Contents

1) THE “STORYTELLER” LABEL: WINGS OR SHACKLES?

2) MAKING WISDOM PRODUCTS – THE EASY WAY. INTRO DISCOUNT

• Read about this course on how to hold and record your own telephone seminars

1) THE “STORYTELLER” LABEL: WINGS OR SHACKLES?

Do you remember discovering storytelling?

One day in 1976, I asked a school music coordinator to hire me as a folksinger for school assemblies. He said, “Sorry, Doug. The music schedule is full. But our Literary Resources office is desperate for storytellers – and you tell stories when you sing. Call them!”

How did you discover storytelling?

Up until that moment, I had considered storytelling only as a small part of folk music. So I was astonished that “storytelling” made me eligible for a different category of work.

Now that I had discovered “storytelling,” though, I could find books about it. I could even join an organization and get a newsletter about it. I had done much more than discover an activity called “storytelling”; I had begun to take on a new identity called “storyteller.”

“You Mean, Storytelling Is a ‘Thing’?”

Many storytellers have similar experiences.

Joel ben Izzy

Think of Joel ben Izzy, who tells us that, as a child, he learned to cheer up his mother during her bouts of sadness. A smile or a laugh from her was the compelling reward for his verbal antics, which inevitably included telling jokes and humorous stories. Much later, he was thrilled to discover that these early skills qualified him to become a “storyteller.” (See Joel’s wonderful book, “The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness.”)

Jay O'Callahan

Or think of Jay O’Callahan, who improvised stories to entertain his younger brother and sister during car rides and moments of waiting. Later, his own children demanded story after story at bedtime. When a friend (who was also an educator) suggested that Jay take his storytelling seriously, Jay was astounded. Make a living from storytelling?

The “Storyteller” Label As Magic Wings

When we adopt the label “storyteller,” we gain entry into a world of storytelling performances, festivals, workshops, conferences and even organizations.

We become inspired by other storytellers. We may feel, perhaps for the first time, that we have “come home.” We get a chance to further our skills, to gain wisdom about the powers of storytelling, to develop our unique ways of exercising those powers.

Adopting the label “storyteller” can be liberating. It can help us fly over barriers to our creativity and passions – in short, to discover an aspect of our true selves.

“Graduating” From Storytelling?

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Reb Zalman)

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was raised as an orthodox Hasidic Jew in Eastern Europe. He completed his studies in New York with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Yet Reb Zalman (as he is lovingly called) went on to participate in spiritual movements from Sufism to the Lama Foundation and the Nairopa Institute. He founded the Jewish Renewal movement as well as the Spiritual Eldering movement.

I once heard someone ask Reb Zalman if he repudiates his orthodox background. Reb Zalman said, as I recall, “I graduated from Hasidism, just the way you graduate from a school. You don’t have to repudiate it, but you have to build on it, go beyond it.”

Once we have found our “place” as storytellers, though, it can be tempting to never graduate. Whether from feelings of loyalty, a fear of being without enough support, or just from attachment to the “outsider” status that being a storyteller can grant us, we don’t always recognize that our once exhilarating storytelling eyrie has turned into a cave to retreat to.

Not everyone needs to “graduate” from storytelling – or from Hasidism, for that matter. But once it’s time for us to leave the cave and explore more of the mountain, staying in the alma mater can be destructive.

The “Storyteller” Label As Iron Shackles

Think of it like this: in your years of successful storytelling, you have learned a unique wisdom. You have developed your own ways of engaging, persuading, moving, or transforming people.

In that way, “storytelling” has been your laboratory, your proving grounds. You have developed wisdom in this relatively protected environment – wisdom that is needed elsewhere in society.

Hanging on to the storytelling label too long is stultifying, like trying to walk with shackles around your ankles. But the real tragedy is that, by not sharing what you know in other contexts, you are depriving others of what they need – and yourself of knowing you are needed.

In this case, the storytelling label, once so liberating in our lives, becomes a chain holding us in place. It can encourage us to discontinue the evolution that led us to storytelling in the first place.

Seeking New Labels

Jay O’Callahan, after years of performing and creating stories – first for children, then for adults – discovered a new market for his now expanded skills: organizations wanting their complex history to be represented in a story.

NASA, for example, knew that even a brief history of its thousands of projects over 50 years would take volumes to describe. So they commissioned Jay to boil it all down into a performance that would, in just 75 minutes, convey the spirit of this epic endeavor. http://www.storydynamics.com/forged

Joel ben Izzy, on the other hand, discovered that his ways of seeing stories “at a slant” could be vitally important to Silicon Valley executives, who constantly need to “think out of the box” and then convey their plans as effective narratives of the future. http://wakingstar.com

Storytelling is a category of work, but it is fundamentally a tool for communicating. To be sure, it sometimes makes sense to base your identity on your tools. If people say, “He’s a great welder,” you’ll get more jobs welding. That’s the helpful side of the label.

But at other times, it’s absurd not to label yourself according to what you create with your tools. Think of Alexander Calder, the innovative sculptor of metal mobiles. He welded, but who would describe him as “Alexander Calder, the welder”?

Instead, Calder used the tool of welding to create sculptures, just as O’Callahan and ben Izzy use the tool of storytelling to create better-understood institutions and more effective executives.

What About You?

In a future article, I’ll talk about ways to re-purpose your storytelling wisdom under other categories.

For now, though, ask yourself, “Is it time to start describing myself by what I accomplish, rather than only by the way I accomplish it?”

Is it time to become a proud graduate of storytelling?

2) MAKING WISDOM PRODUCTS – THE EASY WAY. INTRO DISCOUNT

Are you a professional storyteller? If so, you may have found yourself, like most of us, struggling to get enough work to earn your living – and struggling at the same time to have a balanced life, with enough time and energy to enjoy yourself.

The easiest way to sell your wisdom...

To get off the “performance treadmill,” you need to create and sell your wisdom, not just sell your services.

The easiest way – by far – to create high-value wisdom products is through telephone seminars.

Telephone seminars let you make a valuable recording easily – and involve potential customers in question-and-answer. The group on the call can create enthusiasm for your wisdom and make those listening to the recording later think, “Hey! I would like that person to help me, too.”

Telephone Seminars Are Easy to Run, But…

There are some simple skills you need to develop, in order to run and record telephone seminars, then turn them into Wisdom Products. For starters, you need to know:

• What topic should you cover in your call? Who do you want to talk to?
• How can you get a cooperative, eager group to attend your call?
• What steps should you follow before, during, and after the call itself?
• How do you record your call directly to an mp3 file?
• How can you edit your recording without having geek-like talents? How do you delete what happened before and after the actual substance of your call?
• What should you do on a trial “shake-down cruise” seminar?
• How can you upload your file to a website?

