The Art of Story-telling

The Art of Story-telling

9/9/96

The teller, the tale, and the told.  Three basic elements of story-telling.  First step: structure--getting a story off the page and into my head.  Use short stories.  4-7 minutes.  Very focused: how do a learn a story in order to tell it.   Not biblical.  Instead, something like a kid's tale.  No books while telling it.  Not word-for-word rote memorization of the words in the book.  Instead, internalize a plot (sequence of events) and characters, as well as the meaning of the story.  Tell what happens in the sequence of events as if I were the narrator. 

Robin Redingson: we use stories to carry, from people to people, our essential experiences.  Jarrison: in the telling we create images in people's minds that do not necesarily come out of their own experiences.  To tell a story good is to do so as if you were there.  In story-telling, words are connected to images. So a place and people have to be imagined.  Story-listeners look for images that come in the telling.  Use 'repeats' to give a pattern, or structure, to a story.  A pattern can be altered to show the progression of the sequence. 

There is a cultural hunger for that which story-telling gives.  A distinct and valued way of communicating.  'Performance': a means of using words expressively that is larger or more evokative than is information.  It is to evoke feeling and images imaginatively.  In story-telling, the way the story-tellers of the story-teller influence him.  There is a performance tradition that forms us, so we know what is real and authentic.  How to say something so it is taken as real.  There is also the broader (outside particular models) artistic tradition which 'says' what was real.  There is also our spiritual traditions--of what is sacred.  Sacred speech may not go along with theatric as well as performance traditions that have influenced the story-telling.  There is a fourth formulative source: the venacular (movies, songs).  The story-teller is not limited by these from his past.  In watching other story-tellers, the story-teller will view some as 'fake'.  This is because of the influence of the story-teller's past story-telling formative sources.  So some styles will resonate as 'real'--that that which is told is real.  What are story-telling asthetics--something that takes the audience out of themselves and into somewhere else?  Pay attention to daydream images as well as dreams as gist for the mill.

9/16/96

Storytelling is going through a revitalization movement wherein a deliberate attempt is being made to enhance society.  Specifically, it is to address the rise of telecommunication technology which has reshaped institutions.  Storytelling is a movement that has reacted to the technological change.  Storytelling is based on the storyteller as an archetype for something lost in the culture.  There is a hunger that is addressed to what storytelling gives.  T.V. doesn't suffice.  An effort to activate the story-telling--the interpersonal element--the connection between the storyteller and the listener.  Key: 'The storyteller knows me, and thus knows my story'.  The movement is a resistence to modern mythology-that of the T.V.   On television, the 'narrator is vague and certainly does not know the listeners' stories. 
The oral-traditional mode resists mediation whether reading, print, or video-tape.  Literary-interpretational maintains that a story is only valid in print.  This school is dominate in the twentieth century.  It presupposes that people know how to read critically.  Also, there is not a corrective in this mode to application to different audiences (in time and/or space).  The oral-traditional mode inherently permits adaptation as the culture changes because the story is created in the telling. 
These two modes have different sets of asthetics.  There is the presence of the author who is separate from the storyteller.  The author had intensions; should the storyteller respect them.  In what form does the language take shape, for instance.  How do the characters feel.  Motive isn't known necessarily, but is known by the action.  The question of motive reflects our act of interpreting.  Asthetically, does the storyteller get in the way?  Traditionally, this is not a problem for storytelling because he values becoming submerged in the story, being in the story's own culture from whence it came.  The oral-traditionalist values getting into the tradition.  So for neither one should the storytelling draw attention to the storyteller himself.
When text is used, a tension between adding embellishments to reach the audience and losing the original story. 
In considering what makes a good story, these asthetic(what makes a story good) matters come to the fore. 
The mode is salient in what makes a story good.
The revitalization of the oral-traditional mode is sociological--the re-emergence of the guild of the storyteller as distinct from storytelling in other tasks such as teaching jobs.  The movement is also coming out of the prestige of the folk traditions within definite cultural boundaries.  Thirdly, the movement is from the political radicalism of the 1960's and of the personal growth movement of the 1970's.  The politics of the sixties is included.  Recognition of multiculturalism.  The analogues for this movement include identity movements.  The values thereof are in the stories.  For instance, preserving the otherness of the other.  Fourth, a ritual impoverishment in culture; the storyteller presumes an urgency for myth and ritual--as against homogeneity and de-mythologization.  So a connection of self to a world of simplified forms.  Simple immediacy in a media-vexed environment.  A conntection between self and community is sought.  Out of this movement is is a storytelling world, as characterized by a network of storytellers who are themselves connected to other worlds such as teaching and ministry.  A network of people, as well as of festivals and gatherings. 

