This article explores strategies storytellers use to increase listener response to their performances, such as (1) repeating a salient phrase, particularly a piece of dialogue; (2) adding an explanation of the point of a story; (3) drawing out some consequence of the story; and particularly (4) the unobtrusive strategy of producing a minimal response to draw out a more extensive reaction from listeners. This last strategy came to light in a large-scale corpus-based search. Instead of working from a set of narratives, the article begins by looking at a linguistic element, namely items from the class of discourse markers like so and y’know in all kinds of contexts in a very large corpus, and slowly narrowes its focus to narrative passages within the whole array of examples. In the process, it discovered distributions and functions for items, which have not been described in previous research on conversational narrative.