Almost everyone grows up with stories. It's hard not to. Even if no one formally reads to you, or if you don't learn to read, there are still urban legends, family stories, schoolyard tales, hearsay about neighbors and more. These are types of story that we tend to discount when we're talking about formal storytelling.
As a fledgling storyteller, I latched on to certain stories that were personal to me; things I'd experienced firsthand that were either traumatic or exciting in some way, and told them again and again. These were the first personal narratives that I was deliberately retelling. I had no idea how important that was at the time, certainly, if I could go back and ask my seven year old self to tell me a story, I have no idea what story I would hear.
I suspect that if asked to tell a story my seven year old self would jump to formal stories instead of personal narrative. Let me explain what I mean:
I was a kid who grew up in a story-telling culture. I had books of stories to read, storytelling recordings where the stories were read out loud, including original stories by modern storytellers as well as stories from various cultures, movie adaptations or soundtracks, and read-along-with-the-recording books. I also had picture books, where I could look at the pictures and make my own stories.
My parents also told stories, both personal stories and family stories, sometimes carefully sanitized for young ears, they also both read to me, regularly. Bedtime stories were a nightly ritual, but we also had stories told on walks, stories about history, stories told over the family albums, stories told to large gatherings where I was present, and my favorite; stories told in late night conversations with relatives or friends, where the stories would come in chains of recollection, with one story triggering the next.
All of these story telling rituals were present in my childhood, and yet, if you had asked me to tell a story I might just as easily have given you a story about a summer camp adventure or a prank I'd pulled or one of the stories learned from a recording. As a child I think I had a very specific mindset about formal stories and informal stories. To my mind, formal stories were ones that were written down or recorded and thus codified, whereas informal stories were ones where the specific details of who, how, where, when and why were known to me, and I could elaborate, or not.
This ability to tell in detail or collapse the story into a smaller form was one of my first initiations into the secrets of how to tell a story to suit your audience.
For child-me the function of formal stories was different than the function of informal stories. Informal stories were an ice-breaker. They were a way to command the attention of a person I wanted to be friends with, or an adult I wanted to impress. Jokes served the same purpose, but in most ways, they were a type of formal story, because they had been learned through memorization.
I think in large part, my ability to tell informal stories came out of my strong sense of play and improvisation. I was the sort of kid who liked to organize friends and put on a show, or create a one-time performance of a song or skit. Frequently I would wind up directing, or even narrating, which allowed me to develop a strong sense of formal storytelling even inside my informal, or improvised activities.
That I was training myself to be a storyteller never really occurred to me. I knew professional storytellers existed, I'd even met a few, but when I thought of 'storytelling' I wasn't thinking of the schoolyard productions I was staging, but of professional performances, on a stage or in a lecture hall, or even under a tree, so long as they were being led by an adult, or an older kid. In other words, performances where you had a strong sense of the performer/audience divide. Even in scenarios where there was call and response, you had a sense of who was in charge, of who knew the story and who was just learning it.
Productions of plays also fell under formal storytelling as far as I was concerned, though my retelling of the play to a friend afterwards would be informal storytelling. You see how this goes. I didn't start really thinking about what I was doing formally until well after I was doing it. It was a long time before I really started to see the intersection of informal and formal storytelling as the point where, through improvisation you insert yourself into the story, whether that's through commentary, heckling, bringing up a point that the storyteller is prompting you for -- possibly in an unexpected way -- or even just interrupting the performance to do something spontaneous.
I distinctly remember being at a pantomime performance when I was quite young, probably under the age of seven, and throwing my floppy cloth hat at the performers, to see what they would do. The panto was in a relatively informal setting and to some degree, the awe of being in the audience had been removed, because it was a forum with natural light, and there was little to no area between the stage and the audience. I was relatively certain of getting my hat back, and I really wanted to see what the performers would do with the found object. And, in fact, upon being thrown the hat the first time, the performers did a little improv which was pleasing, and threw it back. Since I was still young enough not to realize that this had been obnoxious the first time, I did it again. And again, and again, and saw how the novelty of it wore off.
In the context of our topic today, I would say that this was one of my first incursions into redressing formal story telling with an informal aspect. Later, I will probably tell other stories about my childhood interactions with storytelling, but I think this one serves well to illustrate the point I'm making here: Looking at this narrative as an adult, I could conclude several things, perhaps that I was bored by the performance, or that I was, indeed an obnoxious kid, but moreover, I look at that story about myself and realize that what I wanted most of all was to insert myself into the story. I didn't have the nerve to climb up on the stage myself, but I sensed that I could still project my will on what was going on before me, and I did. In some ways, this was the first time I really realized how much power the audience had to change a story when they don't like the way it's being told.
> Tune in next time when I attempt to take a childhood story and review it using reductionist storytelling methods.
For child-me the function of formal stories was different than the function of informal stories. Informal stories were an ice-breaker. They were a way to command the attention of a person I wanted to be friends with, or an adult I wanted to impress. Jokes served the same purpose, but in most ways, they were a type of formal story, because they had been learned through memorization.
I think in large part, my ability to tell informal stories came out of my strong sense of play and improvisation. I was the sort of kid who liked to organize friends and put on a show, or create a one-time performance of a song or skit. Frequently I would wind up directing, or even narrating, which allowed me to develop a strong sense of formal storytelling even inside my informal, or improvised activities.
That I was training myself to be a storyteller never really occurred to me. I knew professional storytellers existed, I'd even met a few, but when I thought of 'storytelling' I wasn't thinking of the schoolyard productions I was staging, but of professional performances, on a stage or in a lecture hall, or even under a tree, so long as they were being led by an adult, or an older kid. In other words, performances where you had a strong sense of the performer/audience divide. Even in scenarios where there was call and response, you had a sense of who was in charge, of who knew the story and who was just learning it.
Productions of plays also fell under formal storytelling as far as I was concerned, though my retelling of the play to a friend afterwards would be informal storytelling. You see how this goes. I didn't start really thinking about what I was doing formally until well after I was doing it. It was a long time before I really started to see the intersection of informal and formal storytelling as the point where, through improvisation you insert yourself into the story, whether that's through commentary, heckling, bringing up a point that the storyteller is prompting you for -- possibly in an unexpected way -- or even just interrupting the performance to do something spontaneous.
I distinctly remember being at a pantomime performance when I was quite young, probably under the age of seven, and throwing my floppy cloth hat at the performers, to see what they would do. The panto was in a relatively informal setting and to some degree, the awe of being in the audience had been removed, because it was a forum with natural light, and there was little to no area between the stage and the audience. I was relatively certain of getting my hat back, and I really wanted to see what the performers would do with the found object. And, in fact, upon being thrown the hat the first time, the performers did a little improv which was pleasing, and threw it back. Since I was still young enough not to realize that this had been obnoxious the first time, I did it again. And again, and again, and saw how the novelty of it wore off.
In the context of our topic today, I would say that this was one of my first incursions into redressing formal story telling with an informal aspect. Later, I will probably tell other stories about my childhood interactions with storytelling, but I think this one serves well to illustrate the point I'm making here: Looking at this narrative as an adult, I could conclude several things, perhaps that I was bored by the performance, or that I was, indeed an obnoxious kid, but moreover, I look at that story about myself and realize that what I wanted most of all was to insert myself into the story. I didn't have the nerve to climb up on the stage myself, but I sensed that I could still project my will on what was going on before me, and I did. In some ways, this was the first time I really realized how much power the audience had to change a story when they don't like the way it's being told.
> Tune in next time when I attempt to take a childhood story and review it using reductionist storytelling methods.
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