On the reading:
Storytelling as a form has a uniquely close relation between the teller and the audience.  Storytelling conveys values.  How?  The text reflects the view prior to 1975 that future teachers of children would be the learning of storytelling.  The text gives principles of storytelling, giving a systematic approach.  Developing story-memory is a skill that can be learned; the structure of a story can be internalized. 
Preaching is the creation of discourse to which the preacher is the author.  Skills including being a scribe (egegesis) and taking an overtly theological point-of-view.  Not biography or poetry.  A Christian revelation demands a particular way of speaking.  Kind of like persuation and drama and poetry, but a sermon is a sermon.  Same goes for storytelling.  It is not drama or poetry even though stories can be dramatic or poetic.  An oral or literary tradition can be used to re-create storytelling.  We can't skip the literary dimension and go back to the 'pure' oral; rather, use of literary talent should be used.
The text is a response to the collapse of storytelling training.  We can't get back to what it was because there is literary residue in us as well as our stories.  The story makes possible identification and distance.   As in film which has the tension between knowing it as an art-form and being in its reality. 

Small group assignment:  write a description of 1. a person whom I have known or a character, 2. of a setting--a place that I have imagined or been, or 3. of an object that has great meaning for me personally. The language used must be oral.  See: encoding oral language.  It needs to be coherent, having a beginning, middle, and end.

9/19/96

The oral telling gives eye-contact that is lacking in a reading.  The hesitating/trying-to-make the embellishments in the oral-telling cohere in the story and the story itself cohere as it is developing may not be noticed by the listeners.  Ward: the 'um's' are linguistic handles used in the story-maintenance work.   One need not give a linear (in order) oral-telling from the written story. The event-quality of interaction(i.e. creating or development) in oral telling are inhibited by what is on the page.  Important: let the page go.  It is o.k. to pause.  Think of the written story as a residue of a story-telling.  Each story-telling is creating story.  In one telling, it may last four minutes and another last ten.
In trying to remember a story, visual images can be used. Also, writing can be used to awaken the images (as I came to the story) that came to me in hearing the telling or in creating the story myself.  Most important in story telling: to realize what I saw and heard and let someone else see and hear it--access to the experience. 

9/23/96

The written and oral mediums are different.  Consider the rules of writing.  An introduction, body, and conclusion.  A thesis, usually at the beginning, that is developed.  A sentence-structure and the sentences are organized into paragraphs.  A visual component--indenting.  On the kind of language, economy is salient.  Avoiding emotional attachment, being detached and rational.  A refined sense of audience, so the language can be precise.  Writing up and down. 
This way that we've learned to communicate is different than the type of communication rules conducive to orality.   There are actually several cultures, or eras, in the history of the word: oral, manuscript, print, mass-printing, electronic.  In the oral era, phonic, mythic, and neumic devices were used by story-tellers to remember stories.  This way of organizing information can be taught and passed on.  Telling stories was not only entertainment, but to transcend the ordinary social reality.  It transforms the situation.  The shaman has one foot in each world.  
When writing began, symbols came to represent sounds.  The scribe, rather than the storyteller, was then the center of a culture.  It was through a scribe that stories could be retained.  From manuscript times came the printing press, making print more accessable. Venacular language to fit the indigenous audience hearing the book.  Books were read aloud. Folks learned how to read aloud.  Now, we think in silence and read silently. 
The sound becomes less important in literature.  Electronics has exploded these categories.  No longer do folks read silently; there is the radio or T.V. on.  Also, books on tape.  Secondary orality.  Increasing emphasis on sound and image.  Music television, for instance.  Story-tellers on video-tape.  It makes it difficult to locate the text.  A phenomenon of transmediazation.  How do we transmediaize written liturature?  What are the rules in this process.  A grammatical emphasis. 
Writing transcends consciousness. It makes for a context-free autonomous language.  The context is that of the reading rather than of the composing.  Speaking becomes a thing, objectified, as a text, distant from its original context.  And the author is absent.  An authorial creation called the narrator is present instead.  The presence of the author through a narrator.  But this leaves the matter of motives of the story as well as its characters unavailable.  Writing extends memory.  Writing is a re-structuring of memory.  It is the intervention of technology that allows for memory to be extended as well as transformed; it is natural for orality to transform into writing.  The writers extend, restructure and transform memory.
In story-telling, one moves back to how orality is structured.  Oral language has rules.  The point of the technology of orality is to remember.  A sermon is an oral interpretation of print.  Story-telling, as well, can be revived from print.  The presumption of recitation as the necessary rule in translating from the page to the tongue is what keeps people away from this process.  But consider that the word on the page doesn't necessarily serve orality.  A hyphenated word, for instance. 
Livo and Rietz provide a grammer for written liturature to be translated into orality.  Story-tellers are attempting to recover the dynamic orality by use of conventional methods in a written world.  Consider: if I were not in a world with writing, how would I learn a story?  One tool is structure.  Like an oral short-hand; a skeleton.  There a many structures, whereas writing has one grammer in a language.  So, we can get at the skeleton through the language (the flesh) of a story.  We can capture the residue of a story-telling by taping, but this is not the same as the 'enfleshment' which takes place each time a story is told.  The flesh is fluid.  Creativity and imagination is in the telling, putting flesh on a skeleton. 
What does the story-teller do?  Learn the particular structure of a story, rebuilding the story for orality.  Not by memorizing, but by translating the writing into oral language.