I’m teaching all the above (and more) in a telephone/web course that will start the week of March 5, 2012.

To get the half-price Super Early-Bird special on this course, please use the links here to read more and then to request a simple application:

http://telephoneseminarcourse.com

But don’t delay. I will accept only 6 into this first-ever course.

• Read about this course on how to hold and record your own telephone seminars

Contents

1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

2) MY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU: A NEW, FREE NEWSLETTER

• Subscribe to the Storytelling Games Newsletter (free)

1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

We face a significant opportunity

In the U.S. public schools, 48 states have now adopted the “Common Core State Standards” for what students should learn.

This is an enormous development for teachers of children in kindergarten through high school.

The near-universal adoption of these standards is so new that teachers are scrambling to adapt their teaching to them. Even some of the largest textbook publishers have not yet provided full sets of materials.

As a result, these standards represent, I believe, a significant opportunity for storytellers.

“Standards? Storytellers Don’t Do Standards!”

For those of us who, like Einstein, cherish imagination above knowledge, trends toward standardized curriculum don’t necessarily sound inviting.

We are reminded of the French school administrator of years past who famously bragged, we are told, that he could look at his watch and know what every student in France was studying at that moment.

Where is there room in such a system, we might say, for individual learning styles? Individual interests? Divergent thinking?

Where is there room for education as an exciting adventure? For the thrill of discovery? For any form of enjoyment at all?

Not As Bad As I Feared…

Once I looked at these standards, though (and talked to the forward-looking educator/storyteller Lynne Burns about them), I saw them in a more hopeful light.

First, the creators of these standards have given some thought to what skills they think high school graduates need, to succeed in college and their careers. Indeed, each grade-level standard refers to a long-term “College and Career Readiness” standard.

This means that, unlike some other systems, the work at each grade level builds in a meaningful way on the work at previous levels – and helps prepare the student for the next levels.

Second, these standards don’t seem to lend themselves to over-reliance on uncomprehending memorization.

The vast majority, in fact, seem to focus on thinking skills. They are dominated by words and phrases like “analyze,” “compare and contrast,” “explain the relationships between…,” etc.

But Wait: There’s Another Problem

If the good news is that these standards seem to challenge students to do more than memorize, that merely highlights an ongoing problem: from the students’ point of view, why would they want to exert the effort? What will motivate them to rise to the challenge?

Imagine a student who is faced with a task like this, for example:

Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details.

I readily imagine the student thinking, “What does that have to do with my life? Why would I care about that?”

The more a curriculum requires mental exertion (learning to analyze requires more effort than simple memorization, for example), the more important it becomes to answer the students’ questions about “Why?”

This is a huge potential problem inherent in all standards-driven education: the student might be treated like a thinking machine, expected to perform tasks that seem unconnected to the student’s universal human motivations, such as:

• What do I want to accomplish? How can I accomplish it?
• Who is on this journey with me? How do we fit into each others’ lives?

In other words, these standards don’t, by themselves, make curriculum meaningful to the student.

Stories and Connection

Who could help humanize such a curriculum?

Needed: connection, meaning, involvement

Such helpers would need to be experts in:

• Connecting to human motivations;
• Putting problems in understandable contexts; and
• Engaging people both intellectually and emotionally.

Sound familiar?

If anyone knows about connecting to human motivations and emotions, it’s storytellers. After all, such meaning-building is the essence of what stories do.

Re-wording E.M. Forster’s famous dictum, I would say:

“’The king died and then the queen died’” is a series of unconnected events. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a story.”

In other words, a story differs from a recital of facts in that a story creates causal connections between the facts. A story is really the most basic way of giving meaning to events, of interpreting people’s motivations and personalities.

Such interpretation is essential both to story and to human life.

Specialists in Meaning

Whenever you need to create personal involvement in an otherwise impersonal context, the premier discipline to call upon is storytelling.

Said another way, the missing element in the Common Core State Standards is EXACTLY what storytellers have, since time beyond memory, always known how to provide.

We specialize in helping people create meaning and become involved.

Like a shovel-store in a gold rush, we have what people need

How Often Does This Happen?

Two factors are therefore converging. First, teachers are desperate for help in this time of change.

Second, storytellers have the exact skills that educators need.

We are like a long-established shovel store that just happens to be near a new gold rush. Suddenly, everybody needs what we offer!

A convergence like that comes once in a long, long while.

So How Do We Help?

I see three principal ways that storytellers can help well-meaning teachers carry out a Core Standards based curriculum, so that students become engaged. We can do, or assist teachers in doing, the following:

1. Perform stories;
2. Help students learn, create, and tell their own stories;
3. Teach storytelling games.

In a future article, I’ll talk about the contributions that each of these methods can make.

In the meantime, read on for a new, free resource for the least familiar of the three: Story Games.

2) MY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU: A NEW, FREE NEWSLETTER

Storytelling is a part of every human culture; so are games.

Storytelling games can help teach subjects, enjoyably

So it’s natural that people in many cultures have created games that involve stories.

For me, a storytelling game is any game that involves:

• Telling a story;
• Telling part of a story; or
• Using a skill that’s used in storytelling.

It turns out that people have created such games, for entertainment purposes, for generations.

Many such games help the beginning storyteller develop a particular storytelling skill. Other games focus on particular kinds of content that are of interest to teachers – and that apply to educational standards.

For example, there are storytelling games that require the use of words or phrases that can have two or more meanings. In such games, the spotlight of attention is easily and entertainingly focused on homonyms and metaphors.

To learn more about storytelling games every month, just subscribe – at no charge – to my new, free Storytelling Games newsletter.

In the newsletter, you’ll get games, variations on games, hints on teaching games, and suggestions of Common Core Standards that particular games help develop.

In time, I’ll have a website devoted to storytelling games. For now, you can subscribe by double-clicking this link:

http://www.storydynamics.com/games.newsletter

Questions or problems? Please use my contact form: http://www.storydynamics.com/contact

This newsletter is a gift from me to the storytelling (and education) communities. Happy Holidays! Enjoy!

• Subscribe to the Storytelling Games Newsletter (free)

Storytelling helps us know what it means to be human...

Storytelling is important, in all times and all places. Storytelling, like all art, helps us know what it’s like to be human, including:

- What we have been in the past;
- What we are like now;
- What we are capable of becoming in the future.

Art does this in myriad ways, from van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers to great novels about imagined worlds. The art of storytelling does this through both informal and formal exchanges, from folktales told around a campfire, to personal experiences shared in a diner, to concert storytelling performances on large stages.

