Storytelling Starters ~ Reflections on Telling and Writing
Saturday, March 10th, 2012
I’ve been thinking a lot of late about the differences between telling and writing. Specifically I’ve been thinking about them in connection with personal tales. Here are some of my reflections – with a photo of some reflections to suit!
Personal tales
In storytelling, personal tales can play various different parts. They can be told in storytelling workshops where all kinds of ‘exercises’ can be based on them. They can be told in performance, perhaps as a kind of preamble to a bigger fictional tale. In Chinese storytelling traditions, I’ve read, this is a common technique.
But personal tales can also be told for their own sake and, in my recent thoughts about them, I’ve been considering some of the features that make them work in the telling. One way I decided to explore this was by consciously writing down some of the personal tales that I commonly tell either in my work or in personal life. I know this may seem very odd. Why bother to write down tales I normally tell, perhaps in conversation, sometimes in the course of a storytelling session? Well, doing so has made me newly aware of some of the distinguishing qualities of the spoken tale and how these have to change when you’re writing things down. Conversely, it has also made me understand from the opposite perspective what the storyteller has to learn to do when unpicking a written tale to make it work for a telling. (more…)
