I take from this Reb Zusya story the encouraging notion that if you are patient, and willing to make many mistakes, and willing even more to start over when you’ve fallen down, one day you’ll find that both your stories and the voice in which you utter them are entirely your own. I say that from experience. I think I’ve probably made every mistake in the book. I’ve chosen inappropriate stories, interrupted my elders when I shouldn’t have, lost the thread of a tale, recited a text from memory when I should have been spinning a tale, even bored an audience or two over the years. The good news is that they were all helpful mistakes.
After that first summer at Bolton Camp as a counsellor, I made the most important phone call of my life. I knew I needed a teacher if I was going to go further with this utterly intimidating art I had chosen to pursue. I went back to Boys’ and Girls’ House and asked if they knew anybody who told stories. They told me I should call Alice Kane, a recently retired librarian who knew something about the art of storytelling.
I gathered my courage and made the call. I introduced myself, and explained all in a rush who I was and what I wanted, that I had tried storytelling and that it was the hardest thing I’d ever done but I wanted to do it for a living, and did she know anybody who would be willing to teach me? There was a pause at the end of the phone line. Then she said, with a hint of iron challenge in her voice—a voice that still carried the cadence of a northern Irish childhood, “You’re not an actor, are you?”
Me, an actor? Absolutely not. At twenty-two I hadn’t even learned to play myself, let alone any other role. I answered, “No.” Then I made bold and asked her, “Why?”
In a soft, clear voice she replied, “Because actors can’t tell stories. An actor puts himself between the story and the listener. A storyteller has to let the story through directly.”
I’ve thought about her Zen-like statement ever since. It haunts me, puzzles me, exhilarates me. It reminds me of Homer’s invocation at the beginning of the Odyssey: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story…” When I hear a great story, I can’t tell you afterwards what the storyteller was wearing, or how they used or didn’t use their hands, or anything else. All I saw was my own mind-movie as the story was being told.
Alice’s own favourite example of this was the time Helen Armstrong, a children’s librarian, was telling hero stories to other librarians.
She was telling us the story of “Olaf the Glorious.” And she got up and her friend Dorothy said to her, “Don’t button and unbutton your jacket all the time.” So she got up and she stood in a little bright patch of sunshine, and she unfastened her jacket all the way down, and then she buttoned it all the way up. And then she unfastened it all the way down again, and she kept on doing this. And she started the story, and you watched her doing her jacket. At some point—I don’t know when—she was gone. She was totally gone from that patch of sunlight, and in its place was the Norwegian ship on a blue, blue sea. The sky blue above, and the waves breaking around it. The colours were all blue and white, with a touch of red. It was full of shouts and cries, and suddenly young Olaf with his shield in his hand leapt up and over the edge of the ship and into the water and the waves closed over his head.
The story had come across, vivid and intact, through the teller. And that is the first of my four guiding ideas: It is more important for the listener to see the story than to see you.
And how do you do that? In Ms. Armstrong’s case, it was probably the intensity of her own vision of the story, the perfectly chosen language and her deep emotional connection with the heroic protagonist. In other words, it was the same mix of skill, inspiration and purpose that makes all great art possible. She herself, many years later and long after she stopped fiddling with her buttons, accounted for her art in two ways. First, she worked with the very best versions and translations of epic that she could find. Secondly, she had a deep affinity for the world of “deliberate valour” that the heroes of epic literature inhabit: “I am a natural heroworshipper. I cannot help giving my whole-hearted devotion to people like Don Quixote, Hardy’s Gabriel, Trollope’s Dr. Harding and Harold Godwinson, the Golden Warrior; not to mention a doll called Totty, a spider named Charlotte, and Sam the hobbit; so I suppose it is only natural that I should specially like those most heroic heroes of all, the epic heroes…. There is an element in the epic stories that is unique to them and that generates what is almost a compulsion or at the least an obligation to pass them on.”
The second insight I have to offer you follows directly from the first: When a witch screams in a story, the storyteller doesn’t have to. The audience is better able to imagine the witch’s scream without the teller acting it out. I’ve read many how-to books about storytelling. These books like to provide “helpful” coaching tips in the margins of the stories: “Stand up here.” “Wave your arms like a bird.” “Whisper this part.” “Make eye contact.” This is dreary and discouraging advice. Eye contact? But Homer himself was blind! If anybody tries to sell you one of these tell-bythe-numbers books, take my advice—save your money. The audience doesn’t need to look at you.
The third of the four ideas that have guided me is that storytelling is a dance between suspense and revelation. We start learning about suspense when we play peek-a-boo. Babies are pretty sure the big face is only temporarily concealed, but they still thrill with joy when it BOOS back from behind the finger-curtain. This could be the secret of all storytelling: the hidden part is what makes the story. From then on, we’re hooked. We have entered the storyteller’s shire and there’s no turning back. We will spend the rest of our story-listening lives giving soul’s welcome to the storyteller’s voice, hungry to hear what happens next, and hoping with equal force the secrets will be revealed as slowly and deliciously as possible. The teller’s art is to move gracefully between suspense and climax, between clearly spoken words and well-kept silence. When you’re learning a story it is always valuable to think about the moment of maximum suspense, the moment Scheherazade would have chosen to stop her telling and save her life for one more Arabian night. You can’t build suspense in your telling unless you know when you’re peeking and when you’re booing.
