You finish a story. Before you take it to the stage, you owe the story one last pass — an audit not against what it is doing, but against what it must not be doing. The Dicks tradition has accumulated a list of named anti-rules — the cardinal sins — each one identifying a specific structural or delivery move that reliably destroys an otherwise-functional story. Most of them are not obvious; most have been learned through hundreds of Moth StorySLAMs and storytelling-coaching sessions where the same failures recurred until they earned names.
The cardinal-sins list is not a synthesis of good storytelling (those principles have their own pages). It is the inverse — the catalog of moves that will predictably break a story, named so that a storyteller doing a final-pass audit has explicit names to scan their draft against. Each named sin is a failure-pattern the Dicks tradition has observed repeatedly enough to merit its own diagnostic vocabulary.1
The audit is structural to Dicks's coaching practice. Storytellers bring drafts; the coaching pass scans the draft against the cardinal-sins list; any sin detected gets surfaced and addressed before the story goes to performance. Most drafts contain at least one sin on a first pass; experienced storytellers' drafts contain fewer. The list functions as the immune system of the Dicks tradition — the institutional knowledge of which moves to never make.
The composite list compiled across both Dicks interviews and Lewis's synthesis includes (at minimum) the following named anti-rules.
Sin 1 — Starting with throat-clearing. Hi everyone, thanks for having me, I'm going to tell you a story about... The opening burns audience attention on social acknowledgment that should have happened before the storytelling started. The first sentence of a story should be in-scene, not in-introduction. The sin is committed by amateurs almost universally and by intermediate storytellers when they have not internalized start with location and action.
Sin 2 — Telling the audience how to feel. And it was so sad / and that was when I realized something beautiful / and you'll never believe this funny part. The storyteller is announcing the emotional response the audience is supposed to have rather than constructing the scene that produces the response. The audience resists being instructed; the announcement undercuts the moment that would have produced the emotion organically.
Sin 3 — Explaining the moral. And what I learned from that day is that we should always cherish the small moments. The explained moral collapses the audience's interpretive work into a single line that the storyteller has done for them. The audience's own derivation of meaning is what produces the durable post-story effect; the explained moral eliminates the derivation. The sin is the storytelling equivalent of telling a joke and then explaining why it's funny.
Sin 4 — Including the gear-shift mid-story. Sorry, I should have mentioned earlier — my mother was also there, I forgot to say that. The retroactive insertion announces that the storyteller has lost narrative control. The audience's mental model of the scene now has to be reconstructed; the immersion breaks. The fix is to not deliver the story in an order that requires the gear-shift; alternatively, to integrate the missed information into a later moment without flagging the missed-ness.
Sin 5 — Stretching a story beyond its natural length. A four-minute story padded to seven minutes because the speaking slot is seven minutes loses energy in the added three minutes. Audiences detect the padding even when they cannot name it. The sin is committed by storytellers who privilege filling the time over delivering the right length; the Dicks discipline is the opposite — deliver the story at its natural length and end early if necessary.
Sin 6 — Removing your own stupidity. Covered fully at truth-in-stories; included in the cardinal-sins list because it is one of the most common and damaging sins committed by mid-tier storytellers.
Sin 7 — Manufacturing emotion. The fake crying-in-the-car scene, the invented dialogue that was never spoken, the performed heart-landing that the storyteller does not actually feel. Audiences detect manufactured emotion almost universally; the detection produces the opposite of the intended effect. The sin is closely related to but distinct from Sin 6 (Sin 6 removes truth; Sin 7 adds fiction).
Sin 8 — Ending on the joke when the heart was available. Covered at end-with-heart; included in the cardinal-sins list because the temptation to commit it is universal and most storytellers commit it across years of practice before learning to override it.
Sin 9 — Speaking at instead of to the audience. Covered at speaking-to-vs-at; included as a delivery-level sin that breaks otherwise-sound stories.
Sin 10 — Memorizing word-for-word. Covered at remember-not-memorize; included because memorized delivery produces at-mode register and forecloses the imperfection-as-presence benefits.
Sin 11 — Adding music or production over a strong story. Mainly relevant for podcast and recorded contexts. Production additions usually subtract from a well-told story rather than adding to it. Strong stories carry themselves; adding music telegraphs that the storyteller did not trust the story.
