The Creative Process: If Only It Was Easier

These last couple of months have been work heavy ones.

This is always a double-edged sword for me. On one hand, I am working. Hooray!

On the other hand, if lots of things are happening, I have trouble clearing my head space for different pursuits.

The blog had to wait!

The work is coming in fast, hard, and interesting.

As artists, we are forever taking work that we don't have any idea what to do with but we accept the challenge. We tend to have really good imaginations, but even we cannot imagine all things under the sun.


We know our stuff, and we can do our stuff, but there are so many things we can't possibly know...being human and all.

So, when the world cracks open and people start calling and asking us to do things we never even thought to do with storytelling...it can be fascinating and intimidating. I have found that saying yes is always a good place to start, and then you begin to investigate and research and study. It helps to show you the world in a different way.

Most people who know my work know that I do not do personal narrative very much.
I'm not usually a fan of it either. Personal narrative is hard to craft and even harder to deliver well.

I am not a fan of watching someone bleed all over an audience and wallow in their own misery. I don't find that entertaining.

I am not a fan of watching someone angst all over an audience. I don't find that entertaining.

I am not a fan of watching someone unburden themselves of some horrific, painful, mind-blowingly personal thing on stage. I don't find that entertaining.

If you are taking more energy from an audience than you are giving them...then therapy might be a better choice for that story. We are paying you to be there, after all, not the other way around.

The audience really should walk away with something.






Now, I understand that these are my thoughts and not a rule of thumb. Especially since there is no rule of thumb, is there?

Who decides the standards for this art form?
Who decides what goes and what doesn't?
Who decides what storytelling is?
Who decides what constitutes a good story?
Who?

Well, the audience, I suppose.
If they like a thing, that thing gets duplicated.
Clearly, we are in a place where audiences - grown ones anyway - love personal narratives.

Quite some time ago I started working with some personal narrative. I have coached them. I have written them. I have performed them. I try very hard when I create them to make sure they hold to a very specific structure and pattern.

When I coach them, I encourage people to think about them with the same focus as a piece of folkloric narrative.

Lately, I've been asked to start teaching workshops where I help people tell their own stories.

So, here I am realizing a truth about myself.

I often dislike personal narrative because it is 'Me" centered instead of 'We' centered.

I often dislike personal narrative because I like my entertainment time to be way larger than life. If I could see it on a street corner, or down the block or in my kitchen, why go sit somewhere to have someone tell me about it?

I have this same relationship with movies. If I go to a film, I want to see wild, imaginative things that can't happen normally.

Give me a Neverending Story, a Princess Bride, a Lord of the Rings, an Into the Spider Verse...Star Wars, The Dark Crystal...

The Let's Pretend Record Series. My favorite! Miss them? Here is how you can get copies!

In the last few years, I've been going to workshops and learning how people are teaching others to find personal narrative.

What I really want is to sit through workshops where people CRAFT personal narrative.

I also would like to enjoy them more. I do like the really good ones I've seen. I started making a list of those, and what makes them entertaining. Taking classes from others has helped.

At which point it occurred to me that I should try to figure out how to break down the process and possibly teach it. That's been sitting in my head for about four years.

This morning, I got up with a full-blown idea. I wrote it all out.

Might even work.

I guess I'll have to start applying to teach this workshop so I can see if it has legs, actually helps people craft personal narrative, and figure out how to shape and improve it as participants teach me what works and what doesn't.

This workshop might be coming to a storytelling conference near you sometime in the next few years.


Man, the creative process is crazy.

Sometimes you have a thought and it blooms into amazing things that you can grab and go with almost at once.





Sometimes it is both grueling and slow with no end in sight. Four years of thinking, making notes, and cogitating produced nothing. Then, after hitting some unknown critical mass...inspiration!







I wish being an artist was easier.

Happy Creating!

Taming The Wild Personal Narrative

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My Uncle Pete loved cats. he had a million of them. His favorite one had one blue eye. The other eye, whatever color it might have been, had been missing as long as I'd been alive.

"Uncle Pete," we'd ask, "tell us how that cat lost his eye!"

My uncle Pete would roll a cigarette real slow while we sat there waiting. He'd seal it with his tongue, press it hard together and then light it. He'd take a long drag, blow out that bluish smoke and settle back in this old beat up armchair on his front porch.

"Well," he'd say, "that's quite a story."

Then, he'd launch into the tale of how the cat lost its eye.
The story was always interesting.
The story was always exciting.
The story was always unbelievable.
The story was always different.

Thing is, we didn't really care how that cat lost its eye. We just loved listening to Uncle Pete tell stories.

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Personal narratives. They've become the mainstay of storytelling at festivals and in the commercial storytelling market.

Five minutes of some emotionally shocking thing that happened to you. Five minutes of your pain or someone else's pain on stage. Five minutes of your life for consumption.

