In 2023, I tried to perform Andy Weir’s The Egg. It was a terrible idea. Not the story. The story is brilliant. My idea was terrible. The Egg is a short story about death, reincarnation, empathy, and the possibility that every person who has ever lived—or ever will live—is actually the same person.
It sounds complicated. Weir makes it simple. That was part of what attracted me to it.
I could bring that simplicity to the stage by becoming both characters: the person who has just died and the mysterious figure who explains what happens next. The problem was that I had never really learned how to do that.
My message was right. My storytelling wasn’t. And that failure sent me looking for a better way to understand what makes a story work.
The Egg
Imagine you die suddenly in a car accident. No long goodbye. No dramatic final scene. One moment you’re alive. The next, you’re somewhere beyond anything you understand. Someone is standing there. Calm. Patient. God. You start asking questions. What happened? Where am I? Was my life good enough?
God tells you that you’re going back. Back to Earth. But not as yourself. You will live again as someone else. And then someone else. And someone else. You will experience every human life that has ever existed. The king. The beggar. The hero. The murderer. The person who was kind to you. The person who hurt you.
Eventually, you will have lived them all. You will have felt everything. That is when you will be ready to become like God. Why? Because you aren’t simply one person. You are everyone.
That’s the basic idea behind The Egg. Simple, but enormous. If you hurt another person, you’re ultimately hurting yourself. If you help another person, you’re ultimately helping yourself.
The story takes a philosophical idea about empathy and turns it into something we can imagine.
That was what I wanted to do onstage. I wanted the audience to feel the idea rather than hear it. So I decided to play both characters. That was my first mistake.
What Went Wrong
The problem wasn’t the story. It was me. I was nervous about making eye contact, given it’s a story of two characters, so I tried not to look directly at anyone.
Instead, I looked around the room. At everybody. I had planned to avoid locking eyes with anyone—I ended up looking at everyone.
I was also trying to make it clear when I was God and when I was the person who had died.
The transitions weren’t clear. Who was who? I knew. The audience wasn’t always so sure. My movement didn’t help. I could have used one part of the stage for the dead man and another for God. I could have established different physical positions. I could have used a change in posture, voice, or pace to signal the shift.
Instead, I mostly moved around and hoped the audience would follow me. They didn’t always. The story called for mystery and reflection. My delivery sometimes created confusion.
I also underestimated the importance of rehearsal. I knew the words. I didn’t know the performance yet. Those aren’t the same thing.
A speech can be written correctly and still fail in the room. That was the lesson I took away from The Egg. I needed to understand not only what I wanted to say, but how I wanted the audience to experience it.
So I went back to the speech. I took it apart. I looked at what worked in the story, what worked in my delivery, and what didn’t. Six principles kept appearing.I eventually gave them a name:
SCOPES
S — Simplify
C — Create Empathy
O — Open Strong
P — Practice
E — Excite
S — Share from the Heart
SCOPES isn’t a formula for writing a perfect speech. It is a way of looking at a story before you put it in front of an audience.
S — Simplify
Keep it simple. This sounds obvious, but speakers often make simple ideas complicated. We add explanations. Then more explanations. Then examples to explain the explanations. By the time we’re finished, the audience has forgotten the original idea. A good analogy can do the work of a paragraph.
Steve Jobs famously described the iPod as “a thousand songs in your pocket.” You don’t need a technical explanation.
You can see it. That’s what The Egg does. Its central idea is enormous, but Weir gives us one image: The universe is an egg. You don’t have to understand every philosophical implication to understand the image.
When I went back to my own speech, I realized I could have done the same thing. Instead of building a long explanation about death and what comes after it, I could begin with something ordinary:
You died on a Tuesday, halfway through brushing your teeth. That’s enough. Suddenly the audience has a person. A day. A toothbrush. And a death.
The ordinary has become strange. Now they want to know what happens next. That’s simplification. Not making an idea smaller andoikko09 easier to enter.
C — Create Empathy
A story becomes personal when the audience can find itself inside it. The Egg unusually does this. It tells us that every person is, ultimately, us. That makes empathy unavoidable. If the person standing in front of you is another version of yourself, how would you treat that person?
You don’t have to believe in reincarnation to understand the question. That’s the power of shared experience. When I think about empathy in storytelling, I don’t think about telling an audience, “You should care.”
I think about giving them a reason to care. Start with an experience they recognize. Loss. Fear. Embarrassment. Hope. Love. Regret.