Sin 12 — Apologizing for the story. This might not be that interesting but / I don't know if this will land but / sorry, this is kind of long. The pre-emptive apology calibrates audience expectations downward and signals storyteller-doubt that the audience absorbs. The fix is to either tell the story without the apology or to not tell it at all.
Sin 13 — Defending the story against an imagined objection. Now some of you might be thinking I should have just left the situation, but. The defense surfaces an objection the audience may not have been forming and gives them an objection to consider. The fix is to trust the audience to follow the story without preemptive defensive moves.
The list is not exhaustive; the Dicks tradition continues to identify new sins as new failure-patterns recur. New named sins are added to the institutional knowledge over time. The thirteen-plus listed here are the named sins as of the current Dicks-tradition corpus.
The cognitive mechanism: storytellers can usually identify what to do (the pro-rules) but have difficulty identifying what to stop doing. The pro-rules tell the storyteller what to add; the anti-rules tell them what to subtract. The two operations are not symmetric in difficulty — addition is observable in the draft (the storyteller can see what they added); subtraction requires comparison against a baseline of what should not be there, which the storyteller has no internal reference for unless the baseline has been named.
The cardinal-sins list functions as the externalized subtraction-baseline. The storyteller scans the draft against the named sins; any detected sin is named and removable. Without the named sins, the same failures persist in drafts because the storyteller has no vocabulary for what to remove.
A second mechanism: the named sins are transferable across storytellers. A storyteller learning the tradition can absorb the thirteen-plus sins in a single afternoon and immediately apply them to their drafts. Without the named list, the same vocabulary would have to be re-derived from scratch by each new storyteller through painful trial-and-error. The institutional knowledge of failure-patterns is one of the Dicks tradition's most valuable accumulated assets.
A third mechanism: the sin-list permits fast diagnostic communication. A coach reviewing a storyteller's draft can simply say Sin 4 in paragraph six and the storyteller knows exactly what to look for and how to fix it. The shorthand permits rapid coaching iteration that would otherwise require lengthy explanation of each failure-pattern from first principles.
The cardinal-sins list is the negative-space complement to the Dicks tradition's positive-instruction frameworks. Big Three tells you what to do at the structural level; the cardinal-sins list tells you what not to do at multiple levels. Together they constitute the complete tradition — do these things; do not do these things.
It connects to strategic listening: the meta-skill builds the storyteller's library of which sins each consumed artifact committed and how. Over years of strategic consumption, the storyteller can recall hundreds of specific instances of each sin, which deepens their internal diagnostic capacity beyond the bare list of names. The library is what makes the sin-scanning fast at draft-review time.
It pairs with the no-one-wants-to-hear-anything mindset: the mindset is the upstream attentional discipline that motivates sin-scanning. A storyteller who assumes the audience will tolerate any draft has no motivation to scan for sins; a storyteller who assumes the audience is one-sin-from-leaving scans rigorously.
It contrasts with conventional writing-craft instruction, which usually emphasizes positive sentence-level techniques (varied sentence length, strong verbs, fresh imagery) rather than anti-rules at the structural and delivery level. The Dicks tradition's emphasis on the anti-rule list is a methodological commitment — the leverage is in eliminating the sins rather than in adding polish at the sentence level.
Imagine a storyteller — call him David — bringing a draft to a Dicks-tradition coaching session.2
David's draft (paraphrased): Hi everyone, thanks for being here. I want to tell you a story about my grandmother. So my grandmother — she was a really special woman. You'll see what I mean. So this one Christmas — actually, I should mention that my grandmother lived with us for the last five years of her life. Sorry, I should have said that first. Anyway, this one Christmas, I went into her room and I saw something that I'll never forget. And it was so beautiful. She was looking at this photo album, and what I learned from that moment is that even at the end of life, the past holds the most precious memories.
The coach scans for sins.
Sin 1 — Starting with throat-clearing. Detected. Hi everyone, thanks for being here is the opening throat-clear. Recommended fix: start with the scene-opening (I went into my grandmother's room and saw something).
Sin 2 — Telling the audience how to feel. Detected. She was a really special woman and something that I'll never forget and it was so beautiful are all instructions to the audience. Recommended fix: render the scene; let the audience derive the feeling.
