Tag: traditional tales

Telling tales

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

Wee update with my news – over recent months I’ve been telling stories wherever people will listen, from my story circle to Verbalise to Kendal Mountain Festival to a headline slot at Ink Deep (a new spoken word night in Kendal). I told 30 minutes of stories at that one – The Name, The Pear Drum and Facing The Giant, finishing with a short Eskimo story called The Spirits of the Northern Lights. I also recorded a 90-second version of that one for National Storytelling Week (now been and gone). My telling looked like this:

It’s strange how much goes into a single story, even one as small as this – I spent a week of dog walks and school runs practising Northern Lights – partly because I needed to get it under 90 seconds, but mostly to find the flow in the words and build some phrases into muscle memory.

It’s been a year since I started storytelling with incredible tutors Emily Hennessey and Nick Hennessey. In that time, as well as the stories above, I’ve learned The Talking Skull, Aioga, The Fox Woman, The Magic Bowls, The Hobyahs, Two Tigers & A Strawberry, Stone Soup, Raven & The Whale, Six Blind Men & an Elephant and Gobbleknoll. That’s a small repertoire, yes, but growing all the time, and most of all – I’d feel confident going back to any of these stories. I’ve told each of them to myself (and the dog) dozens and dozens of times. They’re part of me now… even if the dog is sick of me .

Learning and performing traditional tales has upended everything I thought I knew about stories, energised me personally, and also reinvented my writing practice. The simplicity and clarity of folk tales is so utterly grounding – I’m increasingly trying to incorporate that simplicity into my own prose. I’ve also started writing longhand, rather than on a keyboard, and this too has been transformative. I’ve always plotted and planned and noodled in notebooks, but very seldom written extended prose by hand. Taking a novel to the notebooks has been an extraordinary thing. Everything becomes much more linear and causal – and if it isn’t connected, it’s easier to spot a fracture in the narrative. Slowing down to handwriting speed – probably less than half my typing speed – has also slowed my thoughts, giving space to notice and dwell and follow interesting threads. It’s steady and feels somehow more truthful. Most radical of all – I suddenly have countless more moments in the day in which to write. Whereas I once needed a minimum of half an hour, a cup of tea and a playlist to sit down and write – now I’m scribbling ideas and phrases in minutes here and there, from boiling the kettle to the moments before bed. It’s still early days as a process but I’ve been staggered at how staying in touch with my prose makes it all the easier to keep writing.

As to what I’m writing… ah. Enough to say that something I’ve daydreamed about for almost twenty years is quietly taking shape. I’m writing without agenda or plan, dwelling in spaces between ideas and images, forging some links, breaking others. I’ve given it a name but I’m not ready to share that yet.

It’s all stories. Onwards.

The Six Blind Men & The Elephant

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

Another storytelling update! This week I told a story in school for the first time – popping down to tell The Six Blind Men & The Elephant to my son’s class, who are looking at Buddhism. It’s a lovely wee school and the kids were very welcoming, a string of high-fives lined up on the way in and the way out. I’d planned a straightforward telling with some questions to follow, but once we were in the moment I started calling on the kids for ideas of what the blind men thought of the different parts of the elephant. They loved getting involved, which is a lesson for future tellings. Afterwards we had a fantastic chat about the importance of sharing – and of knowing how other perspectives can deepen and strengthen our own knowledge – and then we went round the class, imagining how the bits of our own favourite animals might resemble something completely different. It was a lot of fun.

I was packing up when they asked me for another story, and their teacher kindly gave me the time to tell it. I shared Gobbleknoll, and this is where the fluidity of storytelling showed itself so marvellously – even as I was telling it, I sanitised the tale and teased out the bloodier elements – and I thought nothing of stopping to expand or explain something, even to spell out some words. My knowledge of the story and my prior tellings gave me the freedom to tell it for this particular audience on this particular day. That was exhilarating and wonderful and fun and right. The kids loved Rabbit and his stone shoes and his ears tied down. Gobbleknoll has nothing to do with Buddhism – I could have told The Vain Crane or The Tigers & The Strawberry – but it went over well.

I’m learning several more stories at the moment – Aioga, The Name, Three Golden Heads Of The Well – and more and more, I’m finding my own ideas and instincts stepping in. Adding a few words of description here, or a colour there – adjusting a clunky dynamic between two characters – expanding or reducing dialogue. A story is not a box with walls, but a gateway – a road.

I’m learning.