(Twelve Skills of the Storyteller, part 1)

The first ability of the storyteller is to imagine

This is the first in a series of articles on twelve fundamental storytelling skills. These skills focus on the act of storytelling itself (rather than on areas like voice production, finding and researching stories, relating to event organizers, marketing yourself, and other ancillary topics which each have their own skill sets).

Musicians practice low-level skills (like playing scales) as well as high-level skills, like playing expressively and feeling the overall shape of a piece of music.

Every day, though, we each speak and even tell stories. As a result, the lower-level, physical skills don’t usually challenge storytellers very much: for example, we have all developed fluent muscular control over the mechanisms of speech.

But the higher level storytelling skills can be challenging, if only because so few of them are ever even acknowledged in our daily lives.

The Skills of Imagining

The first three of the 12 skills relate to imagining. Why?

At the moment of telling a story, the storyteller imagines the story and then describes it to listeners. The first ability of storytelling, therefore, is the storyteller’s ability to imagine – to “re-member” or re-embody the scenes of a story.

Stories can be told well with even rudimentary imagination skills, just as musicians can produce enjoyable music without having achieved virtuosity.

But the most masterful story-imagining requires several skills, each building on the ones before it. What follows are descriptions of the imagination skills of the story virtuoso.

Skill 1: Imagine Vividly

Imagine.

Imagination draws from sights, sounds, gut and muscle feelings, emotions, and more. Imagine in every sensory mode.

Imagine all the emotions felt by each character.

The more vividly you imagine, the more vividly your listeners will imagine.

Skill 2: Let Your Imagination Act on You

Imagine without holding back!

Allow yourself to be changed by what you imagine.

It’s possible to imagine something without letting it touch you. The best storytellers, though, can imagine in such a way that they themselves are energized, moved, and even transformed by what they imagine.

This is imagining without holding back, without trying to tame the images or to separate yourself from them.

This form of imagining is magnetic. Like a thunderstorm, it draws listeners’ attention by its pure intensity and drama.

Skill 3: Thinking in Images

Mathematicians learn to think in numbers. Musicians learn to think in sounds. Storytellers need to be able to think in images.

This includes the ability to transform images in your mind.

Thinking in images includes allowing unexpected images to appear

It also includes the ability to notice images that come to mind in response to complex challenges (such as deciding on an audience’s needs or responses).

If skill #1 is about vividness and skill #2 is about a relationship to images, this skill is about flexibility and openness.

Young children have easy access to images, but society teaches us to close our inborn connection to images. As a result, few of us go beyond a child’s level of “image intelligence.”

The most advanced imaginers, on the other hand, have developed the most fluid imaginations. They can drink in the flow of images or “pause” it to focus on a single image.

They can do “virtual tours” of what they imagine, seeing it from any view point, hearing all the sounds, feeling all the tensions, cautions, and flows of energy from a group of characters.

They can glide from one image to another, fully responsive to the threads that unite two images as well as the subtle or striking contrasts between them.

This skill involves not just seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling what you remember or imagine, but also being in touch with what those images could become. It involves a mastery of image dynamics.

Image masters can also allow helpful images to come to the surface. For example, some tellers, when faced with an audience, find themselves imagining scenes from a story they might not have planned to tell.

For myself, I have learned to welcome such unexpected images and to regard them as helpful responses to the complex input I receive unconsciously from the listeners (such as how they sit, breathe, cough, look around the room, and more). When I trust the images and tell the story whose images came to me unbidden, I usually learn later that it was even more appropriate for the group than what I had planned to tell.

More Skills to Come

In future articles, I’ll describe the nine skills in these four additional categories:

• Oral language
• Relating to your audience
• Flexibility in performance
• Being and showing yourself.

All four categories are important. Yet the skills of imagining remain fundamental. After all, images are the very stuff of story itself!

Many Ways to Connect

For me, being present with my audience first happened with a group of emotionally disturbed students. For over two months, they had resisted everything I tried to teach them.

Then one day I told them a story. Less than a minute into the story, their mouths were wide open and their eyes had a dreamy look. For the first time, I had the feeling we were on the same side.

This first connection with my listeners, then, came through unwittingly putting them into “story trance.” Once I felt them responding in that deep, silent way, I settled into the moment. Over the years since then, starting with a story that evokes that trance response has remained a reliable way for me to “show up.”

On the other hand, some people, like my wife, Pam McGrath, can connect with an audience more easily by bantering with them.

One day Pam stood up in front of a live audience to record on video her wonderful forty-five minute story called “Mary and Me: an Encounter with Mary of Magdela.” She spoke into her mic only to discover that it wasn’t working. She needed the mic for the video recording, not to be heard by her listeners.

So, while the videographer tried to get the mic to work, Pam just kibitzed with the audience, asking them questions and telling little jokes. This went on for ten or fifteen minutes!

By the time her mic was working and Pam could start the story, she and the audience were exquisitely connected. They were breathing together. Pam gave one of the best performances she has ever given.

A Wake-Up Call

One of Jay O’Callahan’s ways to become present and connect to his listeners is to make an evocative sound, such as the sound of wind at the seashore or of a parent whistling to a child to come in for dinner.

Such a sound can help the audience wake up and pay attention to Jay, while also enticing them to go deeper into themselves. The sound not only evokes the setting of Jay’s story, it calls listeners to leave behind analytical thinking and to respond instead with the image-creating parts of their minds.

Jay’s sound-making does even more, though. It also helps Jay connect to his story.

When he whistles as his father did to signal dinner time, Jay evokes the scene of the stories he is about to tell, his childhood neighborhood. The neighborhood, in turn, can evoke the ways he became more centered as a child, such as climbing the Big Tree behind his house. High in the tree, he got a sense of perspective, a feeling of his own competence, and an experience of connection to the natural world.

For Jay, then, a single sound not only engages his audience but also engages him with the world of his story. As a bonus, it reminds him of a youthful experience of becoming present.

What Are Some of Your Ways?

Most successful storytellers have more than one route to “showing up” during a telling. Pam, Jay and I all have found additional techniques for becoming present when trance stories, banter or sounds aren’t appropriate. Such techniques can be very personal, such as getting the audience to sing a particular song or recalling the face of a childhood mentor.

Of course, we can’t guarantee that any of these techniques will always work. Nonetheless, they are more effective than simply ignoring the problem.

Each storyteller needs to discover ways to step away from the unavoidable pre-performance preoccupations with travelling, setting up, assessing the physical space, and all the other concerns that are necessary for preparation but that interfere with performance.

In short, each of us needs ways to remind ourself of the glorious delights of the moment, of the privilege of interacting with a unique set of humans in a unique moment.

What ways have you found, that work for you?

(The above article is excerpted and adapted from the Storytelling Workshop in a Box, Lesson #17, How to Be Present.)

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.