Story, Schmory

By Barry Thorson

JUST FOR THE TELL OF IT

The lost art of live storytelling is easier than you might think and much more rewarding than you can ever imagine.

Story, Schmory will help you do it in a fun, irreverent, effective w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Thorson
• Release date: May 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738882014

Book preview

PREFACE

Yeah yeah yeah, I know. Another book on storytelling.

Everyone’s a storyteller. Storytelling is the most important skill you can have. Unleash the Power of Storytelling. Know your story. Tell your story. Stories change lives.

Ya da ya da ya da!

It’s all over the place, storytelling. The oldest pastime is suddenly current again. Who knew?

"Storytelling" has become such a marketing buzzword in the last fifteen years that it’s become almost meaningless. Though the activity has been around as long as we have, the word itself has become somewhat buzzy and ubiquitous in the last dozen years. As a result, it means any number of things and, sadly, sometimes nothing at all.

Just tell one already. Get up in front of a group of people (ideally kids) and rip a yarn from a different time. Entrap them. Enchant them. Enthral them. It’s not about the story you’re telling anyway; it’s about the connection you’re seeking to make.

Telling stories is easier than you might think and much more rewarding than you can ever imagine. This book will help you do it in a fun, irreverent, effective way that will have your students, children, and/or colleagues asking you to repeat the experience again and again.

Become a live storyteller and continue a long and valuable tradition of stirring things up.

If for no other reason than just for the tell of it.

BT

January, 2023

www.tellingchange.com

INTRODUCTION

I need to tell you about Judy.

Judy was among the first clients in my Livestories Programme.

She was in her early fifties and mayor of the little Alberta town I lived in at the time. She hired me to help her tell a story about her mentor, Carolyn, who was the previous mayor. We sat down, and Judy started telling me about her love and respect for Carolyn. How she had served on town council under Carolyn, had learned about leadership and politics from Carolyn, and blah blah blah Carolyn blah blah blah Carolyn.

I told her this was all really genuine and heartfelt, but there was no real story there. Just some tributes and platitudes. Tell me a story, Judy!

Story, schmory! she said, and waved me away with a flick of her hand. I don’t have any stories. My life is boring.

Nearly every client I worked with in my Livestories Programme started off by saying the same thing: I don’t have a story to tell. To which I would agree and reply with not yet.

Of course they didn’t have stories. But they had events. We all do. Thousands upon thousands of events that have happened, are happening, and will continue to happen to us, day in, day out, from our first breath to our last.

My job was to help unearth those events for my clients and to spin them into stories. I’d ask a few broad questions and they would provide a few broad answers. During those answers, inevitably their eyes would squint, the promise of a smile would start to pull up on the corners of their mouths, and the tone of their voice would change. I became very good at watching and listening for those clues. When they happened, I would pounce and say, tell me more about that. I’d video tape them telling their story, add a few photos, a bit of music, and then edit everything together into a fifteen minute Livestory which I would burn onto a DVD for them to share with their families.

During my second or third session with Judy, I began to notice a constant ringing sound that kept throwing her off. Turns out she wore a hearing aid.

Since when? I asked.

I usually keep my hair long to hide it in my ear. It’s been my secret for decades.

Judy had recently shaved her head as a fundraiser for cancer research. Part of the job of being a good mayor, she told me. So now everyone can see this damn thing. I hate it.

After some more digging, I learned that she nearly died as a young girl. She had grown up on a farm in Quebec and there was no money for a doctor. As she said if we got sick we just got better on our own. In the course of six months, she had the mumps, measles and chicken pox. The end result was an ear infection that left her legally deaf.

I learned to listen with my eyes, she went on to explain. To watch people. My brain put it all together. I was twenty-one when my husband and I moved to Alberta, and he told me ‘Judy, you’re as deaf as a post. Go see someone and get a hearing aid’. So I did. I remember walking out of the office, down this flight of wooden stairs, and hearing my footsteps for the very first time.

Now that’s a story, I told her. Incredible!

‘What’s so incredible? she asked with a shrug. I’m legally deaf, but get by well enough. I don’t talk about it much. Who’d vote for a deaf mayor?’

Judy continues to tell this schmory of hers, twenty years later, and no longer gives a shit about who sees her hearing aid.

