The Impossible Dream

I've never taught before, or been a story coach before.  Turns out I love it.

Trying to figure out how to get introverted 15-year-old boys to get comfortable sharing anecdotes in a story circle every class is, at least in the school I'm working in, a lot like threading a needle with a landscape timber.

Students at the school I'm working at are generally quite troubled.  It's a mix of very bright kids with trauma and other emotional issues with kids who have learning challenges AND trauma or social issues.  Many are on the autism spectrum or have Aspurgers.  Many of them are survivors of school shootings or come from homeless families or multiple foster homes.  Almost all of them in my present class are young men with few social skills and a myriad of emotional challenges.  Especially at 8AM (4AM when you're at the mercy of the circadian rhythm) they tend to be borderline hostile, terse and sullen.  

Yet another challenge faces the teachers: there are protocols protecting these kids with the threat of possible lawsuit if the kid doesn't feel served enough by the staff.  If a kid reports that his needs were not heard or not being met, all hell can ensue for the school.

Here he comes, ear buds in, slumped deeply into his hoodie.  He may or may not take the ear buds out, since it's protocol that he gets to keep them in at all times for emotional purposes.  He returns a friendly "good morning" with a snarl or a grunt.  He gives one-word answers to all questions, except when he shruggs.  When asked to take part in the exercise "I am, I can, I want," by way of sharing in story circle, he shuffles to his feet, head hung so low his voice barely makes it out of his hood, and answers, 

"I am hating this class.  I can not wait to get out of this school.  I want to go home."

Now teach him to tell a story.

And yet...I actually LIKE this...

Helping The Needy

   It's one unfortunate thing that happens at story gatherings: the needy get greedy.

  Some people don't know how to get their needs met in their relationships or with a therapist, so they bring it all to story circles.

  This does not apply to every personal story.  Stories of loss, grief, pain, and all difficult emotions can be riveting and fulfilling for the audience.  

     But perhaps we all could use a refresher on what a story is and what it isn't.

     A story is a series of events leading to a conclusion, according to the dictionary. 

     It's not pointless meandering.  It's not a crazy quilt of facts or anecdotes.  That kind of self-service brings the audience to the excruciating edge of patience and physical tolerance.  One method of torture is to keep someone trapped in one position for too long, so to pile story on top of story because it's "your time", to meander uncontrollably, to stack up facts without conclusion is practically criminal.  

   I think we need to visit the benefits of boundaries when it comes to story sharing, because if we don't we are allowing the self-serving to kill it.  We're killing ourselves to be kind toward the passive-aggressive people who refuse to respect the form.  We're being nice to our torturers, and we're allowing them to chip away at the very thing we love by allowing them to disrespect it.

   It needs to be stated: this is a story circle, not therapy.  Everyone's story matters, in equal measure.  Everyone gets the same number of turns and the same amount of time-no exceptions for the greedy.  And everyone is expected to tell a story.

  The need we should be serving is the the need to keep story gatherings about stories.  

    

    

   

Thieves Of Time

Advertising on the air is sold in units of time.  

People who buy advertising have the same problem with this concept that many people do, including even some storytellers. They have difficulty saying what they want to say in the time they agreed to use, so they just decide to ignore the clock and hope they can get away with going over time. 

For voice actors this creates challenges. It's normal to get a script for a 30-second spot with 35 to 40 seconds of copy in it.  When the talent has to speed it up to put all the copy in to the time, it sounds a little rushed.  Some clients are fine with this but many send the spot back for a revision, either blaming the talent for sounding rushed or taking responsibility for time and shaving a few words off the copy. This process is pretty infuriating for voice talent and producers, but most of us have to do it on a regular basis.

For storytellers, going over time steals time from another teller. It's a very subtle form of f*** you. It's like flipping the bird with velvet gloves on, and then pretending you didn't.

The other people in the circle or at the performance are also desperate to tell their story, so it's common for the most needy to go over time until the few people left at the end of the line politely clap and then go home.  

In a supportive artistic setting, no one person grabs time from others.  It's not tolerated in theater and certainly not in broadcasting or voice overs. You'll just get fired for it.

I don't think most people plan to steal time. I think it's just lack of practice.

Doing anything well takes practice, discipline, devotion, and (your own) time.  

Rather than pontificating on what other people should do, I decided to make the use of units of time as a regular disciplined practice.  

I start with the bones of the story. Some stories have bigger, more complex bones than others.  

So far I can fit the bones of a 5-minute story into one minute and the bones of a 30-minute story into 5 minutes.  Practicing with the hour glasses helps me to focus without watching a timer or a watch, which is much more distracting. 

I'm not as good at it as I was hoping I would be.

Twenty years ago when I worked at Clear Channel and was the third most used voice in the commercial system, I would voice up to 20 spots a day.  Because of all the practice I got so good at timing I could cut a 30-second spot in one take.  Then if the producer asked me to do in 29 and 1/2 seconds, I could re-cut the spot right afterwards with all the same inflections and shave off a half a second.  It was one of those stupid human tricks.  So I mistakenly thought that meant that I had an everlasting great sense of time!

What I've learned is that a sense of time for me requires a consistent, rigorous practice.  It takes at least a half hour a day.  

But I figure by putting my own time in to practice, I'm less likely to steal it from others.

4th Wall, Crumbled

The first time I saw this in action was watching The Talespinner, Dany Feldman, telling at a MileHi Con.  She told stories to a roomful of kids who's parents were working the Con.  There was an intimacy to her telling that I hadn't seen before.

I went back every year to the Con to watch her tell, because even though when I expressed awe at her skill she would humbly say, "Well, I've known them all for years," I knew there was much more to her performance than just familiarity. Dany told with real magic.

What she did was a mix of great vivid storytelling and improv.  Her telling of the stories was an interactive dance with whatever was happening in the moment.  She folded in what the kids were wearing, what they said, anything that happened effortlessly into the story she was telling, bringing the audience into the story and weaving it around them.  I was stunned by her style and thought about it a lot. I hadn't seen other tellers do it quite the same way.  It was a transformation of reality.  Would I ever be able to learn such a thing?

I started my theater training as a teenager doing as many school plays as I could and doing summer stock as well. In theater the 4th wall is essential.  It seals in the viability of the imaginary world you're creating, protecting the illusion, keeping the dream real for the audience.  When Jerry Lewis broke the 4th wall in film it was considered a moment of great comic genius; when Phoebe Waller-Bridge does in in Fleabag, it's one of her most beloved beats.

When I first found a storytelling circle and stood up to tell, I was keeping the 4th wall intact.  After a time I did notice that some tellers did it differently.  At the RMS festival I saw Cheri Karo Schwartz and Paul Taylor addressing members of the audience as they told, making the experience much more intimate.  But for me the most startling example of it was Dany.

Since becoming a Spellbinder and regularly telling in classes, I've begun to find my way. There are tellers who believe in surveillance, in making the kids pay attention through forms of coercion, but I agree with Hannah B. Harvey who authored the Great Courses class in Storytelling, that if the audience is becoming distracted it's often because they need more from the teller.

You can't do that with a story when it's walled off.  The way to give more is to shatter that 4th wall, bring the audience in and wrap the other three around them.