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Then, there are longer personal narratives about all sorts of things. We hear stuff that we wouldn't ever ask about because it would be rude. We hear about stuff we wouldn't ask about because we don't want to know. We hear about things that we don't care about because it doesn't resonate.


Every now and then we hear a story that speaks to us beyond the here and now. Every now and then we hear a tale that is actually about what it means to be a human going from one moment to another.

I don't write much about personal narrative, but I just took a workshop with Bill Harley about personal narrative, and they are on my mind.


So, to that end: Here are some tips I give to people about personal narratives.

1 - Is this a "Me" story or a "We" story?

Kathryn Tucker Wyndham talked about the difference between a "me" story and a "we" story. The Me story is all about me and it is focused on me and at the end, I am the only reason it is told. The We story is about all of us. It is the story that focuses us on ourselves and invokes the power of who we are as a people to shine a light on something that is true about our condition. We stories transcend the now. Me stories are gone shortly after we hear them.

Q: What on earth was the point of that story about Uncle Pete? Why should we care?

2 - Don't tell a story that hasn't ended yet. That's therapy. You should be paying us.

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Personal stories are like molten lava spewing from our soul. They need to cool, harden, and patiently wait until we see which trees, flowers, and animals start inhabiting it. Until the story is no longer living, breathing, or burning inside of us as a now concern, we don't know where it is going or what is going to happen to it.

Q: Why are you telling this particular tale about Pete? Did he die of cancer or was he from a bygone era, or possibly he is now in a nursing home or maybe...Is this story actually over or did you see him last week and hear about his cat. If you did, how are you dealing with that?

3 - Make sure you have some idea about what the story is about.

This is hard. We always think we know what our stories are about if they happen to us, but the truth is that in order to understand a story you have to be standing on the outside of it. From the inside, you can't even guess what is going on.

Bill Harley was talking about contextualizing a story and giving it meaning through your lens.

Q: Is this thing with Pete why you love a good story? Did he die of cancer? Does he have memory loss? Was he a brilliant man who nobody thought two shakes of a stick about? Is this story really about that cat? Have you got a one-eyed cat now? Do you rescue animals? What is this story about?


4 - What is your role in this story?

This is something I learned from Bill this morning.

Who are you in the tale? Frame it in terms of mythology. I've discovered that in one of my stories I'm Eris. In another, I'm as invisible as the air. What is your role in the tale?

Q: Who are you in Uncle Pete's story? A conduit? Do you have some connection to that cat? Do you save, condemn, lead, flee, fight for, or otherwise have some kind of mythic role in this tale?

5 - Be a responsible tour guide.

Personal narratives can get tricky, messy, emotionally complicated, and downright soul cutting. Don't leave your audience bleeding, in distress, or worried that you are about to jump off of a building. If you end a piece and the audience thinks they need to take care of you, that is not a story you should be telling.

Q: Where is this Pete story going? Are you going to tell us what happened to him or why the cat has one eye? Does it matter? If we have questions about Pete or this cat when the tale is over, you were not a safe tour guide!


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As for the opening lines of the story above, I would love to answer your questions about Uncle Pete, but since I just made him up to illustrate the way a personal narrative might start, I can't help you.

Feel free to just flesh it out any way you'd like. After all, it isn't actually a personal narrative.

Happy Telling!

Teller In Residence - Thoughts From Day 1

I love Folktales. I have loved them since I was a tot. Whatever else you can expect of me if you see me perform, you can be sure that if at all possible, I will work folktales into everything...my personal narratives included.


As the world of storytelling is more and more defined by the personal narrative, it often gives those of us who tell folktales pause.





(Personal Narrative (PN) is a prose narrative relating personal experience usually told in first person; its content is nontraditional.^[1] Personal refers to a story from your life or your own experiences. Nontraditional refers to literature that does not fit the typical criteria of a narrative.

Cinderella

Is there a market for folktales amongst adults?        


How do adults deal with folktales?


How do people react to them?


Do we really need to hear these stories again?

This week, in Jonesborough, all of the sets I plan to present have folklore in them somewhere. Some, like today, have an introduction that is definitely personal, but the meat of the set is folklore.

The answer is...grown people will listen to folklore.

Adults enjoy it when it is done wholeheartedly and they react to it in some ways like children react to it.

Click here to watch Marilyn Tell The Juniper Tree

When I was out in California, I heard the wonderful Marilyn McPhie throw down some amazing folktales.


Adults are often mortified or shocked or interested in different elements than the children, but they react with the same gusto. I'm always pleased when I get audible gasps from the grown folk.

Storytelling audiences will play with you.



I've done my first turn as an almost straight up folklorist here as a Teller In Residence, and the response was positive.

One woman said to me afterwards, "I don't tend to like folklore, I'm tired of hearing the Cinderella story or whatever, but that was creative and interesting. I liked that!"

Tell what you tell with enthusiasm and genuine love. That is what is required of us as storytellers.




Happy Telling.