A hospital room. A slammed door. A conversation you wish you could have again. The audience doesn’t have to have lived your exact experience. They only need to recognize the feeling. That’s where empathy begins.
O — Open Strong
You don’t get to warm up an audience. They don’t owe you their attention. You have to earn it.
The Egg does that immediately. “You died in a car accident.” That’s the opening. Who starts a story that way? You do if you want the reader to keep going.
The question arrives automatically: What happens now? A strong opening doesn’t have to be shocking. It can be funny. Unexpected. Personal. Provocative. It can simply make the audience curious.
One of the best examples I’ve encountered is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, We Should All Be Feminists. Her opening is direct: “I am a feminist.” There is no long introduction. No explanation of why she’s qualified to speak.
She tells us where she stands. And we want to know what comes next. That’s what an opening should do. It should open a door. Then make us want to walk through it.
P — Practice
Knowing your material isn’t the same as knowing your speech. I learned that with The Egg. I had rehearsed the words. I had not rehearsed the experience.
There’s a difference. A speech has timing. Movement. Silence. Eye contact. Volume. Tone. Gestures. Transitions. You discover those things by saying the speech aloud. Not by reading it silently.
Not by thinking about it. Out loud. Record yourself. Watch it. Listen to where your energy disappears. Notice where you’re rushing. Notice where you look uncomfortable.
Notice where a joke doesn’t get a laugh. Notice where you are saying something important and the audience is watching you instead of listening to you.
Then change it. Practice isn’t about making a speech sound memorized. Create the words familiar enough that you can concentrate on the people listening. I learned that the hard way.
E — Excite
A story needs energy. Not necessarily shouting or dramatic gestures. Energy can be curiosity. Anticipation. Surprise.
A question that hasn’t been answered. A problem that needs solving. A character who doesn’t know what the audience already suspects.
Think about The Egg. You die. You meet God. God tells you you’re going back. You assume you’re going back as yourself. You’re not. You’re going back as somebody else.
Who? Anyone. Everybody. Now the audience has a question. How can that possibly be true? That’s narrative energy. Give people something to wonder about. Something to anticipate. Something they need to know.
A speech doesn’t have to explode. It has to move.
S — Share from the Heart
The final S is the one I probably understand better now than I did when I performed The Egg. Don’t simply tell people what you know. Tell them why it matters to you.
That’s different. Anyone can research empathy. Anyone can explain storytelling. Anyone can summarize The Egg.
But only I can tell you what happened when I stood in front of an audience and tried to play both God and a dead man—and discovered that knowing a story wasn’t enough to tell it.
Personal experience gives information a reason to matter. It doesn’t mean revealing every private detail of your life. It means finding the connection between the subject and you.
Why this story? Why this moment? Why are you the person telling it? The audience doesn’t need a perfect speaker. They need a real one.
What I Learned from Failing
My 2022 performance of The Egg didn’t fail because the story was too complicated.
It failed because I hadn’t yet learned how to translate a good story into a good performance. That distinction matters. A great story can be buried under poor delivery. A simple idea can be buried under too many words.
A powerful message can disappear if the audience has no reason to care. And a speaker can know what they want to say and still lose the room.
SCOPES became my way of remembering the lessons.
Simplify the idea. Create empathy. Open strong. Practice the delivery. Excite curiosity.
Share something that matters to you. I don’t see SCOPES as a set of rules.
I see it as a set of questions. Before I give a speech, write a presentation, tell a story, or stand in front of a room, I can ask: Is this simple? Will they care? Have I given them a reason to listen? Have I practiced saying it, not just writing it? What makes them want to know what happens next? And finally: Why does this matter to me?
Those questions came out of a failed speech. Sometimes that’s where the useful lessons are hiding.
Step Up to the Mic Exercises
- Think of a presentation or speech you gave that didn’t work as well as you’d hoped. Where did you lose your audience?
- Take that presentation apart using SCOPES. What would you simplify? Where could you create more empathy? Could you strengthen the opening?
- Practice your next presentation aloud. Record yourself. What do you hear that you didn’t notice while writing it?
- Think of a story—a movie, novel, short story, or personal experience—that has stayed with you. What keeps pulling you back to it? Can you find the SCOPES?
- Is there a story you would tell differently today than you would have five years ago?
Why?
Richard Tardif is the author of six books. Born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1960, he was raised in Montreal from 1964. He has worked in the military, journalism, publishing, and public speaking, including Toastmasters. His writing has appeared in literary fiction and journalistic contexts.