I once saw an astonishing wolf drawn by an eightyear-old friend. It galloped across the page, mouth slightly open and eyes full of spirit and ferocity. When I admired her artistry, the girl gazed at her own work for a moment, and then explained, “It took a strong eraser to make that.” A good storyteller, like this wonderfully intuitive young artist, uses just enough words—not too many, not too few—to sketch a wolf that can run straight into the listener’s mind.
My fourth piece of counsel seems almost heretical to say. Storytelling is the most boring art in the world. To redeem myself, I’ll immediately claim that it is also—or can be—the most thrilling. A good story well told is absolutely enthralling. We are willing to wholeheartedly entrust our imagination, feeling and intellect to a storyteller who can hold us as they tell their tale. The Cape Breton storyteller Joe Neil MacNeil remembers the master storytellers of his youth: “[T]he tale was so enjoyable and would please you so well as it progressed that you would find yourself hoping that it would not end for a long time, that there would be a great amount of working around it so that the storyteller could make it very, very long before he arrived at the end of the tale.” MacNeil, you’ll notice, didn’t say the tale was long. He says the listener wanted it to be long, because they found it so compelling. To achieve that, you must remember that human beings do have notoriously short attention spans. It has never been easy for people to sit and listen for long periods of time to one person who’s doing all the talking. (Mind you, I’ve spent many hours listening to tellers speaking languages I didn’t understand, held simply by the music of their voices.)
Traditional cultures around the world have always known that boredom is an ever-present risk when a teller opens his/her mouth. That’s why the Haitian storyteller cries Cric? and Homer played a lyre, and Africans run riddle-games wi
th the audience. It is why Scheherazade stopped her stories at the most suspenseful moment. It is why Tuscan storytellers always made sure of a warm welcome before starting: “The old storytellers would never begin on their own initiative. They would not want to err, as did the blindman of Peretola, ‘who needed a coin to begin, and ten to stop.’ Even though everyone knew they would finally concede, and happily, they still looked for a lot of coaxing first. It seemed to be part of the performance itself, not just a happy prelude but a way of establishing the proper mood and the right way to frame the scene,” writes Alessandro Falassi in Folklore by the Fireside. And according to Rafik Schami, in Damascus Nights, “A story has to taste every bit as good as the food, otherwise most of my guests would get up, pay for their waterpipe, and leave…”
How boring can storytelling get? I was once at a friend’s house when somebody came by with a slide projector and some carousels of slides. He had been to Calgary and Banff, Alberta, for the Winter Olympics. He said he had a few slides to show. After about thirty, the children had fallen asleep on the rug. By the time he started on the second carousel, his wife was nodding. As for me, I heard the click of the third carousel starting, but I didn’t wake up until the door opened and he said goodbye. He had bored an entire roomful of people into utter oblivion. One of the problems, of course, was that every picture was more or less the same: he was standing on a snowy hill; or his wife was standing on a snowy hill. He could happily have shown his supine audience another three hundred slides. Why? Because he was in them. It was his life and personal memories being reflected. We humans have limited patience with the display of somebody else’s life on a screen, but we find our own lives infinitely fascinating.
And there are many other ways of boring a listener. Dr. Samuel Johnson and his sublime chronicler James Boswell were once travelling together, and they fell in with a certain man, who tried to relate a story. As Boswell reports, the story didn’t exactly keep Johnson on the edge of his carriage seat:
A learned gentleman who in the course of conversation wished to inform us of this simple fact, that the counsel upon the circuit at Shrewsbury were much bitten by fleas, took, I suppose, seven or eight minutes in relating it circumstantially. He in a plenitude of phrase told us that large bales of woollen cloth were lodged in the town-hall;—that by reason of this, fleas nestled there in prodigious numbers; that the lodgings of the counsel were near the town-hall; and that those little animals moved from place to place with wonderful agility. Johnson sat in great impatience till the gentleman had finished his tedious narrative, and then burst out (playfully however), “It is a pity, Sir, that you have not seen a lion; for a flea has taken you such a time, that a lion must have served you a twelvemonth.”
One of the stories told in Boccaccio’s Decameron features a similarly leaden-tongued raconteur:
[O]ne of the knights turned to her, and, perhaps because they were having to travel a long way, on foot, to the place they all desired to reach, he said, “Madonna Oretta, if you like I shall take you riding along a goodly stretch of our journey by telling you one of the finest tales in the world.”
“Sir,” replied the lady, “I beseech you most earnestly to do so, and I shall look upon it as a great favour.”