The Experience Factor

Is it any secret that the pace of our society is accellerating? And that the more we work and the more we consume, the less satisfied we are on the deepest levels?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy not having to worry about the basics like food and shelter. I also love the fine things in life. I like my tools, including computers; I am very glad they exist.

Yet I also believe in the wise words of the Jewish compendium of writings known as the Talmud:

“Who is weathly? The one who is happy with his portion.”

In a society based largely on consumption, status, and the profit-motive, artists help shine a light on the quality of human experience.

Art Is Dangerous

Any government dependent on deception or injustice fears art...

Because all honest art helps us know who we are as humans, art is important to societies.

Without accurate knowledge of human experience, human nature and human potential, no society can make intelligent decisions about how to use its resources.

At the same time, any government or system dependent on deception or injustice fears the truth about humanity and our experiences – and therefore fears art.

If you don’t believe this, consider how often a new dictator moves immediately to control art. Consider why Franco’s forces killed the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca even before their full military victory in Spain, or why songwriter Victor Jara was assasinated – and the masters of his recordings burned – soon after a military junta overthrew the elected Chilean president in 1973.

Controlling Art in a Free Society

In our society, we control art not with guns or a Soviet-style bureaucracy, but, in part, with the star system. The star system elevates a few artists to “star” and even “super star” status. Because there is a limited supply of such stars, it’s possible to profit from them by creating a monopoly.

A recording company, for example, can control the supply and distribution of the star musician’s work. And, because the star is now dependent on the company, the company can also partly control the star.

Incidentally, the extravagant promotion of a relatively few artists’ work, in itself, often discourages other artists. (“If you had talent, you’d be rich.”) Still others are kept from seeking their own truth by their desire to “make it big” (that is, by pursuing fame rather than the truth of their own vision).

This is not to disparage the work of famous artists. Often they are magnificent writers, singers, painters, etc. Yet there are many non-star artists whose work is also worthy of being more widely shared, but is filtered out by a system that requires mass popularity for mass profits.

Such filtering affects all artists, but some artforms, including in-person storytelling, are particularly ill-suited to mass consumption. The for-profit organizations that dominate our society are indifferent to such artforms. As a result, performance storytelling operates only along the fringes of society, where resources are in shorter supply.

Sadly, all this works to encourage artists to compete against each other, fighting over the crumbs available to us as non-stars. Our natural gratitude for each other (as companions on the path of art) can be replaced by carping and jealousy. This further distracts us from our true possibilities—and our importance to each other and to society.

Signs of Hope

A new appreciation for people telling their own stories...

In spite of the difficulties currently faced by artists in general and storytellers in particular, I am excited by hopeful developments in recent years. We see, for example, a new appreciation of people telling their own stories, as evidenced in the U.S. by the rise of The Moth, of story slams, and of organized story-collection projects like StoryCorps.

The internet is another source of hope. To be sure, live, two-way storytelling is not yet taking place in significant amounts on the internet. But the strangle-hold of mass publishers over the availability of art is being weakened. It is increasingly easy to create and post audio recordings, videos, books, photographs and more – and it is increasingly easy for others to access and pay for such art.

Further, artists can now easily connect with each other via the web. We can share our work with each other. We can share our experiences, even when separated by oceans.

We can also share how-to information about our artforms, information that would never have found its way into the more limited pre-internet channels of books, broadcast, and recordings.

Thankful for Being A Storyteller Now

In other words, it’s a good time to be a storyteller. No matter how isolated we are locally, if we have access to an internet connection we have a world community at our fingertips. And we have access to information about our art.

In this case, information is power. It gives us the power to be inspired by each other to create our unique styles, to understand the inner workings of our art, and to share what we have learned widely and easily.

It’s a great time to be a storyteller, not because rivers of money are flowing to us or because we are prominent in society, but because it’s a great time to become the storyteller you are capable of being – and therefore to help nudge society ever closer to what it, too, is capable of becoming.

For all this opportunity, I give thanks – and a promise to re-dedicate my efforts.

Contents

1) THE SKILLS OF SHOWING YOURSELF WHILE YOU TELL

2) SAVE $130: KEEP YOUR STORYTELLING CLOSE AT HAND

• Read about your storytelling file-storage bracelet

1) THE SKILLS OF SHOWING YOURSELF WHILE YOU TELL

It's not always easy to show yourself

(Twelve Skills of the Storyteller, Part 5)
The prior five articles in this series described:

• “Preface”: The dangers of focusing on storytelling skills;
• Part 1: Imagination skills;
• Part 2: Oral language skills.
• Part 3: The skills of relating to your listeners
• Part 4: The skills of emotional authenticity.

This article takes up skills #10 and #11, the two key skills of showing yourself.

You can tell very well without having mastered these next two skills, but they are essential to becoming a great storyteller. In fact, if you have either of these two skills, you may be able to succeed in spite of lacking several of the other ten.

Skill 10: Show Yourself

The first skill is showing yourself. This sounds easy. Yet it can be one of the hardest skills of all.

We all have unique characteristics, a unique flavor. Along the way, our most obvious characteristics are likely to have received negative attention. People may have teased us for our way of laughing, our sense of humor, or our way of phrasing things – in short, for having any identifiable characteristic at all.

As a result, we may have learned to hide our uniqueness. Carried to extremes, this may make us inoffensive but also bland.

The best storytellers can allow themselves to be tasted just as they are, to let their flavor completely emerge – and do not try to disguise it with salt or MSG.

Letting Your Light Shine

I met someone 15 years ago at a concert I gave of Jewish mystical stories for adults. She came to several such concerts over the next months. One day, though, she heard me tell participation stories to school children. She said, “I didn’t know you could be like that!”

I said, “What?”

She said, “You were so playful, so uninhibited!”

I understood that she was right. I was showing a side of myself with the children that I had largely kept hidden from adults. I was doing well with adults, I realized. But until I could figure out how to let my playfulness show, too, this hiding would keep me from being the best storyteller I could be.

“He's always himself. He doesn't try to be funny. He just is.”-- Betty, Will Rogers' wife.

We have all heard storytellers, stand-up comedians, even politicians who, no matter what they’re doing, always seem to be themselves.

Think of Will Rogers, the Oklahoma cowboy, comedian, philosopher, and actor. He had such a strong sense of being Will Rogers – and no one else. His voice, his facial expressions, his attitudes, and his way of expressing himself were unmistakable.

That’s what the best storytellers can do. They have figured out how to let themselves show through, to be transparent. They are not holding anything back. They show exactly who they are.

