First, catch your story

Where's storytelling headed right now? There's no better place to find out than The Story, an annual one-day conference held in Conway Hall. This year we heard about the family as unreliable narrator, the joy of embracing mess and why you should drop your filter. And Jarvis Cocker taught us how to fly.

Every time I go to The Story, I swirl my metaphorical butterfly net in great loops in the sky around me. I never know quite what ideas I’m going to catch, but I always know it’ll be worth it.

Here are some of this year’s treasures.

There's more to life than carbonara

"I just thought I was going to get a job, get the tube and eat carbonara, or whatever people do." When he left university, Elijah initially considered following a traditional career path. But when he realised that his future lay in doing something "crazy niche", he forged his own style as an electronic music producer and set up a grime label, Butterz.

He now tours globally with his partner, Skilliam, and has collaborated with everyone from Skepta, JME, Wiley and Kano to Stormzy.

His advice? Ditch the careers advice and create for yourself. "I do everything geared to me being the listener. I produce what I'd want to hear."

Drop the filter 

Juno Dawson, the YA author, came on stage announcing: “I feel so ill. I’ve taken just enough paracetamol, codeine and ibuprofen so I don’t have to have my stomach pumped. The filter has gone.” Perhaps because of this, it was an absolute joy to hear her straight-from-the-hip tales about her life and career.

We discovered that she only studied maths because she fancied the teacher and took up writing as a hobby to stop herself having sex with other people while her partner was away. The most infectious idea from her talk? Real life, unfiltered, makes the most convincing story.

How to mix surrealism and journalism

Researcher, film-maker and producer Mandy Rose made me want to rush to see the Mass Observation archive housed at the University of Sussex. She talked about how this project aimed to record everyday life in Britain through a panel of untrained volunteers. It ran from 1937 through to the early 50s. You might remember the Housewife 49 film starring Victoria Wood inspired by one of those diaries.

According to the brilliantly oddball Mass Observation manifesto, the project aimed to study:

Behaviour of people at war memorials. Shouts and gestures of motorists. The aspidistra cult. Anthropology of football pools. Bathroom behaviour. Beards, armpits, eyebrows. Anti-semitism. Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke. Funerals and undertakers. Female taboos about eating. The private lives of midwives.

Apparently, the study would collect "weather maps of public feeling". I admire everything about the Mass Observation project, particularly the way it mixes journalism and surrealism. Life's a serious business, but how about that aspidistra cult?

The family as unreliable narrator

Your family members could be some of the most unreliable narrators you'll ever meet. Tanya Byrne, the author and freelance journalist, described how she heard two stories about her birth. The first spoke of a hospital dash on a snowy December day when the house was decorated with fairylights. She only heard the second story much later, when she learned that her father had left for good three days after she was born.

Tanya grew up navigating the cultural differences between her Guyanese and Irish heritage, but didn't feel "enough of either". She came out at 40 and is still trying to discover who she really is. This search is made more difficult because: "My mother either told me things in vivid, brutal detail or said nothing at all." She asks herself: "Why do I keep going back to the age of 16, 17, 18?" but doesn't yet know why.

Her message is that it's OK not to know who you are or where you're going. But be persistent. Question the stories you're told, because the truth lies somewhere in the gaps.

Embrace the mess

It can be disconcerting when we meet our heroes and they don't measure up. As Tate Modern curator Zoe Whitley said: "We don't want larger-than-life figures to present something imperfect or tarnish our idea of who they are."

And yet, they invariably do.

But there's a lot to be gained if you can accept the messiness and contradictions in people's stories and "don't polish them up for the sake of cleaning up culture with a capital C". What kind of story might you write if you abandoned the idea of a clear narrative and followed the untidy, jagged truth instead?

Find new ways to play the game

Last year at The Story, Victoria Mapplebeck told us about 160 Characters, a film about an unplanned pregnancy and the tense relationship with her son's father.

This year, producer and commissioner Adam Gee called in to give us an update. Victoria's new film is Missed Call, about her 14 year old son's search for the father he's never met.

We saw an extract of the film, where Victoria tells her son that she's worried he'll be upset if his father fails to respond. Apparently unconcerned, he replies: "It's like a video game. You're always trying to find new angles and new ways to jump." The story doesn't have to move in one direction: you can't predict how people will react and they may well decide to play the game in a new way.

Be inquisitive about mundane details

Jarvis Cocker closed the day, treating us to a rare performance of Pulp's first ever song, Shakespeare Rock, a poignant tale that rhymes ‘Yorick’ with ‘makes me sick’. He admitted that at the beginning it was tempting to use jokes or philosophy as a way of avoiding saying something meaningful. "You have to weave your way through those two poles and overcome the fear of revealing something about yourself through your lyrics."

He added: "If you’re gazing at the horizon waiting for inspiration, it’s easy to discount everyday reality as scenery.” He encouraged us not to strive to be unique and extraordinary, but instead to look at small details and describe how we see them.

I liked the way he put it. “We all see the same world, but the human eye, which we think of as a camera, is also a projector. So all you have to do is write down what you see and it will be unique.”

PS: Jarvis didn't really teach us how to fly. He demonstrated a little jump, and said that's all it takes. Then admitted that his promise was a plot device to help keep our attention until the end of his talk. Cheeky.

Thank you, Storythings!

A huge thanks to Matt, Hugh and the Storythings team for another fabulous edition of The Story. Next year is the tenth edition of the event and we hear that big things are planned. How will the team top this year? I look forward to finding out.

Fiona Thompson is a writer and communications consultant who helps clients including Nokia, the Paris Opera House, Help Musicians UK and Battersea Dogs and Cats Home to tell their stories. This year, she is President of the Writing for Design jury at the D&AD awards.