#storyprocess

BEHIND THE STORYTELLING CURTAIN

A Day in the Life of a Storyteller, Episode #17

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“That must have taken a long time to memorize all those words!”

“Do you practice over and over until you have it all perfect?”

“How do you come up with the stories you’re going to tell?”

“Do stories ever just come to you?”

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The mystery of the storytelling profession is both what I love and what drives me crazy about it—the constant need to explain what it is that I actually do as a storyteller can be frustrating, but at the same time the constant chance I have to create what it is I do as I go along, while quite scary and challenging, is also invigorating, and often downright fabulous.

Considering that the whole point of A Day in the Life of a Storyteller has been to attempt to disseminate the world of storytelling as an art form and profession, I’ve decided this week to delve more into the actual process I go through to prepare stories to tell.

I often hear comments like that very first one, “That’s a lot of words to memorize!”, or questions like this one, “Do you say the story over and over again until you have it perfect?”

I find that many people hold a misconception that storytelling is just like performing a scripted theater piece.

While some tellers follow a tighter script than I do, the majority of storytellers I know (including myself) adhere more to the practice of learning a story by heart rather than memorization.

What do I mean exactly when I say by heart? Isn’t memorizing something the same as learning it by heart? The terms are often used interchangeably, but for me as a storyteller there is a huge difference.

To memorize something is to have it in my head, with the precise words and sequence down pat. To learn something by heart is just that, to have it in my heart rather than solely in my head.

I was never great at memorizing lines for plays growing up, but I always wanted to perform the scenes—I wanted to feel the lines and be in the character, to know the story so intimately that I didn’t need the exact words, I just needed to be the character, the story itself. I’ve heard a lot of actors tell me that when you become good at acting this is how it is—you feel the character you are playing so much that you can take more liberties with the lines, and you know the story and plot in and out that the lines just come naturally.

While I haven’t gotten there yet in theatre, I have found that heart full experience of performance in storytelling.

Before I choose to tell a story I have to be able to feel the story deep down—to feel the message and the importance of it for myself, before I share it with anyone else.

There is a beautiful thing that storytellers have different names for, but I’ve always called it enchantment—where the triangle of “story”-“audience”-“teller” is formed, all three elements linked, and in the center enchantment forms, a moment in time never to be repeated and unique to those within the triangle, where all is connected and all are experiencing the heart of story—the essence of the power of storytelling to change and shift and expand horizons of all involved.

I’ve started to work on a story and had to stop, because I’ve realized that I couldn’t really feel the heart of the story, that I wasn’t connecting with it the way I wanted to, the way that is necessary to be effective in telling it to others with the potential for enchantment.

Once I find a story where my heart is in it, I get to the business of learning it by heart.

This involves a process of visualizing the story—through drawn images, or often just by imagining the sequencing of the story in my head as I walk through the park, take a run by the creek, or sit on my porch drinking tea and watching passersby in their daily routines.

I find that learning a story by image, rather than by words is easier to hold in my mind—words memorized can be fleeting, but the image sticks because I can see how it is part of the whole.

Our brains are wired for story, and there is scientific research out there now to back this statement up.

Kendall Haven, author of Story Proof: The science behind the startling power of story, shares that our brains have something he calls the neural story net (NSN), where the information received by the subconscious is storied before it reaches the conscious mind. The NSN is our brains’ make-sense tool—it changes facts, makes assumptions, creates new info, ignores parts, infers connections and intent, and misinterprets information (Haven). Haven says that stories themselves minimize what our NSN does—by applying effective story structure to the information we give our brains, we minimize distortion done by our NSN. If it’s already in a story, our brain has less work to do!

To remember how to tell the story I wish to tell, I first have to really know its structure and flow—to understand the whole and not just the parts. When I try to learn something by heart using just words, I end up focusing too much on the parts and lose much of the whole. When I use images and visualization, I can imagine the whole and the parts begin to make more sense in relation to that whole.

Of course there are certain phrases or parts that are more effective for an audience when they are spoken a certain way. Often storytellers choose to learn the beginning line (“Many say that ghosts do not exist…” or “I never did like our neighbor’s dog…”) and the ending line or paragraph (“Rambling Richard went on his way, and as he went, he sang…) or a jingle or repetitive phrase word for word (“I’ve got two eyes and ears, ten fingers and toes, I stand on my feet, and follow my nose…”) to use in the story to provide structure and a part to hold on to when performing. I find this helpful, though any more than this and I begin to lose sight of the whole again.

The idea that storytellers practice their stories over and over again exactly the same each time, well, for some this is true, but for me this almost never happens.

I do find that it is important to tell the story again and again—to friends, family, people I meet—but each time it is different, each time there is some variation on the phrasing, some difference in how I embellish certain parts or not. And this is in fact the useful part of telling it over and over again—not to “perfect” it in the sense of having it be the exact same each time, but in determining what different ways there are to express the story, and how that shifts and flows depending on who is listening and what my ultimate goal with the telling happens to be.

Part of this practice for me of telling over and over again, is to tell the story to myself informally over time and in different places, without the pressure of an audience and often with the distraction of nature and movement.

One of the most effective practices I have is to take a run or a walk in the park, with a pen and folded up piece of paper tucked in a pocket.

I let my mind wander, though I will often set an intention to loosely (key word here) adventure through a specific story and how it might like to be told.

Sometimes I won’t set an intention, and a story will appear on its own. Other times a different story than what I set out to explore will find its way into my consciousness. Whichever way, I always find it to be a fruitful process.

The looseness of the thought process, combined with movement of the body and exposure to nature has a way of freeing my imagination and awakening untapped creation.

Three years ago, I had a story snippet come to me in a dream, but upon awakening I was left only with that snippet and nothing more. I’ve played with this snippet, focusing on it and trying to force it to show the rest of its world to me, but until recently I hadn’t gotten much out of it.

On the road this last fall, I had spent the day driving across Minnesota and South Dakota and the sun was getting low in the sky, the clouds thin and streaked just above the horizon. I’d been daydreaming and my mind was free.

Then, all of a sudden, as if I were watching a movie play across the darkening South Dakota sky, I saw the world clear and crisp, full, sequenced, ready to be told—the world of the story I had only the snippet of—blooming in pink, orange, dark blue as the sun set and the my story rose to meet me, finally ready to be told.

Story ideas have come to me before, but this time was special, a unique moment where the story unfolded itself, a comic strip visual, characters fully formed and full of voice, painted and singing across my mind in a moment of complete mental freedom.

These are the moments that make creating my own career path fabulous.

These are the moments where I love the mystery and magic of the storytelling profession.

These are the moments that make it possible to share heart-felt stories with all of you.