secrest storytelling skills

Many of the core skills we need to tell stories effectively are used with great skill and  aplomb every time we tell and listen to stories socially. Noticing and acknowledging how this happens allows us to trust our skills as storytelling beings and be bolder and more effective in our telling as a result.

These social storytelling skills include both listeners and tellers and can inform how we gain rapport with our audiences in a performance context as well as how we tell our stories whether derived from traditional orally derived material or our own experiences.

Our secret storytelling skills include…

• Swapping spontaneously between telling modes including action, description, information, comment and dialogue.

• Using liminal character embodiment to convey different people in the story - including yourself at another time in your life.

• Negotiating our way as a group of listeners into and out of the storytelling mode.

• A sophisticated use of gaze to include the fixed gaze of the audience as well as the teller switching between memory, the listeners, the imagined space and character point of view

• An elaborate and fluid use of gesture to indicate the relative positions of objects and people in space.

• The ability to make the jointly created imagined world of the story more real and substantial than the real world

Bringing these skills into awareness immediately gives us a rich vocabulary and effective tools to work on the stories we want to perform so that they can really come to life.