Story telling - TIPS & Exercises

The quickest practical advice I can give is to recognise three different 'modes' of telling - action (plot), description (outer), and emotion (inner). Your lady is probably getting stuck on the action, and trying to work out the logical direction to make her point. Tell her that if this happens she should immediately switch to one of the other modes but not to stop speaking. This is like stopping in the middle of a journey to take a look around at the environment (description) or contemplate one's feelings (emotion). Either of these modes can lead to potentially endless material to say, without needing to progress the plot.

This does two things: firstly it buys you time while not making you stop speaking; secondly it switches you away from logical or intellectual thinking and into an image-rich mode that will stimulate your creativity and allow inspiration to pop up. It will also help to round out the story, if it has been lacking in such description.

There is a simple exercise to try this out: one person tells a story - known or improvised. Someone else at random moments calls out either 'action', 'description', or 'emotion', and the teller immediately has to change to that mode. It's important for this game not to allow a mixture, so e.g. while describing emotions, there is no action in the story; while things are happening, there is no description. This helps one to identify in one's mind the differences between the three.

In a workshop this can be demonstrated with a volunteer and the teacher shouting the cues, and then everyone can try it in pairs. Each mode, needless to say, has a very different feel, and produces different kinds of imagination.

So when one is getting stuck in solo storytelling, having experienced this game, one can silently tell oneself one of these cue words and know that the change will bring a fresh influx of material that will probably help to break out of any stuckness.

Another vital skill in improvising stories is to trust in yourself and the story despite not knowing what your mouth is going to say next. If you are good at forward thinking, even while telling the story, then you may only occasionally not know what you are saying. Few people relish this lack of control, but once embraced with commitment to keep going, it's amazing what pops up - often the best bits in fact. This kind of openness, relinquishing of apparent control, and trust, is something that takes a while, and lots of positive reinforcement, to develop, so I'm not sure that I can give any quick fix.

One game that helps a lot is the One Word Story. If played enough, holding to the rules, the trust comes.

Participants sometimes get frustrated at first, because they want to guide the story in the way that they are imagining, only to have the very next person completely change the meaning or direction, but when they let go of wanting to control, they realise the story can be delightful anyway. Others want to always say interesting or clever words when it is their turn, resenting having to fill in with a necessary 'the' or 'and', but again they may come to see that even these words can be invested with emotion or mood, and that the story is a truly communal creation, not a competition between individuals for starring roles.

Here are the rules - I've taken these from two occasions I've posted them before, so you get both in the hope that each has something the other doesn't:

One Word Story. Rules are: each person round a circle contributes just one word in turn to the story.

• Say the FIRST word you think of - it doesn't have to be the best, and it doesn't matter if it's rude.
• Do it as fast and smooth-flowingly as possible.
• NO hesitating, no asking for repetition of unheard words (just imagine what the word might have been and carry on),
• NO stopping to apologize if you accidentally say two words.
• Speak loudly, so the laughter doesn't drown you out.

This game produces bizarre crazy stories - very funny. Sometimes the sentences degenerate into gibberish or lists - either wait for them to get sorted out again, or interrupt and remind people that we want sentences of a story. The leader will have to interrupt to end the story, or it will never end. There may be a natural place to end, but the leader will have to grab it quickly.

One Word Story is an improvisation game. Each person in turn, in the circle, says one word. The flow of words should make up sentences, and a story. The main rule is that there must be NO pause before you say your word. If there is, you are thinking, and that's forbidden. Instead, say the first word that pops into your head - if people freeze, someone should shout out 'First word!' to remind them. Grunts or noises are perfectly acceptable substitutes for a word, as long as they are said without pause. If someone freezes totally there's no failure, just pass the turn to the next person. This game depends on speed and smoothness, so the leader should ensure the pace keeps up. The pressure of time is what overcomes people's inhibitions and critical faculties. It's also important to make it clear that people aren't responsible for their utterances - anything is allowed, including obscenities, if it is said without thinking. If people aren't told this, they are almost incapable of relinquishing control (don't worry, obscenities don't emerge unless a group has established a really good trust and intimacy, and even then they are a brief phase that passes, like flushing out dirt from a clogged channel). The outcome is a hilarious rambling story of almost utter nonsense, sometimes degenerating, sometimes brilliantly inventive. With practice, the stories become a great deal better, and quite satisfying, but even if they are rambling, the game is still wonderful. It does take a leader to interrupt at an appropriate point, otherwise the game will never end - although experienced players will collaborate to find an end.

A final couple of safeguards: speak loudly and clearly - there are often people laughing, so words get lost easily, which breaks the flow. If there is confusion - a lost word, an ungrammatical sentence, or someone breaking the rules by saying two words - the essential thing is to carry on without breaking the flow. Asking for a word to be repeated is forbidden, just treat it like Chinese Whispers and imagine what might have been said.

There are lots of variations on One Word Story. You can do it to a beat, using softly clicking or tapping fingers, and insisting that if you miss the beat you miss your go. You can do it with every word having some emotional expression in the delivery, contributing to a whole mood, and to lots more imagination and images than otherwise - this is probably the best variation, and can be combined with any other. You can write a letter rather than tell a story - don't forget the address, the signoff and the P.S. - this variant guarantees an ending, and can be very satisfying, and often even funnier than others. You can also do Two (or Three) Word Story, One Sentence Story etc., but these allow each person more control and so are not so useful at breaking down the need to be spontaneous. With only one word there's no way you can plan at all, with one sentence you can plan moderately.

Finally, as I hinted before, if you get stuck make sure you keep telling.

Stay engaged with the eyes of your audience, stay expressing yourself.

You can do this even when silent - it comes across as a dramatic pause.

But if you retreat inside to think, even if you are looking at people, your eyes will glaze, people will immediately notice you've disappeared, and the energy and involvement will plunge. Find your inspiration in the eyes, the minds, of those that you look at, rather than the floor or ceiling where most of us try and find it (for some odd reason!) You can always come up with something to say - you just have to be willing to have it surprise you, to discover what it is at the same time as your audience and risk that it will be okay, rather than insist on vetting or planning it. We are so wedded to planning, censoring, vetting, controlling, determining that the meaning and the effect will be good, clever, sensible etc, that it takes both trust and pressure to keep going when we get stuck. One can't guarantee that the results will be as sensible or logical, but if one has a playful attitude, willing to treat the story as a bit of an adventure, then room is made for inspiration and excitement, and the audience will have fun along with you.

The part of the equation I haven't even touched on is how to guide the story in the right kind of direction, assuming one has some purpose in mind, but that requires a fairly ingrained sense of the dynamics of stories and plot, as well as an ability to split one's attention simultaneously between telling and sensing the direction of all the plot strands. That's not easy! This faculty is one that I do teach, but it requires experiencing free play with various fundamentals before bringing them together in a rather mind-boggling way. But if one is used to telling stories, especially improvising them, one would already have some grasp of narrative structure and devices.