Mapping the structure of 'The Two Old Women's Bet'
Introduction-setting: two women talking about their husbands
Problem: which of the husbands is more foolish?
Resolution: the women make a bet to prove whose husband is more foolish.
First Woman's sequence: an accumulative sequence (not repetitive). 
            Code:  setting: house             
                        a. puny
                        b. real sick
                        c. coffin 
            (use whatever words cause the sequence to come up for me)
Second Woman's sequence: accumulative sequence
            Code: setting: spinning
                        a. spinning
                        b. loon
                        c. trying on clothes
Third Sequence:
                        a. funeral (man 1)
                        b. special suite
Reaction:         a. laughter
                        b. argument
Resolution: none.
            (or, the Third sequence is the resolution)
Conclusion: none.
As the story-teller, I can add a conclusion.  In mapping a story, less is more.  Then, come to grips to what the story demands.  The words demand a dialect.  Can I do it in dialect?  Any unfamiliar language needs to be looked up.  Some translating may be necessary, but not so much to ruin the atmosphere.  There is a rhythm, or pace.  How am I going to tell the story in a way that sounds authentic?  How am I going to depict the women's mounting plot (from 'puny' to 'coffin').  A graduating sense.  Witnessing the foolishness can be enjoyed by the story-teller/narrator as well as the audience.  How do I tap into this sense of playfulness?  Lift out the humor in the story.   What gestures are demanded?  The story describes the coat going on.  The story-teller could assume the gestures of the husband or wife.  On the funeral, the story-teller can be the guy peeking out of the coffin or someone from a distance watching him peek out.  Same with the man with the suit.  I don't want to imitate every gesture of every character.  The story-teller needs to figure out how much to suggest and how much to imitate.   A story might be silent on some details of character and locale.  A story-teller can add embellishments.  For instance, if the ending falls flat, the story might allow an alternative ending.   The story-teller can create a frame for the story.  The point is to consider what the story allows and what its constraints are.  A story in written form may be a distillation of what it was, orally.  To 'flesh it out' is where the art is.  Try to let the natural pattern of a story come out, as the story-teller sees it.  Mapping is done as a tool in the remembering of a story. 

On slowing-down in the telling of a story, several tools can be used.  Concentration of the images depicted in the telling, embellishments to help the audience see the images, and getting up and walking around--walking slowly.  Also, consider the moment before you speak (e.g. establishing eye-contact before beginning a story as well as to end a story.

