Contents

1) FINDING THE SCENES IN A STORY

2) FREE DOWNLOAD: 7 OBSTACLES ORDINARY PEOPLE FACE…

• Download your free, 15-page white paper

1) FINDING THE SCENES IN A STORY

The essence of storytelling is the specific scene, the “power of one-ness”:

At ONE moment,
in ONE place,
ONE character
performed ONE action

Of course, there are parts of stories that are best summarized:

“Over the next couple days, she tried again and again…”

These summaries have the virtue of taking us quickly from one important scene to the next, without bogging us down in the details.

The trick in storytelling is to get the right balance: which parts of your story are important enough to deserve a full scene, and which parts should be summarized as briefly as possible.

In order to get that balance, though, you first need to know what the scenes are!

Needing the Scene

When you are first telling a story, you may need to tell much of it in “full scene” mode – at least until you begin to understand the story’s organizing principle, namely, what is most important about it for you.

At this point, the tendency to summarize can hide the juicy details that will make your story memorable.

Interestingly, the same problem arises during the interviewing process, too. If you are trying to elicit stories from someone else, you may need to probe behind the summaries for the power of scenes.

How to Elicit Scenes – not just summaries

Some interviewees will tell full scenes without any prompting. But most often, interviewees will tend to summarize scenes rather than flesh them out.

For example, I once interviewed a survivor of a drunk-driving incident. Let’s call the woman Kathy (not her real name). My goal was to help Kathy tell her story of how the drunk driver affected her life.

Kathy responded to my initial questions about what happened to her by saying simply, “A drunk driver ran into me. That’s how I ended up in this wheelchair.”

Notice how her answer is narrative in form but lacks specifics about the collision. There is no specific place or time, and the collision itself is summarized by the words “ran into me.”

Prodding for Details

As an elicitor of stories, you may need to prod several times to get the details that will make this scene come alive and be meaningful for listeners.

In Kathy’s case, I asked her, “Say more about what happened.”

She responded, “He rear-ended me. I wasn’t even moving.”

I said, “Wow! Where were you when this happened?”

She said, “I was on the highway by my house. I had just driven 20 miles and was about to turn into the road I lived on then. I was about 3 blocks from home.”

I said, “You were just driving along and he rear-ended you?”

She said, “No, I was sitting at the light. It was dark so I was being very careful. If I had run that red light, I’d still be able to walk.”

The Pay-Off

To get the full details of the scene, I had to ask several more questions. Eventually I learned that she had been sitting in her stopped car, waiting for the light to turn, and that there were two open lanes next to her in which any rational driver could have passed her.

With the full scene revealed, I felt her helplessness and the incident’s unpredictability. To me, those are the qualities that made me remember this scene ever since.

How to elicit scenes

When you hear your interviewee refer to an episode that might fit your goals, encourage him or her to tell the full scene. Don’t worry about the presence of irrelevant details at this point. Instead, focus on getting all the details that might be relevant. Ask questions like “What happened next?”, “What were you doing before that?”, and “Where were you at this point?”

Once you have identified a scene that seems powerful, persist until you feel you can fully imagine it.

There are several other potential obstacles in the process of eliciting powerful stories, and many other useful techniques to aid in the process. But the key issues are identifying powerful scenes and then eliciting the details that make them memorable. If you succeed with those issues, you’ll be well on your way to success.

(The above article is adapted from the white paper, “Seven obstacles that ordinary people face when telling their stories to the world – and how to overcome them.” Read on to learn how to download it free.)

2) FREE DOWNLOAD: 7 OBSTACLES ORDINARY PEOPLE FACE…

After my work with Witness to Innocence (you can read about that at http://www.storydynamics.com/witness) I realized how much I care about helping ordinary people tell their extraordinary experiences to the world.

This process involves three main phases:

1. Eliciting Powerful Stories
2. Shaping And Performing Effective Stories
3. Adapting To Changing Contexts

I have made available a free, 15-page download, “Seven obstacles that ordinary people face when telling their stories to the world – and how to overcome them.”

You can download it free here:

http://helpmypeopletell.com

I look forward to getting to know people who share my interest in this work!

• Download your free, 15-page white paper

When you are faced with the seed of a story, you may not recognize it. This is in part because story seeds can vary so much from each other.