Skill 11: Find Your Purest Motivation and Stick With It

This skill involves choosing a part of yourself to put forward, while ignoring other parts.

You might say, “But, Doug, you said that we’re not supposed to hide anything!”

Ignoring is different from hiding. Hiding something is putting up a barrier between that part of yourself and the audience. When you do so, you can be sure that your listeners will sense the barrier, sooner or later, and respond negatively.

But “ignoring” doesn’t involve drawing a curtain in front of a part of yourself. Instead, it means to leave that part in shadow while you shine a light on a different part.

It means to put all your vitality into one part of yourself while letting the other parts lie dormant. Those other parts aren’t hidden, but neither are they activated by your energy or your attention.

Choosing a Motivation

We have many motivations for telling. For example, we may love to be the center of attention, to have people love us and applaud us. Or we may be motivated by our self-image as an inspiring teacher, a lively entertainer, or an agent of personal or societal transformation. We may be hungry to see ourselves reflected in our audiences’ eyes as clever, warm, honest, or charming.

Those motives aren’t bad. We don’t necessarily need to purge ourselves of them.

But if these motives come to the fore, we risk betraying our listeners’ trust.

Offer a gift of hope?

Somewhere inside us, we also have a motivation that is purely for the sake of the listener. It may be to offer them a gift of hope, or of seeing their own goodness, or of relieving them of a burden (of busyness, guilt or timidity, for example).

In each situation, our motivation for their sake may be a little different. But that motivation (or that cluster of motivations) is what that belongs at the forefront as we tell.

In other words, your listeners didn’t sign up to give you a good time. Instead, they signed up to get a good time for themselves. It’s just fine for you to enjoy the process, but they expect you to be there for them.

Therefore, you need to find the particular altruistic motivation you have in each telling – whether to instruct, to entertain, to delight, or to warn – and place that motivation in the sunlight. Breathe life into that motivation. Let your heart’s blood flow into it and cause it to pulse.

For the duration of your telling, all your other motivations will wither from lack of attention, from the loss of psychological nourishment. They may well be present, and they may come to the fore later on at home. But for this moment, you put this motivation first. When you do, you become a servant to your listeners. You are there for their sake. All else becomes as nothing.

Only then can you become a slave to their delight, to their thirst for meaning. You have the great opportunity then to place your own desire far behind your listeners’ deep hungers – including their hunger for connecting to you, to each other, to the story, and even to the transcendent realities that stories hint at, everywhere and in every time.

2) SAVE $130: KEEP YOUR STORYTELLING CLOSE AT HAND

To play the video, click the small triangle

The world’s first storytelling bracelet that is a USB drive
—and contains advanced storytelling instruction!

You’ve doubtless seen people wearing “cause” bracelets, like Lance Armstrong’s yellow LIVESTRONG bracelets or pink for breast cancer awareness.

Now there is a storytelling bracelet that is much more than decorative. In fact, it contains the most advanced storytelling course available – all 37 lessons of it.

Through November 16, 2011 you can save $130 on the complete, deluxe version of the Storytelling Workshop in a Box[tm] – pre-installed on a 2GB USB bracelet. There’s even plenty of room for your own storytelling files.

You get all 37 recorded lessons of the acclaimed Storytelling Workshop in a Box, all the exercises, all the transcriptions, $524 worth of coupons, and all the rest. The drive itself, no bigger than a small fashion watch, is built into a bracelet – so you can take it anywhere you like.

Can you imagine a better conversation starter?

In short, now you can Keep Your Storytelling Close At Hand™.

Read more about this bracelet, how to use it, and what it holds:

http://KeepYourStorytellingCloseAtHand.com

“It’s a goldmine on your wrist!” – Jay O’Callahan, holder of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Storytelling Network.

Note: The $130-off intro price ends on Wednesday, November 16, 2011

• Read about your storytelling advanced training, conversation-starter, file-storage bracelet

Contents

1) EMOTIONAL AUTHENTICITY FOR STORYTELLERS

2) FREE CALL ON CREATING WISDOM PRODUCTS

• Register free – and choose your preferred date

1) EMOTIONAL AUTHENTICITY FOR STORYTELLERS

Let emotions flow through you—and make it safe for your listeners to feel.

(Twelve Skills of the Storyteller, Part 4)
The prior four articles in this series described:

• “Preface”: The dangers of focusing on storytelling skills;
• Part 1: Imagination skills;
• Part 2: Oral language skills.
• Part 3: The skills of relating to your listeners.

In this article, we’ll take up the skills of emotional authenticity.

The first of these skills is to imagine and communicate the emotions essential to a story; the second is to make it safe for your listeners to experience those same emotions.

Skill 8: Allow Emotions To Flow Through You

The best tellers imagine all the emotions felt by each character in a story, as well as the likely reactions of their listeners. Emotions, after all, are a significant part of human experience.

But here’s the rub: you’re a human, too. You have lots of emotions inside you. Some of these emotions are fully processed and easily available to you, but some aren’t.

Telling a story that requires only fully processed emotions isn’t hard. It’s like a pleasant review of a well organized photo album. You “open” the feeling, tell about it, then “put it back” where it was. In this case, imagining how your character felt is not too different from imagining the color of your character’s eyes.

Other emotions, though, aren’t just memories; they are more like unfinished tasks. Letting these unprocessed emotions flow through you while you try to guide your listeners isn’t so easy.

Your Emotional Closet

Telling a story that brings up unprocessed emotions is not like paging through a photo album. Instead, it’s like opening the door to a closet crammed with a thousand loose photos.

First of all, you’ve probably learned to avoid anything in that closet, because you know what a big project it would be to get the photos back inside if you were to open the door even a little.

Second, you can’t just go straight to the photo you want; you’ll have to at least paw through the ones on top of it, tear off the ones stuck to it, and look at each photo closely to decide if it’s really the one you want.

Third, some of the photos will have unfinished tasks associated with them, like sending the copies you promised to Aunt Nancy or deciding whether to order more copies of your publicity shots.

In other words, the fully processed photos in an album don’t require much of your attention; you can go straight to them and easily close the album when you’re done. But the photos piled in the closet represent a backlog of demands on your attention.

Telling About a Dog

If your dog died last week, telling a story about Jack’s dog might remind you of your unprocessed grief. It may well bring tears to your eyes, tears that desperately need to be shed.

In this case, you’ll be torn between your need to serve as a guide for your listeners and your need to clean up your own emotional closet.

Please note: the issue here isn’t that you might cry while you tell. If you can clearly indicate that you’re okay while you cry, you may be able to guide your listeners through your tears. Rather, the danger is that the pull of the unprocessed emotion can compromise your ability to fully attend to your job as your listeners’ guide – or that your listeners might perceive your abilities to be compromised.