Whereupon this worthy knight, whose swordplay was doubtless on a par with his storytelling, began to recite his tale, which in itself was indeed excellent. But by constantly repeating the same phrases, and recapitulating sections of the plot, and every so often declaring that he had “made a mess of that bit,” and regularly confusing the names of the characters, he ruined it completely. Morever, his mode of delivery was totally out of keeping with the characters and the incidents he was describing, so that it was painful for Madonna Oretta to listen to him. She began to perspire freely, and her heart missed several beats, as though she had fallen ill and was about to give up the ghost. And in the end, when she could endure it no longer, having perceived that the knight had tied himself inextricably in knots, she said to him, in affable tones: “Sir, you have taken me riding on a horse that trots very jerkily. Pray be good enough to set me down.”
The Irish storyteller Padraic Colum would have advised unfortunate narrators that they need not describe the entire sea, but rather must give their listeners “the flash of the wave” (“Storytelling New and Old”). My son, Nathaniel, after seeing the movie Finding Forrester, commented, “They left too little unknown.”
Those are my four counsels. Although they won’t save you from your own stumbles and they probably won’t speed your own discoveries, they are useful things to remember as you work with stories.
Besides those four overall guiding principles, there are a few practical thoughts I have, especially for the beginning storyteller. Whenever I work with teenage storytellers, I insist they learn their stories by heart. “Word for word?” they ask, incredulous that anybody nowadays would demand such a preposterous chore of a teenage brain. Yes, I tell them. A musician doesn’t ask if he or she needs to learn every note of a Mozart sonata. The right notes give the music its fullest expression. So too with the words of a story. What I know—but don’t usually explain to the high school kids, because I’d rather they discovered it for themselves—is that by the time they’ve told the memorized text a few times, they will have unconsciously started to adapt the story to their own voice. They move from classical to jazz mode, so to speak. And because they worked so hard to get the words right in the beginning, their tenth telling has all the confidence and spontaneity and precision of language that their first telling may lack.
There are, of course, many points of view in the storytelling world. I’ve heard very fine storytellers argue that it’s better to learn stories from their images, and not worry so much about the exact words. Ruth Sawyer is adamant that it is better to learn stories this way, that it frees the teller from sounding like a mere reciter and turns them into more creative artists. But Nancy Woods, a high school teacher I’ve collaborated with many times, always has her storytelling students memorize their stories, some many pages long. These bright teenagers begin by thinking storytelling will be a breeze, but having to master a text filled with very particular turns of phrase “stops them cold,” Nancy says, and makes them realize this is not such an easy art after all, but one that will take all of their resources of attention, memory and imagination. Storytelling is the favourite unit among Wood’s tenth-grade students, she reports, because they are invariably pleased with themselves when they discover what they can do.
However the words come to you—learned by heart from a literary source or text, or improvised from a basic plot—the aim must be to make the story sound fresh every time you tell it, as if you were discovering the story’s people, dilemmas and landscape for the first time along with your listeners. When I tell the stories at the back of this book, I probably don’t stray far from the text as it’s printed. But if you heard me tell them, you might well think I’m making them up fresh just for you, and just for the occasion. At least, that’s the effect I’m aiming for.
Rehearsing can be a problem for storytellers, especially if, like me, you do your best thinking out loud on long walks. Storytellers should carry a sign that says Rehearsal in Progress. I’ll often stroll throught the ravine near our house, mumbling and declaiming a story I’m working on. It’s a dangerous habit. If you do it in your car in the middle of rush-hour, other drivers pass you with alarm in their eyes. If you do it on a city street, people think you’re a little nutsy-fruitsy (my mother’s expression).
I was once trying to prepare “The Princess and the Pea.” It was a foggy night and I was walking down Brunswick Avenue, just south of Toronto’s most famous beer hall, and I said out loud, with feeling, “But she must be a real princess!” A young woman loomed out of the fog at that moment, and looked at me with great alarm. She probably thought I’d just staggered out of the Brunswick House somewhat over-refreshed with ale.
When you are telling a story, don’t get distracted. I was once
telling a funny story to a grade-five group, and one boy laughed so hard he fell off his chair and let out a loud fart at the same time. It took a while for the group to calm down, and longer for him, but I didn’t stop telling the story for more than a moment. Once the flatulent echoes died away and the boy stopped quaking with laughter, calm was restored. Almost all questions the chldren may have for you can wait until the end of the story. Ever since my run-in with Farting Frankie, nearly thirty years ago, nothing except a fire drill can stop me from telling the story right through to the end.
The one imperative of storytelling is that the audience must long to know what happens next. Tell your story as if the garbagemen of Jalandhar were in the audience; I read the tale of these great listeners in a Canadian newspaper, and they’ve been my heroes ever since. The dateline is New Delhi, 1988:
The garbagemen of Jalandhar have gone on strike in this city in the Punjab to protest the cancellation of a popular television series. The series is based on the Hindu epic the Ramayana and is the most popular show on Indian television. Its seventy-eight week run is scheduled to end this month, but the Jalandhar garbagemen demand an extension to show what happened to Lord Rama’s two sons. Municipal officials fear the workers’ refusal to collect garbage could spread disease.
My friends in India tell me this report is true; while the show was on, the whole country came to a standstill. What an honour it would be to tell stories for an audience willing to go on strike for the sake of a beloved story. For such noble listeners we must be ready to juggle with the lightest of balloons and the sharpest of knives.
Suddenly They Heard Footsteps Page 14