But it’s mostly because, until you’ve made up a lot of successful stories, you probably haven’t had many chances to connect story seeds with the stories they grow into.

The Unrecognized Seed

Think about it: you hear finished, fully-grown stories and you love them. Then one day you get a simple image. Do you think, “Boy, I bet that image could grow into a great story?” Probably not!

Instead, you think, “I’ve seen stories. They don’t look much like this image.” So you ignore the image. You don’t “plant” it.

Given that our society talks so often about “artistic talent” as a rare thing that most people weren’t born with, you may even conclude that your baby image “proves” that you could never create a finished story.

So you abandon the image before it can grow. It’s understandable that you might do that. But it makes no sense!

To help you connect a seed of an image with the tree of a story, let me give you an example of a very simple image, which grew into a story that I perform and have even recorded.

Noticing the Image

Years ago, Jay O’Callahan and I gave a series of workshops together. In them, we helped people notice and respect the images in their stories.

Our last workshop was in Pennsylvania. On the morning of its final day, I said to Jay, “Let’s try out a new exercise. Let’s ask people to just wait for an image to come to them.” It was a risky exercise, because I had never done this myself! Still, it seemed worth trying.

Joining in as a listening partner, I got a ten-minute turn to try the exercise. During that turn, I sat in silence and waited for an image. As I waited, I felt a slight pain in my side. I thought, “I have to ignore this pain. I’m waiting for an image.”

But something about it made me think, “No, this feeling is part of the story. Go with it.”

So I said to my listening partner, a little apologetically, “Well, I’m feeling this kind of pain in my side.” Soon after I said that, the pain got more specific.

I said, “I think there is an old man having this pain.”

A minute or so after I said THAT, I had an image of a particular old man. “I think it’s a rabbi,” I said. “He’s holding his side, and he’s bending over in pain.”

I waited a minute or two. More clarity came; I said, “A sound is causing that pain. Someone is singing, and that sound is going right to that place in his side.”

That was the end of my turn.

Planting the Sprout

A few days later, I had a fifteen-minute turn to be listened to by a partner. I said to my partner, “I want to get more images from the story about the rabbi with the pain in his side.”

Nothing came to me right away. But after a few minutes of waiting silently, I saw the rabbi again. Now I heard someone singing coarsely. Then I realized that the singing was a prayer. After a couple more images came, my turn was over.

The third turn I devoted to this series of images was 40 minutes long. I told my partner the images that I had seen, heard, and felt so far. I tried to let the images come anew, even if they had changed since last time. I just imagined the images, describing and experiencing them.

I did not tell the images in “performance style.” Rather, I sat with my partner, waiting for images to come. When the next image came, I said, “Okay, now he’s doing this. Okay, here’s what I see.”

By the end of this third turn, I understood that the singer was an old man who had been a cantor but couldn’t sing anymore. When he tried to sing, though, the rabbi heard, in the cantor’s unmusical singing, the exquisitely painful and beautiful music of God. That was the bones of the story as I had received it.

In the coming weeks, I repeated the process two or three more times, until the story felt like it was wasn’t changing much anymore. At that point, I felt that I knew what happens in the story.

But How Do I Tell It?

But knowing what happens isn’t the same as knowing where to begin telling it. So I devoted a turn with a listener to “asking” where the story began. I waited for an image.

In a few minutes, I saw the rabbi walking back and forth in front of his congregation, gesticulating and muttering. He wasn’t talking to the congregation; he was talking to God. I could tell that the congregation was waiting for him impatiently.

So now I knew what happened, and also where to begin the telling. At this point I stopped “riding the images” and began my usual process of getting playful about the language and deciding how to tell the story. In time, I gave this story the title, “Hearing the Music.”

(You can read the story online at http://hasidicstories.com/music ; I have also recorded it on the CD, “Can You Hear the Silence?” – http://www.storydynamics.com/cyhs )

The Sprouting Process

This story began with an image so subtle that I nearly ignored it. It was a kinesthetic image, not a visual one.

But when I paid attention to it and described it aloud, the image began to come into focus and to grow. I merely kept describing, to willing listeners, the images that came to me – until it seemed that I had uncovered all the images of the story.

Later, I began the process of deciding in what order and with what language to tell those images. In other words, I decided how to decorate my story. But by then, that first seed – of a pain in my side – had already grown up.