Closet Cleaning

“Unsorted” feelings need to be processed emotionally. You need to cry the uncried tears, laugh away the unprocessed backlog of humiliation or light fears, face the accumulated anger, etc.

Interestingly, the fully processed emotions also seem to get “albumized” along the way. That is, they get stored mentally in a way that allows you easy access to them – with little mental overhead.

Now you can appreciate what Skill 8 really demands. It demands that you have cleaned out your emotional closets (or at least the ones relevant to a given story).

When you have done so, you can imagine the emotions in a story fully and relaxedly. You won’t need to keep the closet door rigidly shut or else let out the whole mess; you’ll be able to open it exactly as much as makes sense for your audience’s optimal experience.

The Hollow Reed

Here’s another way of describing this skill. Think of yourself as a hollow reed. Images and emotions come in one end of the reed and flow out the other to your listeners. Everything in the story flows easily through you.

The key here is to let the reed be hollow. You want to clean it out before you tell, so that feelings don’t get stuck on obstructions in your reed. You also need to hold the reed gently; if you hold it in a death grip, it will narrow and stop the flow.

In advance of telling, clean out the reed. At the moment of telling, though, remain relaxed and delighted with the emotions flowing easily through it.

Skill 9: Create Emotional Safety

When you have hollowed your reed (or cleaned out your emotional closets), you have made it possible to feel your emotions freely. Congratulations! You are halfway there.

What’s the other half of your job? You need to make it safe for your listeners to feel the story’s emotions, too.

Keep in mind that we humans are designed to respond to unspoken attitudes. That’s a survival skill, allowing us to distinguish between would-be allies and enemies. This means that your listeners respond to your attitudes about your telling, not just to what you say or do.

I have learned over the years that I can say highly controversial things without producing a backlash, as long as I say them relaxedly. But whatever I’m nervous about saying, no matter how innocuous, is likely to be challenged.

Here’s an extreme example. Suppose I said, “The sky is falling,” in a pleasant, relaxed tone. People would likely show mild interest but no concern.

On the other hand, if I make the perfectly uncontroversial statement, “The sky is blue,” but say it with a concerned tone, people may leave their seats immediately to check out whatever danger might be descending on them.

One part of creating emotional safety for your listeners, then, is to wrap your whole performance in a relaxed attitude. The second part is to lead the way emotionally.

Joy and Horror

Bud Welch, master of leading the way emotionally

Back in 2005, a man named Bud Welch gave an unforgetable keynote address at the National Storytelling Conference in Oklahoma City.

Bud’s daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. Knowing that, I almost didn’t attend. I didn’t want to hear about horror and loss. In the end, I went but sat in back in case I decided not to stay.

To my amazement, Bud spent the first half of his time talking about the joys of raising his daughter. He told, with real enjoyment, how his daughter Julie was born premature with a 10% chance of survival, but lived to become Bud’s best friend and constant companion.

He told how, in the seventh grade, Julie met a girl from Mexico who didn’t speak English. Yet the girl quickly became bilingual, inspiring Julie to want to do the same. By the time she entered college, she had mastered four languages and spent a year living in Spain.

Bud, raised on a farm and the owner of his own service station, said that the day he took Julie to college in Wisconsin, “I didn’t have a shirt that would fit me, because my chest was swelled so big with pride.”

Bud told about Julie with such joy and love that I opened myself to him. To this day, I feel that I, too, love his daughter Julie, who I never met.

Julie Marie Welch. September 12, 1971 - April 19, 1995

Julie’s love of reaching out across language boundaries led her to take a job at the federal building in Oklahoma City, assisting immigrants and the disadvantaged. That’s why she was one of the 168 people killed by the bomb set there by Timothy McVeigh.

If Bud had been angry and tense at the beginning of his talk, I would have discounted him. If he had been completely unemotional, I would have remained uninvolved. But he shared his feelings about Julie for nearly 30 minutes, relaxedly and unabashedly. He was clearly experiencing feelings of pleasure.

In other words, he walked through the gates of joy and invited me to follow. Once we were there together, I could go with him through the gates of horror and rage, too.

By leading the way, he made it safe for me to feel things I had been reluctant to feel only an hour before. I have been grateful to him ever since.

Still More Skills to Come

In future articles, I’ll describe three skills in these two additional categories:

• Being and showing yourself.
• Flexibility in performance

All six categories of storytelling skills are important. Yet the skills of emotional authenticity have a privileged place among them. With these two hard-won skills, you will have a key for connecting more deeply with your listeners – and for opening your listeners to a more profound experience of your stories and perhaps of the world.

2) FREE CALL ON CREATING WISDOM PRODUCTS

Free calls on "Creating Wisdom Products" in September

Does this sound familiar?

“There are two seasons to my storytelling life: one is called ‘too busy,’ and the other is called ‘too poor.’”

When work is plentiful, professional storytellers run ourselves into the ground earning what we can. But the busy periods are always followed by times when we don’t have enough work to sustain us.

To make things worse, the cycle of “good months” and “bad months” is superimposed on the economy’s cycles of boom and recession, which always seemed to hit our primary audiences of schools, libraries, synagogues, churches, etc., all at the same time.

That was my reality for over 20 years. But it all began to change when I discovered “wisdom products.”

A Sustainable Income?

Wisdom products, if done right, can free you from the cycle of exhaustion and income short-falls.

They can make money without your leaving home. They can even make you money while you sleep. (Just last night, I checked my email before going to bed – only to learn I had made $681.75 while I was watching a movie with Pam.)

And they can be based on what you already know and love to do.

Free Call in September October

This month, I am offering a free call (on your choice of three dates) that will give you a a method for creating wisdom products.

You will learn ways to turn your unique storytelling skills into an income that will sustain you for the rest of your working life.

Read more and register, free, at:

http://creatingwisdomproducts.com

Your Choice of Three Dates Last Chance for This Call

Register now for your choice of these three dates:

• Choice 1: Wednesday, September 14 4-5:30pm EDT.
• Choice 2: Monday, September 19 9-10:30am EDT
• Choice 3: Thursday, September 29 8-9:30pm EDT

I have rescheduled the final call for:

• Thursday, October 13, 8–9:30pm, EDT

You can view a chart of those times in various timezones around the world at http://creatingwisdomproducts.com

A Gift to You In Hard Times

I know that the people who most need this course are feeling the pinch of a sluggish economy.

Therefore, I have decided to make this call available at no charge.

Learn how Wisdom Products™, even as you age, can make your income easier and more dependable.