9/30/96

A symbol that is archetypal(a certain emotion/mood connected to a particular image) can give a certain tone/mood to a story; locating the symbol in a space and referring back to it (looking 'there' again) can help sustain the particular tone.
On language, be careful about using contemporary jargin or ideology into the story unless it is germaine to the story itself.  Don't impose on the story that of my culture if the story is not of that culture.  On character-language: it ranges for a narrator from interpretation to impersonation.
If a character or characters talk in the first-person, it is drama.  Story can contain drama, and containing it must be by a known or unknown narrator.
Language and voice can evoke image.
Story-telling is a form of communication that has three transactions involving the tale, audience, and teller.   Preparation pertains to the relationship between the teller and the tale.  Transparency and opacity, respectively.
Performance does not mean something that is necessarily theatrical or fake (i.e. grandstanding or play-acting).  Performance: form coming through; to allow the form to come through.  If text is an arrested utterance, then it has a potential oral life.    Unlike an actor, a story-teller does not draw attention to himself.  So, a performance-text, emphasizing the creation aspect of, is that which is emphasized in preparing a story-telling.  A performance-text contains the teller.  It is a creative event--an 'other than'. A performance-text in preparation mixes together what the text says with the teller(voice, movement).  A story-telling is the re-creation of an experience, including not only that of the narrative, but of the history of it's telling history.  Also, the audience has prior experiences that can be evoked--audiences participate in the story-telling.   The teller, too, discovers who he is as his personal traits are used in his telling.  The story pulls different 'muscles' out of different tellers.  But I don't choose the story as much as it chooses me.  If I have the attitude that I own a story, the story looses its capacity to meet me as the teller.  The teller becomes visible, over that of the story.
The text is as a 'body', or 'act of the imagination' (so it is dynamic), has characteristics: structure (how is the story organized?  Genre has an effect).  Second, language--a distinctive way of speaking ('speaking presence').  Third, there is the body of the teller.  This body is brought to the body of the text; the body of the text 'pulls on' the teller into it's reality.  Also, the teller 'pulls on' the text, respecting and interrogating it.  How much license does the story give me to find possibilities?  How far can I go in giving what the text demands.  These pulls are tensive.  This is part of the aliveness of story-telling.  Intentionality is also tensive; the teller and text have intentions.  So, the idea is to get some 'matching' where the teller can't be distinct from what is being told.  Naturalness.  Also, there is something in the teller that is not of the text; the teller should not get lost in the role. The teller makes selections from the text and withholds stuff about me. The audience experiences only the matching.  Not everything about the story as well as the teller is going to be shown to the audience.  For instance, the teller withholds what the story means to him; he lets the story be the story.  And the story has a life beyond a particular telling.  The matching, or naturalness, is a reality of communion--sharing the experiecial reality of the story-telling.  The audience wants to participate in this. 
If a teller attaches his hearing of a story with the teller who was heard by the present teller, the story-text can be referred to (if distance is sought), or that teller can be allowed to resonate in the present teller.
On character-voicing, the teller could do the character out of what is possible, probable, or a distortion of what the character in the story is.  On what is probable, look for the author's attitude about the events described.  This attitude has a lot to do with what is probable.  The author's attitude may show a distorted view of a particular character.  The teller/narrator is constrained by this, or the story is a different story.  If too much of the teller's interpretation occurs contrary to the author's attutude in the text, attention in the telling will be overly on the teller.
On paralinguistic devices, what hints does a text of a story give?  Movements of characters.  Where does the narrator stand in relation to the action.  'Little Jon ran up the hill' shows a distance.  The narrator can also give a sense of the scene by embodying (actually running in place and heavy breathing) the character, even if said in the third-person.  The character's internal state being embodied by the narrator decreases distance too.  Shapes described in the text impact how something or something is vocalized and suggested(or the object itself can be used). Images in the text can be used to suggest possible gestures.  The use of voice.  So, characters, shapes, objects and images of the text can suggest paralinguistic devices.
The world of the story is important as well.  What is possible in the world of the story?  A world where there are kings.  Or, a world in which people can fly but can't swim.  There are things possible in such a story-telling's reality, but there are also things that are not possible.  The reality of a particular world has its own rules which a teller must respect in order to tell the story of that world.  The teller can wear clothes that suggest a world. 
The teller can emphasize vocally a sentence, making certain words salient by accenting it in loudness and in pitch as well as in where the pauses are.  These choices show an attitude and an image of a character. 

9/21/96

There are ways to ritualize the opening and closing of a story.  "Once upon a time...", for instance.  Or I can make up my own. 
Personal story: story created by oneself; can come out of one's own experiences, but need not.  So, not that it is necessarily about me; rather, that I am the creative agency.  A process by which an antidotal or image  memory becomes a story.  From conversational to story-telling.  Give it some fulness; make it an artistic creation, not into something of artifice ('fake acting').  Interrogate that image or memory with questions.  What is it that is in the memory that I want to communicate and what is essential in it?  Self-commentary may heighten some of the details.  How can the experience be enlarged, having dimensions, so to be larger than a private moment.  Recall where and when (circumstances and context) the image or memory was. What was the library like?  What was it like to be there then?   Look at pictures.  What is the experience of looking at them like?  What mood, for instance, does a picture evoke?  Go deeper into the event, on the level of myth; namely, how can the image or memory be seen as a more universal engagement?  Suspend reason and logic and use imagination.  Ask how things came to be that have just been assumed?  In story, there is a truth to it: an essence.  Details can be fiction or non-fiction.  Think up a title.  Thinking of one while constructing a story can actually help in putting together the fragments of memory. 
This is of the conceptualization of the story. Place, time, persons, experiences, moods.  Plot comes later.  Considering how to tell it follows.

