point of view. The narrator is entitled to an opinion, a reaction or a changed belief. The distinction lies in how that view is positioned. “I now believe my father was trying to protect his own dignity” differs from “My father was trying to protect his own dignity.” The first admits uncertainty and the narrator’s perspective. The second presents a conclusion and expects obedience.

Endings deserve the same discipline. A tidy resolution may be true, but it can become an artificial way of reassuring the audience or the performer. An aftermath can be enough: a new apartment that still has the same strange sounds, an old friend who sends a birthday message, a habit that continues after the decision to abandon it. The story is complete when its meaning has changed, not when every loose end has been tied.

Let the room become part of the story

Live storytelling creates a different contract from writing for a page or a screen. The performer cannot rely on editing, and the audience becomes conscious of itself through pauses, laughter, shifting attention and occasional silence. A story prepared as a polished monologue must leave room for those responses without treating them as instructions.

Strong live narratives need landmarks rather than every word. The performer remembers where the tension began, which detail must return later and what the final image carries. Matt Goldberg’s role as host adds another layer: the evening can connect unrelated experiences through conversation or transition, allowing one performer’s story to alter the temperature of the next. That change is part of the event, not a flaw in the stories’ independence.

Silence is a practical tool. It can give an awkward memory room to breathe, preserve the awkwardness of an unrepaired relationship and resist the urge to rescue the audience from discomfort. A performer who rushes into the next sentence often explains the feeling that the silence was holding. Confidence in live storytelling comes from trusting the pause and the listeners’ capacity to meet it.

Community makes the same trust necessary in another direction. Confabulation’s Montreal setting brings together people whose lives may be far apart, yet each story offers a route into recognisable experience. In Australian cities, intimate storytelling often takes place in pubs, independent theatres, bookshops, community radio rooms and weekend markets where neighbours share a stall or a folding table. The familiar work of finding a coffee, hearing a band and browsing secondhand records can become the social setting for a story about migration, ambition, grief or belonging.

The performer should honour that shared space. This means avoiding material designed simply to shock, explaining the confidential detail of another person for a laugh and allowing the audience to remain uncertain. It also means understanding that access is part of the encounter. A pay-what-you-can door at MainLine Theatre and a donation jar beside the urn at a neighbourhood book launch may look like small differences, but both keep participation from becoming another financial barrier.

The strongest stories do not turn listeners into judges waiting to award points for the right response. They create enough clarity for understanding and enough openness for doubt. The performer offers a perspective without claiming universal authority, while the audience receives the story without being required to convert it into advice.

A story that neither judges nor preaches can still be sharp, moving and full of conflict. It can expose cruelty, admit desire and laugh at the parts of life that resist dignity. Its honesty comes from refusing to use another person as evidence, and its generosity comes from allowing the audience to interpret what was shared.

Remember the story that leaves the room more open than it found it.