Sin 3 — Explaining the moral. Detected. What I learned from that moment is that even at the end of life, the past holds the most precious memories is the explained moral. Recommended fix: end on the image of the grandmother looking at the photo album; let the audience derive the meaning.
Sin 4 — Gear-shift mid-story. Detected. Actually, I should mention that my grandmother lived with us for the last five years of her life. Sorry, I should have said that first is a clean gear-shift. Recommended fix: integrate the context into the opening or omit it (the story may not require it).
Sin 12 — Apologizing for the story. Detected (the sorry, I should have said that first). Recommended fix: omit the apology.
The coaching pass identifies five named sins in a draft of approximately 130 words. The fix list is correspondingly specific: cut the throat-clearing, cut the she was a special woman and I'll never forget and it was so beautiful, cut the explained moral, restructure to avoid the gear-shift, cut the apology. After the fixes, the draft compresses from 130 words to approximately 60 words and lands considerably harder — the sins were taking up roughly half the original real estate while subtracting from the effect.
The instructive part of the case: David could have spent weeks polishing the original draft at the sentence level (varying word choice, smoothing transitions) without improving the story's audience reception, because the sentence-level work was operating underneath five active sins. The sin-scan was higher-leverage than any amount of sentence-polish. This is the load-bearing argument for the sin-list as a coaching tool — the eliminations are nearly always higher-leverage than the additions.
You have a complete draft. You want to run the sin-scan before performing.
It is the night before performance. You're at the kitchen table with the printed draft and the cardinal-sins list. You read the draft once for general comprehension. You then read it a second time with the sin-list visible beside you.
You start at the opening. Sin 1 — throat-clearing? Yes — thank you for having me. Mark it for cutting.
You continue. Sin 2 — telling the audience how to feel? Three instances in the middle section — and it was incredible, what I felt then was beyond words, the room was electric. Mark each for cutting and replacement with rendered-scene content.
You continue. Sin 3 — explaining the moral? Yes — and what this taught me was the importance of. Mark it for cutting; consider restructuring the ending to land on the image rather than on the explanation.
You continue through all thirteen sins. By the end of the second read, you have marked twelve cuts and three restructure-zones. You implement them.
You read the revised draft aloud. The runtime has compressed from twelve minutes to eight minutes. The story lands harder. The cuts and restructures eliminated material that was subtracting from the story's effect; what remains is the story itself, without the sins that had been blocking it.
You consider whether to add new material to compensate for the runtime loss. You decide against — the eight-minute version is the right runtime for the story; the original twelve minutes was Sin 5 (stretching beyond natural length). The shorter version is the correct length.
The pattern is: complete the draft, scan against the named sins systematically, mark all detected sins, implement cuts and restructures, accept the resulting runtime compression as evidence that the cuts were correct, perform the compressed version.
Your drafts contain three or more sins from the list across multiple revisions. Sins that persist across multiple drafts indicate the storyteller has not internalized the named anti-rules. The fix is repeated coaching feedback against the named list until the sins become internalized as automatic-avoidance during drafting.
You can identify others' sins but not your own. Storytellers often see the sins clearly in others' work and miss them in their own. The fix is to transcribe your own performances and read the transcripts as if they were someone else's drafts — the transcript-as-other psychologically separates the storyteller from the material and surfaces the sins the storyteller could not see in real-time.
You believe specific instances of the named sins are exceptions. The temptation to argue my situation was different; the audience needed me to tell them how to feel because the scene was unfamiliar; my explained moral was a clever subversion is the sin-tolerating mindset's signature self-defense. The Dicks tradition's empirical claim is that the named sins are reliable failure-patterns; the storyteller's belief in their own exception is almost always wrong.
You add new sins as your craft develops. Intermediate storytellers sometimes shed early-amateur sins (throat-clearing, apology) only to develop intermediate-storyteller sins (over-polished transitions, manufactured emotion at calibrated intervals). The sin-list should be re-applied at each phase of craft development; new sins emerge as old ones are eliminated.
Dicks across both interviews emphasizes the cardinal-sins list as a practical coaching tool rather than as a theoretical contribution.3 He frames it as accumulated institutional knowledge — the failures the tradition has seen repeatedly enough to name. The framing is appropriately modest about authorship (most sins were identified by predecessors and refined by the tradition; few are uniquely Dicks-original) and appropriately confident about utility (the list works; storytellers improve quickly by absorbing it).