10/28/96

Biblical Story-telling:
Two tensions: oral traditional and oral interpretational.  If the texts had an oral-life, how can it be recovered from the written sources one has access to?   Why is the dramatic form in itself so distant from what it was about?  Internal transformative experiential of the stories.  Are these tasks possible?  Ask: what makes story-telling?  Is there such a thing as biblical story-telling? 
In the oral interpretational mode, see the biblical story as text.  The printing press. Translations.  Authoritative in this textual mode.  The Biblical Scholars Network sought a solution.  Take a story in the Bible as a complete story.  Tell, recite, tell, recite...  Then, recite it back and forth with another learner.  Only then can the paper be looked at--as a tool.  This method of learning stories is normative.  Consider connections between oneself and a character.  Have I ever been in a position of asking for mercy, for instance.  Details are not embellished; the telling is text-based.  Interprative work is in the nuances.  For instance, open up the levels of meaning in the text. Look up what the names mean, for instance. Use emphasis to do show this meaning.  In general, short sentences receive emphasis and pause. To get the tonal and pitch qualities of the character-speech, one needs to know the story well.  But are these oral nuances lost?  If so, consider how much laditude the story-teller will have.  So, sound and emphasis of the words themselves are skills that are lost in silent reading but are closer to how stories were learnt when the biblical stories were formed.  Relating my experience to different places at the text (not having experienced everything in a given story)--every biblical story has suffering and resurrection, allows the story-teller to share the narrator's commitment and am transformed.  The interpretation is done close to the text and its motifs such as God in Jesus Christ.  Non-narrative material, such as letters, can be put within embellishments which put the letter in context. 
From this 'pure' method (dont mess with the story), one could add embellishments which bring the story into terms of today's idioms and culture.   At this point, the text is an outline, wherein there is a discernable plot.  This is the oral traditional mode of story-formation.  Consider that the biblical stories are distillations of what Jesus or his followers probably said or got from other sources.  Putting these stories in print 'fixes' them.  In the oral traditional mode, consider the 'fixed' aspect as the story's structure/plot, characters and theme.  From this freedom of embellishment is possible.  Consider whether there might be characters in the stories who don't talk or are described in it but could be there?  What would have come before and after the events described in the text?  On language, how much of contemporary idioms can I use.  Difficult to learn how to retell stories in the oral traditional mode.  How to bring the stories to life in the telling.
Consider too the advent of telecommunications.  What is a text in electronic media?   Marshall Macluen: a secondary orality mode.  Simultaniaty--of image and sound.  Audio-visual language in the electronic media.  Translate biblical stories into this language.  The world is moving away from the text, so written stories need to be translated to the modes of communication salient in modern culture.  A lot was lost when the biblical stories were set down in print.  So, limitations on how the stories are accessable.  How to translate the stories?  Learn telling.  Apply this to the electronic media. 
Any story is accumulative.  The story written form has an authoritative life.  The story preached has a preached life.  The story told has an oral tradition life.

For next week, learn the story in Mk (ch. 7) of the woman with three kids.  Type it out and memorize it. 
This is not to dramatize the story into a play; rather, it is to create a new form of communication: oral narrative (story-telling).  

11/4/96
Biblical Story-telling:
Boomershine claims that there is an element of resistence in a paradigm shift.  There is also a capitulation(the new paradigm itself and its artifices are salient to the extent that continuity with that of the prior paradigm is lost)--that the medium of communication of the new paradigm is of neutral effect on the content communicated.  A given story on television is different than a story told in a classroom.  New genres, such as storytelling, borrow from various forms, thus is a mixed medium.  So too with the electronic media.  Each innovation calls for breaking the rules and norms of the prior paradigm.  Media transformation profoundly affects the content as well as the receivers.  For instance, television has created the dominant myths of our time. We live by these myths.  A hermeneutic: distinguishing the myths created by television and those having been created in other mediums.  On a hermeneutic: Boomershine--the Holy Spirit that formed the Bible should be the criterion.  Ward: Amos Wilder claims that the Spirit acts outside of human intension or established media to go into as well as construct new medias.  The hermeneutic: assess whether the christian spirit is in a new myth and in a new medium.  On Wilder: Early Christian Rehtoric: the Language of the Gospel.

11/10/96
Story-telling Program:
Consider the sequence of stories. In arranging stories, consider the pace, flow, and shape defining the story-telling event itself.  Between the stories, transitions such as poems, letters, editorials, journal or diary entries, essays on the themes accrued through the stories, and music can serve to hold the stories together to form the story-telling event.  So, look past the story-form in the story-telling event.
Tandom-telling: two people tell a story.  Choral-reading: several readers. 
Consider: What will I leave the audience with?  Laughter, solitude, or a sense of closure--tag the story-themes together. 
Consider time, place, props, displays, costume, and atmosphere.