Storytelling 101: The Basics

You have decided to enter, either voluntarily or by coercion, the fine art of storytelling.

How do you begin your story? Is it better to use "Once upon a time," or do you want to rely on the old favorite "It was a dark and stormy night" as your introduction?

Who are the characters? What is the plot? What is the theme (if there is one) and what points do you want to make? How is this going to end? Is it a happy, sad, or even tragic story?

Whoa, whoa, whoa! We're going too fast here. Before you can answer (or even ask) any of these questions, you need to establish a framework around which your story will be set.

There are some basic questions you need to ask first, namely: who is the audience; how much preparation time do you have; and what type of story (childhood, make believe, folk tale, or another story from literature) do you want to tell?

So, who is the audience? Is it a group of children? Is it your children? Is it one child? How old - five, ten, or thirty? Is it for family, for friends, or for strangers?

The younger the audience, the shorter the story should be. Now, there's something to be said about teaching little ones to have an attention span. I contend that by telling them stories, instead of sticking them in front of the television, you're already working on their attention span. If you finish and they want more, you can tell a longer story. And if they want more beyond that, then tell an even longer story.

How much preparation time do you get? Is it after dinner and you're sitting in the easy chair and your little niece climbs in your lap and asks, "Uncle, would you tell me a story?" Is it the Rotary Club, bringing you in as next week's guest speaker?

Practice telling the stories, but ... I really encourage you to practice by telling anyone who will listen. Practice telling your kids impromptu stories after dinner or before bedtime. If you're taking the family on a car trip, you have a captive audience. Turn off that CD player and tell the story. The more you tell it, the more natural it will become.

We were camping recently with a group of families, and after dinner as we were sitting around the campfire, one of my kids said, "Tell us a story, Daddy." Everybody else chimed in too, prodding me to entertain.

I stood up, having no idea what I was going to say, and I jumped in and created a scary story on the fly. As I was going along, I had no idea how it was going to end, but I used my voice to create suspense, and eventually I came up with a nice surprise ending. I was able to do this because I've been making up stories for years and telling them to my kids. You can do it too! It just takes a little practice.

What type of story do you tell (or to be more precise, where do you get your story)?

There are storytellers who believe that the easiest place to start is with an established folk tale, one that you've heard before, like Three Little Pigs or the Tortoise and the Hare. Those are wonderful stories and they have been told through the ages. But unless you can tell the story in a particularly effective way - if you are truly a gifted storyteller - perhaps it is best to leave those alone for now.

There are stories from great literature - not folk tales, but well written stories with a point. Scenes that come to mind include the scene in Tom Sawyer where Tom has been tasked with whitewashing the fence comes to mind; or the scene in Edgar Allen Poe's "How to Write a Blackwood Article," where Psyche Zenobia has stuck her head out of a hole in the clock on the big clock tower, and the minute hand has come down on her neck, pinning her there, and she sees and describes her eyes popping out. Those are memorable scenes that can be effective in stories.

I contend, though, that the easiest and most natural place to start is with what you know - stories about yourself.

When my children were little, I would frequently get besieged with requests for stories. "Tell us a story, Daddy." At first I almost feared getting a request like that, because I thought only two or three tales from my past were worth telling my kids. I discovered along the way, though, that the more I told stories from the past, the more I remembered other stories, and it started this seemingly endless cascade of story upon story.

Where do you come up with stories? Sit down and think about funny things that have happened in your life. Jot them down, at least by title. If you have time, it would be wonderful to write the story out. This is a great way to help sort out thoughts and the order of events and what points you may want to bring out when telling the story.

I sat down recently and wrote a few of my childhood stories, and suddenly I had sixty stories on paper and plenty more stories in the back of my mind that have not yet been written down.

And because these stories happened to me, I can retell them pretty easily. It's okay if I don't remember all the details precisely; with personal stories I still feel I have the freedom to embellish where needed.

If you want a funny story, think about the blunders you've made. I've been in more comical situations than I can count, and I'm probably as normal as the next guy.

If you want a more serious story, think about those poignant moments in your life. When have you felt loved; when have you felt hurt; when have you felt lonely; when have you felt victorious; when have you lost the big game; when have you felt regret? Those are moments that are rich fodder for a story.
As an adult, you can take the same story and shape it one way for a child and shape it another way for an audience full of adults. The key is to think about your audience and tailor the story in that mindset.

After you've mastered telling the childhood stories, you're more than ready to move on to folk tales, other tales from literature, or stories that you've just created on your own.

There are some basic storytelling rules that I think are important.
If you are going to make fun of anybody, make fun of yourself. If you're laughing at you, other people will laugh with you. If you make fun of someone else, the audience may be uncomfortable laughing with you.

Be true to yourself. You don't need to stoop to jokes that some would laugh at but that others might be offended by; you can be funny without resorting to bathroom humor; you don't need to use swear words or talk about body parts or do anything of that nature.

Never say anything in a particular audience that would be derogatory or offensive to someone in another audience. If you stick to that, then you won't have to worry about accidentally slipping and saying something that does offend that one person who you weren't expecting to attend.

Be interested in the story you're telling. Have fun with it. Act out the character parts. Change your voice - I mean really change it. Change pitch, change accents, and change dialect. Again, if you're having fun with the story, the audience is more likely to enjoy it.

Identify a few stories that will be your "back pocket" stories, stories that you can tell in impromptu situations where you're asked to tell a story; what stories are funny? What stories are sad?

There are no perfect storytellers out there. Everyone slips. But if you are enjoying telling the story, and you have the audience enjoying it with you, they will be quite forgiving of anything you forget or mess up. In fact, that can add to the humor at times.

Enjoy storytelling! If you do, your audience certainly will.