Things have happened to us all. Givens. Data to draw from.

Judy is one such human in a horde of billions, with countless events happening in her life - big and small - every day. The story she told grew out of a tiny percentage of them. But it’s a fifteen minute yarn that settles beautifully in the ears.

A few people’s events have gone through a process not unlike Judy’s.

For more than 200,000 years, we humans - Homo Sapiens, to be precise, wise humans - have created, refined, and passed on an immeasurable hoard of wisdom, captured in fifteen minute yarns that are free for the telling.

The slings and arrows of the most outrageous fortunes, the gravest mistakes, the most embarrassing assumptions, all distilled in petite works of art, with the ability to transform whoever participates in the act.

We are the only species in the history of earthly lifeforms that possess the ability to not only imagine the unreal, but to communicate those imaginings to each other.

I was often asked by my Livestories clients how I became so attuned to finding the gold of narrative amongst the rubble of personal events. My answer was always the same: by telling the old stories. Live. Face to face. Person to person.

The classic fairy tales, folk tales, myths, and legends. I have told these stories to thousands of school kids, university students, and library audiences. I’ve told them to Indigenous elders, zoo and museum patrons, and corporate leaders. I have told them to my three children.

A good-story-well-told contains an unbelievably rich inheritance filled with ancient magic and modern psychological truth. But it also contains an unshakeable structure, simplified and refined over time, that works over and over again, regardless of setting, character, and truth.

I like to think that all the stories we’ve inherited from our narrating ancestors began in a similar way to Judy’s. By curating events, assembling data, choosing what to leave in, what to take out, and what to enhance.

They formed slowly, a little bit at a time, over hundreds, thousands - even tens of thousands - of years.

This book is the what, why, and how of live storytelling; the lost art I’ve been actively engaged in for close to thirty years.

This book is for leaders in all industries: corporate, not-for-profit, education, science and tech, the arts.

When you’re addressing an audience without a narrative of some kind, you’re missing out on a golden opportunity to connect with them. You may be speaking to adults, but don’t kid yourself; they are just as hungry for a story as children in a classroom or a child at bedtime.

The simple act of telling a story, with no Powerpoint slides (let me repeat that: no Powerpoint slides!) demonstrates that you can be vulnerable, a little bit silly, and very engaging. You will also come across as an inspired communicator with brilliant public speaking chops. Narrative sticks where non-narrative lecturing slips away. They’ll remember the story you told more than anything else you say. And by remembering the story you told - live, face-to-face, with no slides or charts - they’ll connect the other stuff (your information, your message, your point for speaking at all) to that memory. Think of anyone you’ve listened to (when you were a university student, or attending a seminar, or at a corporate shareholder meeting) who told a story as part of their presentation, and you’ll agree that live storytelling works.

It’s a valuable skill to have. This book is for you.

This book is for teachers.

As a teacher myself, I know how hard it can be to connect with your students. It often takes a long time to connect with one student, let alone twenty or thirty. And yet, that connection is vital to establish trust in the relationship. Telling these stories to your students - live, face-to-face, in-the-moment - forges an instant connection. Kids are narrative junkies; they can’t get enough of story. It’s in their games, the shows they watch, the social media they use. I told stories daily to my students. The idea for this book was born out of my experience in the classroom.

Teaching is a vitally important job, but not an easy one. This book is for you.

This book is for parents.

I’m the proverbial (in the truest sense of that word) fairytale father who has three daughters. I’ve told stories to each of them, and still do. Like the story in the Arabian Nights, parenting never ends. Everything you do, and do your best not to do, shapes and changes the lives of your children.

I sat on the board for an early literacy organisation, and can quote you a mountain of statistics around the vital importance of books and reading to your children from the moment they’re born. So by all means keep doing that. However, if you add live storytelling to this, you open up a whole new way to connect with them. And they will eat it up.

Kids not only love to play, but they need it, as much as food, water, and oxygen. They learn about the world by pretending to be in different ones. If you, as their parent, become the kangaroo who doesn’t like to hop, or the kookaburra who’s afraid of heights, or the gremlin who giggles when someone pokes him in the belly button, then you’re inhabiting those different worlds with them.