• Register free – and choose your preferred date

Contents

1) WHAT KEEPS A STORYTELLER GOING?

2) SUBSCRIBER SPECIAL: NEW COURSE ON LEARNING YOUR GIFTS

• Read more or request an application

1) WHAT KEEPS A STORYTELLER GOING?

In many ways, we performing storytellers don’t live easy lives.

We get up early, pack the car, and drive to our audiences...

We spend years developing our skills and our repertory. We figure out how to find audiences. Most of us spend countless hours on the phone arranging performances and negotiating what we’ll tell.

Then we get up early (or stay up late), pack the car, drive to our audiences (or to an airport), and deal with the sound systems, the noisy auditoriums, the sometimes poorly planned events. And then we repeat the process again and again.

Oh, and did I mention that the pay is often low?

So, why do we do all that? What’s in it for us?

Riding the Racehorse

I remember my first time to perform as a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN.

The audience had been listening to stories for two days straight. Their response was immediate and strong!

On Friday and Saturday, I told in short sets: 12 to 30 minutes at a time.

Then came 1pm on Sunday: my solo hour. My listeners were primed and ready. They had been listening to stories for two days straight.

I began my first story and felt awe. The audience’s response was immediate and strong! As the performance went on, I adjusted happily to their amazing responsiveness. It was like spending an hour horseback riding, in perfect unity with a powerful, sensitive thoroughbred in its prime. Wow!

Last in Line

After my set (and the applause) was over, a line of people formed, waiting to thank me individually for the particular ways in which I had touched them.

After 30 years, I remember one person in that line.

He was the last in line. He was perhaps 30, slight of build, wearing a worn, long-sleeve denim shirt. He looked to me like he came from the rural South.

When nearly everyone else had left the tent, he stood about 5 feet from me, as though he were too shy to come nearer. I took one step closer to him and looked in his eyes. They were wide open and moist.

I waited. At last he said, “Things have been kind of hard.” He sounded choked up.

I nodded and waited again.

He said, “Those were some stories I needed to hear.” He began to cry.

I stepped forward, put my arms around him, and held him gently for a few minutes.

Then he stepped back, locked eyes with me for a second or two, smiled, and turned and left.

The Gift

I never saw him again or learned what he had found in my stories that day.

But I didn’t need to. I had received from him a precious gift, perhaps the most precious a teller can receive.

He let me know that I had given him what he most needed that day, that my stories had touched him in the exact way he had needed to be touched – that, in their mysterious way, the stories had spoken through me a message perhaps unknown to me.

The Reason?

Isn’t that what keeps so many of us at storytelling? Sure, most of us love the applause, the attention, the chance to hold sway. But those things aren’t the deepest motivators.

My deepest motivation became visible that day in Tennessee, in that one man’s face: storytelling gives me a chance to give people something they need. It gives me the feeling of offering just the right thing, of being the right person at the right time.

That feeling doesn’t depend on all my listeners being generous enough to tell me what it was like for them. In fact, the more often I feel it happening, the more I learn to sense it – to know that, even when no one thanks me for it, someone in the crowd has received a unique gift.

That’s what keeps me coming back. That’s what keeps me going as a storyteller.

What about you? I welcome your reasons at http://www.storydynamics.com/current.

2) SUBSCRIBER SPECIAL: NEW COURSE ON LEARNING YOUR GIFTS

Over the years, I learned that I can give people just what they need by performing – but also by other ways.

I discovered the joy of teaching about storytelling, of helping people find the “missing second leg” in their communication, the leg that propels the heart and the imagination, not just the intellect.

I also learned the joy of coaching, of helping other tellers to overcome obstacles they face in their storytelling, helping them move closer to being the unique tellers that only they can become.

Help Others Learn to Help Others?

They I began to think: If meeting people’s unique needs is my prime motivation, and if I can learn multiple ways to meet people’s needs, then could I maybe help other tellers get that same satisfaction, using their unique gifts in new ways, too?

I tried multiple approaches, from “mastermind groups” to four-month, online courses with 20 people.

But last year, I pioneered a new approach: a telephone plus web course with only 6 people. The small number meant that, in the 6 sessions of the course, I could schedule two coaching sessions for EACH participant (one of them for a full hour) as well as two meaty lessons.

Better yet, the group of 6 would gain from hearing each other be coached to make such significant progress. They would become a mini-community of people learning to use their storytelling skills to meet customers’ needs in unique ways.

Course Starting in October

I am offering such a phone/web course again this fall. Its six sessions will begin the first week of October and be over by the Thanksgiving holiday.

Learn to use your gifts in new ways - without leaving home

It may happen, of course, that not every participant gets the coaching they need in the first 6 sessions. If that happens, we’ll schedule additional meetings in January. I promise to give enough coaching (in the class or privately) that each of you in the course will:

1. Discover a group (a market) who is hungry for what you have to offer;
2. Create the title and outline of a digital product that will attract just the people in that group.

(If you want further help in actually creating the digital product from your outline and offering it to members of your new market, additional optional courses will follow in the winter and spring. In fact, with one of the additional courses, I will offer free websites optimized to help you reach your market.)

Save By Just Asking for an Application

To make this $795 course more affordable to you – and to encourage you to sign up early – I’m offering an Early Bird Special discount.

All you need to do to lock in your discount is to request a simple, 5-question application. Just click the large button toward the end of this web page:

http://IrresistibleOfferCourse.com

You may want to read the page, even if you’re not interested in the course at this time. It contains useful information about how to “get off the storytelling treadmill” by adding to your storytelling income.

• Read more or request an application

(Twelve Skills of the Storyteller, Part 3)

The prior three articles in this series described:
“Preface”: The dangers of focusing on storytelling skills;
Part 1: Imagination skills;
Part 2: Oral language skills.

In this article, let’s take up the skills of relating to your listeners.

Skill 6: Respond to Your Listeners

When you tell a story, you begin by imagining your story. Then you use oral language to stimulate your listeners to imagine the story in their own ways.

Your listeners, in turn, respond to you by constructing images in their own minds. But they also respond with oral language: facial expressions, posture, laughter, even how they breathe.

The communication streams in an endless feedback loop

Then you respond to their response. Each moment builds on the ones before.

For example, you might begin, “There was once a girl so small that she could have hidden in a pea pod.”

Perhaps your listeners lean forward. Some of them smile a bit.

Then you respond to their responses. You smile back. Or perhaps you repeat, “Yes, a pea pod.”

Now maybe some of your listeners laugh a little. Or more of them smile.

Buoyed by their positive responses, you continue in the ”groove” you have created together – which, in turn, weaves the spell even more tightly.