So, the next time an image comes to you – in any sensory mode – you can try to treat it as a potential story. You can water it with your attention, and wait, patiently and attentively, for it to grow.

Even more miraculous, my parents’ new bed was covered with the most luxurious object I had ever come across: a chartreuse, satin comforter. (I never knew the word “chartreuse” until my mother used it to describe the comforter.) I had never touched anything so silky. I had never seen anything that color, or with that kind of sheen. Even the word “comforter” suggested luxury.

Each day, while our parents lingered at the dining room table after supper, my brother and I found ourselves in our parents’ new bedroom, admiringly stroking this smooth, shiny, miraculous comforter.

Going Under Cover

We never knew how we ended up IN our parents’ bed. But every evening, there’d we be: lying on our backs, side by side. We always snuggled down so that we could feel the comforter on the bottom of our chins and see our little feet poking up beneath it.

We started playing little footsie games. His foot would nudge mine and I’d nudge his back. Then we’d giggle.

Once, my foot said “hello” to his foot. His smaller foot said “hello” back. Our feet began having conversations.

Then, one day I told a little story about two feet. One was Big Foot; that was clearly my foot. The other was Little Foot; that was his. The two feet did what my brother and I had done that very day.

After that, I always told stories about Big Foot and Little Foot. If my brother had said something funny or had done something endearing, then that would show up in what Little Foot had done. If we’d had an adventure or been scolded that day, so had Big Foot and Little Foot.

These stories would simply flow out of me. I never thought ahead about them. But our memories of the day were always fresh. And it was simple to reframe them as stories about two feet. The stories felt as rich to our imaginations as the comforter felt to our skin.

Stories in School?

Years later in middle school, I learned about “stories.” Stories were something you wrote. If you spoke them, you had to get every word right. You argued about their meaning.

Suddenly, to tell a story seemed difficult and subject to criticism. By the time I was in high school, I was afraid to even try.

Then in my early 20′s, I took a job as a teacher. One day, when I needed to keep a group of 70 very tough children busy for a few moments, I told a story that I’d heard on a recording. Luckily, the story not only calmed them but it also made us feel closer to each other than we’d ever felt before.

As I told that story to those students, the experience seemed vaguely familiar, even though it had little in common with my experiences in English classes. Many years later, I realized it was like the experiences I’d had laying in bed with my little brother.

Four Ways to Make Storytelling Easy

The “under the comforter” storytelling experience had four important qualities that made it easy and enjoyable. In fact, I’ve discovered that, if you can replicate those conditions, your storytelling will be as easy, enjoyable and successful as mine was at age seven.

First of all, I was talking to a particular person. I wasn’t telling the story of Big Foot and Little Foot with the hopes that it would “be a good story.” At that point, you see, my little brother wasn’t old enough to go to school, but I was. As a result, our daily experiences had diverged. Our times in our parents’ bed became a way of bringing our worlds together a little. So I was motivated to connect, not to make something “good.”

Second, I followed my sense of fun. If he laughed when I said something I hoped he would find amusing – or snuggled up tighter saying “ooah” when I hoped he would – then I felt rewarded. Encouraged, I’d go on to try something else that felt like fun.

Third, it was totally correctable. If something went wrong in the story, I just dropped it and went on to something else. In other words, there was no big penalty for mistakes.

Fourth, the response and the reward were both immediate. I wasn’t telling for some future day when this would be a good story. I told for right now. When it worked, we both enjoyed it fully in the moment.

Claim Your Right To Tell!

Humans have told stories since before we have any history. (After all, our first way of recording history was through stories!) Storytelling is natural to us. It’s a birthright. It’s significant. It’s part of how our brains work. In large measure, we take the world in through stories and process our experiences through making stories out of them.

It’s not hard to tell stories. It just requires us to have the four conditions that I had the good fortune to stumble on during those evenings snuggled under a comforter, next to a precious little brother:

1) Direct communication with your listeners;
2) A playful attitude;
3) Lack of concern for momentary failures; and
4) A focus on the immediate moment.

Changing Our Lives

At the time, my brother and I didn’t think we were doing anything that would affect our futures. To be sure, neither of us remembers a single story that I told.

But those moments changed our lives. How do I know? Well, a couple times a year, my brother, who is now in his 50′s and has two grown children, will sign one of his emails to me, “With love from Little Foot.”