Lewis treats the cardinal-sins list as Dicks-tradition foundational and presents it in his synthesis as one of the highest-leverage curricular elements available to would-be storytellers.4 Lewis's version emphasizes the fast-acting nature of the list — storytellers can absorb it in a single workshop and immediately apply it.
Jasper Claus does not articulate an explicit cardinal-sins list but operates an analogous list implicitly in his corporate-filmmaking coaching practice. The structural sins he warns against (telling the audience the message rather than letting the story carry it; over-producing rather than trusting the protagonist; including the brand-name too often) map onto specific Dicks-tradition sins in modified form. The convergence suggests cardinal-sins-style anti-rule lists are emerging across multiple storytelling traditions as practitioners accumulate institutional knowledge of failure-patterns.
Look at what the named-sins list does: it institutionalizes accumulated knowledge of failure-patterns as anti-rules with names, enabling fast diagnostic communication and self-audit. Several other domains have evolved equivalent named-anti-rule traditions.
Software engineering / code-smell taxonomies: The software engineering tradition has developed an analogous named-anti-rule corpus called code smells (Martin Fowler's term) — named patterns of suboptimal code that reliably indicate underlying design problems. Examples: long method, feature envy, primitive obsession, shotgun surgery. The structural parallel to the cardinal-sins list is precise: both are accumulated institutional knowledge of failure-patterns, given names to enable fast diagnostic communication, deployed in coaching/code-review contexts to surface problems for refactoring. Both fields landed on the same idea independently — a named-anti-rule list is a general craft-development tool, not something specific to storytelling. Neither domain supplies the full account alone: storytelling supplies the human-communicative failure-patterns; software engineering supplies the formal cataloging methodology. Pairing them suggests storytelling-craft might productively formalize the cardinal-sins list into a more comprehensive taxonomy with explicit refactoring-prescriptions per sin, the way software-engineering has formalized code-smell handling.
Medicine / clinical syndromes and contraindications: Medical training includes substantial coverage of named syndromes (collections of symptoms with diagnostic names) and contraindications (drug-or-procedure combinations that reliably produce harm). Both function as institutional-knowledge externalizations of accumulated clinical failure-patterns. The structural parallel to the cardinal-sins list is direct: named patterns enable fast diagnostic communication between practitioners and faster intervention. Look at what storytelling and medicine share: both have built named-failure-pattern lists as professional-development tools across disciplines that handle complex multi-variable failures. Storytelling-craft could productively study how medical institutions maintain, update, and disseminate their failure-pattern catalogs (textbook updates, board-exam questions, continuing-education credit) as model for how the cardinal-sins list might be more systematically maintained and disseminated.
Stand-up comedy / heckle-handling and bombing-analysis traditions: Stand-up comedians maintain informal but well-developed failure-pattern catalogs in their own institutional culture — the heckle that derails the set, the joke that always bombs in front of certain audiences, the opening that loses the room. The catalogs are mostly oral-tradition rather than written, but they function structurally identically to the cardinal-sins list. Pairing with strategic listening: comedians' continuous strategic listening to each other's sets is the mechanism by which the failure-pattern catalog stays updated. The Dicks tradition's storytelling-craft cardinal-sins list could productively borrow this peer-network update mechanism — formal channels by which storytellers share newly-observed failure-patterns and have them incorporated into the institutional list.
The Sharpest Implication The cardinal-sins list implies that most amateur and intermediate storyteller improvement comes from elimination, not addition. The amateur's intuitive improvement model is add more (more material, more polish, more techniques). The Dicks-tradition model is the opposite — subtract more (fewer sins, less padding, less explained meaning, less throat-clearing). The leverage gradient runs toward subtraction at all stages of craft development; the storyteller who continues to add when they should be subtracting plateaus at a ceiling set by the sins they cannot bring themselves to remove. The list is therefore not a beginner's tool — it is a career-long discipline, applied to every draft regardless of the storyteller's experience level. Even decades-experienced storytellers commit sins; the discipline of continuing to scan is what keeps the work at quality across the career.
Generative Questions