Adjusting As You Go

Of course, your listeners don’t always respond the way you want. In this case, you respond by adjusting your telling to produce a different response.

For example, if your group of 5-year-olds begins to snicker at the word “pea” (taking it for its homophone “pee”), you might say, “Yes, she could hide inside a green bean!” If they laugh at her tiny size (instead of at the saying of a forbidden word), then you’ve gotten the response you want – and you’ll likely replace “pea pod” with “green bean” for the rest of the story.

The Loop Called Rapport

The feedback loop of responding to each others’ responses builds a state of synchronization between you and your listeners.

When you respond to your listener's response to your response, you create synch, a sense of rapport

Have you ever seen the tandem storytelling duo Gerry Hart and Leanne Grace (“Hart and Grace”), of Pennsylvania? They tell stories as a team, and they tell well. But what distinguishes them most is the almost magical rapport they display with each other as they tell. Sitting down and facing forward, if one crosses her legs, the other does, too – uconsciously, at nearly the same instant. If one puts the palms of her hands on the sides of her chair seat, so does the other. They are always in synch, both mentally and physically.

In storytelling, as in other communication situations, when synch builds, the feeling of rapport builds, too. When you are in such a state of rapport with your listeners, your influence is magnified.

At this point, a nearly invisible raising of one corner of your mouth, for example, may create a ripple of laughter. But if you break the rapport, you lose the “multiplier” effect of synch, and will need to expend more energy again (perhaps you will need to speak louder or gesture more broadly for a moment) to have as much effect.

Intense rapport with an audience is a highly rewarding experience. It requires you to maintain a sometimes precarious balance between attention on your listeners and attention on your story. A moment of distraction (such as when someone new enters the room or when your mind wanders) can sometimes be enough to break the spell. Then you need to re-create it.

Learn to pay close, delighted attention to your listeners. Learn to respond, and to swim in the currents of the resulting endless feedback loop.

Skill 7: Feel Your Listeners

Some years ago, I asked several professional tellers how they experience their audiences during a successful performance. Some talked about responding to individuals: “Tell to one listener at a time,” one said. “If you can get one person on your side, the others will follow.” Many tellers, however, described a sense of the group as a whole.

One veteran teller said, “It’s as though the audience offers their energy to you so you can mold it for them. Their energy seems to meld together above their heads. My job is to give it a shape without trying to take it away from them.”

When Pam McGrath and I give workshops called “Dancing with the Audience,” we have each participant tell a story to the group while blindfolded. Afterwards, we ask what the teller noticed about the audience. Most tellers describe being more in touch with their listeners than usual. I believe that, denied the convenience of sight, the tellers turn to additional ways of sensing their listeners – ways that great tellers call into play at all times.

The Power and the Burden

When you connect deeply, with all your senses, to your listeners, you form a bond of trust with them. The audience gives you a gift of power over them.

The power is not yours to exploit, however. As soon as you use your power to aggrandize yourself or to manipulate, your listeners begin to withdraw their consent. In a way, you are like a coach driver: you are hired to direct the horses, but the horses don’t belong to you. If you mistreat them or drive recklessly, you lose your job.

Such power comes with responsibility, which can feel frightening as well as exhilarating – perhaps like taking the reins the first time you drive a coach-and-four.

Talking About the Ineffable

All this talk about connection with your audience is necessarily a bit indirect, because the bonding happens primarily at a subconscious level. Generally, connection is experienced consciously only after it is established; it is created through a myriad of adjustments, each too small and rapid to be noticed individually.

Describing a strongly connected storytelling event, we often use words that suggest being highly present in the moment, such as:

• immediacy
• vibrancy
• vividness.

More commonly, though, we turn to metaphorical language to describe the effects of connection with your audience. These effects are difficult to analyze but unmistakeable to experience. To describe these effects, we compare them to:

• physical force:

• powerful
• compelling
• captivating (which derives from “to make captive”)
• moving
• “She had her audience in the palm of her hand.”

• being engulfed or submerged:

• - absorbed
• - engrossed
• - immersed

• the effects of magic:

• conjure
• “The teller cast a spell…”
• enchanted
• spellbound

If you want any of these qualities in your telling, pay attention to how you respond to your listeners. That’s where the magic lies!

(Twelve Skills of the Storyteller, Part 2)

This series describes the skills practiced, consciously or unconsciously, by masterful storytellers.

To be sure, effective stories can be told with just a subset of these skills. But familiarity with the advanced skills can help you advance your abilities and even recognize skills that you have been unaware of having.

In Part 1 I described three Imagination Skills. Now, on to the skills of oral language.

Oral language

Oral language has its own operating principles, strengths, and limitations.

At its most basic, storytelling involves imagining or remembering scenes, then describing them to your listeners.

In in-person storytelling, you describe scenes using oral language (spoken language), which differs from its close relative, written language. Oral language has its own operating principles, strengths, and limitations.

For example, written language relies chiefly on words, which vastly overpower the lesser channels, such as punctuation, typeface variations, etc. Oral language, though, uses many communicative elements in addition to words, such as:

• Tone of voice
• Facial expression
• Gestures
• Body language
• Eye behaviors
• Orientation in space (facing toward or away from listeners)
• and a dozen or so more.

Further, many of the communicative elements of oral language, such as tone of voice, are powerful enough to completely overpower words. Sarcasm, for example, uses tone of voice to give words an opposite meaning. Said sarcastically, “Right!” means “Wrong!”

Skill 4: Master the Elements of Oral Language

There are an infinite number of effective oral language styles, ranging from leaping about the stage and declaiming in Shakespearean tones, to sitting quietly on your hands and shading your words with a subtly raised eyebrow.

Whatever style makes sense for a particular teller and telling, however, the masterful storyteller calls on well-developed expressive abilities in voice, face, eyes, hands, posture and the rest.

The masterful storyteller’s voice easily conveys a wide range of emotion. It creates interesting and appropriate shapes through rhythm, repetition, tempo, volume, pitch, pauses, and more.

The masterful storyteller also uses her or his body well, using postural changes and changes in muscular tension to convey clearly the attitudes of characters and the narrator herself.

The masterful storyteller uses her or his eyes well, alternating naturally among the “big four” eye behaviors:

i) Looking up and to the side while accessing images;
ii) Looking down and to the side while accessing emotions and attitudes;
iii) Looking at imagined objects or people while describing them or pretending to interact with them;
iv) Looking directly at listeners.

Each element of oral language has a wide range of expressive potential. It is possible to master each of them in ways that are unique to you.