They may forget to brush their teeth, or hang up their clothes, or wipe their bum the right way (or wipe it at all), but they’ll remember every frickin’ detail of the five minute story you made up two weeks ago to get them to sleep and demand to hear it again tonight (and correct you in the retelling of it).

Your kids want you to tell them stories. This book is for you.

Every time a live storyteller connects with an audience by bringing one of these tales to life for fifteen minutes, change happens. They’re little changes. The tiniest shifts in mood, outlook, and thinking. Somebody laughs. Another one gasps. A third holds their breath without knowing they’re holding their breath, and then sighs audibly when the suspense no longer suspends.

Nobody - not the teller nor the audience - is quite the same after the story has been told. Those tiny shifts, those minuscule changes, begin to add up.

My life has been transformed by telling these stories, and yours will be too. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, but it will happen.

Not by reading the stories. Not by watching them.

By telling them.

This book is for you.

PART I

WHAT IS STORYTELLING?

1

STORYTELLING AND ACCOUNTING

We like to define things. It makes us feel safe somehow, to know what things are.

Like most children, I was obsessed with asking why all the time. My five year-old is in the thick of that phase.

As a teenager, I wanted to know how to do things. Not to so much learn how (I had little patience for learning back then), but to know how. I wanted to know how to drive, how to play the drums, and how to build a pool table (we didn’t have the money to buy one).

Now, as a middle-aged adult, I want to know what things are. I want to know what the temperature is before I go outside. I want to know what the plan is before we start our day. I want to know what restaurant we’re going to, what is on the menu, and what it will cost before I get in the car.

Somewhere along the line, I became mildly obsessed with etymology. I think it may have coincided with the birth of Google, but I am endlessly curious about not only what words mean today, but what they originally meant. Their origins.

Before I share what storytelling is, and more to the point, what I mean by the term, I needed to look it up and see what it originally meant.

A quick search revealed that the word story comes from the Latin storia which is a shortened form of historia. It developed, according to etymonline.com, into a narrative designed to interest and to please.

The word story relates directly to history. This makes sense. Every story I tell, I tell in the past tense. Whether real or imagined, the events have already happened. Remember, we say ‘once upon a time, there was a man who had a sister’ (not ‘there is a man who has a sister’ or ‘there will be man who will have a sister’).

Telling comes from the Old English word tellan meaning to account, calculate, reckon, or compute. It was a way of reckoning or calculating, to relate an accounting of events. I admit I was surprised when I read this and a little disappointed. Storytelling is rooted in accounting? How unromantic! But then I gave it some thought, and found it is very much how I see the building blocks of story.

Traces of this archaic definition can be found in modern English. When we do a quick mental accounting, like adding up the items on a shared restaurant bill, we say something like "you had the truffle fries, a glass of Pinot, the mushroom risotto, another glass of Pinot, the creme brûlée, and a flat white… all told you owe $85.00. Plus tip.’

All told.

It’s not just in English that telling is related to accounting, by the way. Compare with the French to count (conter) and to recount (a raconteur is a storyteller). Same in Italian (contrare), Spanish (contar), German (zählen, erzählen meaning to "total up"). Even in Hebrew, the idea of telling a story is related to counting (sipur - story’ - is from saphar, meaning he counted).

Once upon a time, there was a man who had a sister, and his sister was a Certified General Accountant. The man is me, and my sister is a CGA. It’s very possible that the first storytellers were also the first accountants.

Therefore storytelling, according to its original definition, is an accounting of a short history with an aim to please.

Keep in mind that it doesn’t say that the short history needs to be real or true. Conversely, it doesn’t say that the short history can’t be an imagined one, nor that the accountability should be to the truth at all times.

Now what do accountants do (besides file tax returns free of charge for their siblings)? I wasn’t sure either, so I asked my sister.

They identify, measure, record, and communicate data. Real, verifiable, data. Things. Events, like expenditures or revenues. Something that has occurred, a transaction of some kind. Those events could be real and easily verifiable, or abstract and open to interpretation. Accountants add them all up, all those events, and bring order to the chaos to paint a coherent, financial picture of a business or individual.

If you apply this lens to a story, it’s easy to see that a story is simply a series