Skill 5: Master the Interplay of Oral Language Elements

Not only does oral language use a variety of expressive elements, it also uses elements simultaneously and in succession.

Written language is basically linear: the second word comes inexorably after the first word, and so on. But because oral language broadcasts its communicative power over several channels, it is “multi-linear.” The “word channel” may carry its own programming while the “tone of voice channel” and the “posture channel,” for example, may be reinforcing that programming, negating it, or introducing new nuances.

1st photo: all messages the same.

2nd photo: mixed messages

Notice the two pictures of women giving non-verbal messages. In both photos, a woman holds out her hand in a clear gesture of “Stop! Don’t come closer!” In the first picture, all the other oral language channels support that message. The fingers are tightly together; the eyes are hard, the mouth firm, the chin set, the torso squared.

In the second picture, though, the messages are mixed. The fingers of the hand giving the “stop” gesture are somewhat relaxed and separated; the eyes are soft; the mouth is slightly opened (giving a feeling of uncertainty or apprehension); the torso is straight but without tension. The fingers and thumb on the woman’s other hand touch each other nervously. This person is communicating something like “I will stop you” but also “I am uncertain whether I can” and even “I am afraid.”

Taken together, these photos show how powerfully and succinctly oral language can communicate messages, even when the messages are complex.

The interplay of oral language channels also allows complex transitions. Imagine that you are telling about a critical boss’s response to your presentation, like this:

I knew I had said something stupid. Then my boss came charging over to me. He said, “Is that what I pay you to say?”

Suppose your posture begins as your own. Then, when the boss speaks in your story, you switch to the boss’s posture.

	My Boss Got Mad At Me, version 1
What was said	“I knew I had said something stupid.”	Then my boss came charging over to me	He said, “Is that what I pay you to say?”
Whose words?	Narrator’s	Narrator’s	Boss’s
Whose “body”?	Narrator’s	Narrator’s	Boss’s

Even more is possible in oral language, though. You can go beyond alternating between the narrator and the boss by allowing them to overlap. For example, you could shift to the boss earlier in one of the channels than in the other.

To create this effect, you could begin with your own words and posture (“I knew I had said something stupid.”) But then you could begin shifting into the boss’s posture while you continue with your own words as narrator, “Then my boss came charging over to me.”

In this case, your words remain the words of the narrator. But the posture channel shifts to that of the boss, creating an anticipation of the full-out boss qualities that include the boss’s words, “Is that the way I pay you to talk?”

	My Boss Got Mad At Me, version 2
What was said	“I knew I had said something stupid.”	Then my boss came charging over to me	He said, “Is that what I pay you to say?”
Whose words?	Narrator’s	Narrator’s	Boss’s
Whose “body”?	Narrator’s	Boss’s	Boss’s

Masterful storytellers are expert at conveying such complexity through oral language.

An oral language aficionado?

How do you become so masterful? Begin by paying attention to the oral language of others. Notice it everywhere.

Watch videos with the sound turned off, then again with it on. Notice how people walk, stand and sit in airports and shopping malls.

Become an oral language gourmet. Play with it. Be swept away by it. Be tickled speechless by it. Be awed by it.

Try it out in your buddy sessions and your everyday conversation. Go over the top, beyond the limits – and then adjust back to what works. Conversely, start subtly and see which small changes can give big effects.

The ocean of oral language is enormous, offering endless territory to explore over a lifetime. And it fertilizes the river delta of storytelling with its unending expressive potential.

(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!

Practicing skills might sound harmless. But it has dangers!

Long ago, someone asked me the question, “Musicians practice scales to develop their skills. What can storytellers practice? To get better, what should we work on?”

I will answer this question positively, in a future newsletter. But first: you must be warned!

Danger!

It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? “Put in your hours practicing basic skills, and you’ll be a better storyteller.”

Unfortunately, this apparently worthy quest for skills can easily lead your storytelling astray.

How? Here are four dangers of “skill work” in storytelling:

Danger 1: Disconnecting

If you focus too much on the mechanics, you can become disconnected from the big picture, from the purpose of your storytelling.

I knew a violinist from the New York Philharmonic, Mischa Borodkin. He heard me dutifully practicing scales on my guitar one day and stopped me. “When you are playing scales,” Mischa said, “always play with soul.”

The last thing we want to get better at is disconnecting from our stories, our selves, and our listeners. “Practicing” can help us improve, but only if we are practicing communicating what matters to us.

Rather than practice mindlessly, tell stories often to caring listeners. As you tell, seek immediacy and connection. Seek to lead your listeners on a satisfying, mutually enriching journey.

Danger 2: Running from Your Fears

The urge to develop skills can sometimes be a response to fear. We can be afraid of doing poorly, of being disliked, of being vulnerable, and much more.

All those fears are understandable. But the way to conquer them is to face them and heal them, not to “build your arsenal of skills.”

Rather than learn skills as a way to not feel afraid, try to embrace the exhilaration of telling, of letting go of the bar on the roller-coaster, of joyfulling riding the story wave.

Danger 3: Neglecting Your Strengths

There may be one best way to play a rapid C-major scale on a piano, but there are infinitely many ways to be a great pianist, a great composer, or a great storyteller.

Think of the storytellers you love best. They do not all tell stories the same way! Instead, they have each found ways of telling that build on their unique strengths.

Build new strengths, of course. But don’t neglect the noble search for the strengths you already have. Rather, notice what works now. Experiment with doing it more – more often and more boldly. Find safe places to tell in new ways, then allow your unique qualities to emerge in them.

Danger 4: Not Prioritizing

There are lots of skills I could use in storytelling. I could certainly make use of Odds Bodkin’s harp skills and Kevin Locke’s hoop-dancing skills. I could use some less obvious skills, too: Donald Davis’s ability to move an audience to long, deep laughter and then on to other deep feelings. Connie Regan-Blake’s deep sense of integrity. Penninah Schramm’s flowing river of connection to Jewish tradition. And more.

But such skills can take decades to develop, so I can’t develop them all. Which skills are, in fact, worth my life’s blood?

That’s the question I need to answer. My answer will be mine alone, and it will likely shift over the years.

This is the fourth danger: focussing on a list of skills can divert me from the path of prioritizing, of wrestling with the question, “Exactly which potential strengths of mine will pay off the most for my listeners and me?”

So What Path Should You Take?

The quest for storytelling skills is an honorable one. But rather than being the safe path it might appear to be, it is strewn with the dangers described above.

The only path worthy of your art is one that keeps you connected and brave, that leads you to the hard choices that assist you in discovering your own flavors of greatness.

(Please look for a list of “The Twelve Skills of the Storyteller” in future newsletters.)