Storymaker E-Book

Giles Abbott

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Whether you're a teacher, parent, guardian or family member, the need to engage with and entertain the youngsters you care for is universal. Modern life makes access to entertainment easy, but what if there was another way – one that truly strengthened the bonds between you? For generations, humanity has practised the art of storytelling – a skill that you too can learn, enabling you to create magical tales that will shape those listening for years to come. Perhaps it's a group of restless children and you wish you could catch, hold and reward their attention? Perhaps it's a long journey, or you want to get them off their screens? As you conjure a gripping story from thin air using the methods in this book, you'll find that face-to-face engagement creates contentment, concentration and connection on your journey together through story.

Leseprobe

For Sooz,

With undying love and thanks for the way you showed the way, lit the way and lead the way. Nothing without you Belle!

G ;{~

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Text © Giles Abbott, 2025

Illustrations © James Lythe, 2025

The right of Giles Abbott to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 919 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

The History Press proudly supports

www.treesforlife.org.uk

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eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

Overview

Story and the Study of Story

The Forms of Story

Memory I – Building Your Palace

1. The Quest: Six-Part Story and Hero’s Journey

The Quest

Memory II – Sleep on it

Creating Your First Story

The Bones

The Arc of a Story – Freitag’s Triangle

Putting Flesh on the Bones

Detail

Modes of Language

Bonus Mode of Language

The Fear of Empty Spaces

Characterisation

Gesture

Word Substitution

Place – Why Baddies are Always Right

Scaring Them Silly, Because They Want You To

Proving the Pudding

Memory III – Take it for a Walk

Further Proving of the Pudding – Example Stories

Memory IV – Cleaning the Palace

Meet the Forms of Story

2. Journey and Return

Example Story – ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’

How to Make a Journey and Return Story

Example Story – ‘The Lad Who Had No Story’

Advanced Journey and Return

3. Rags to Riches

Example Story – ‘Cinderella’

4. Rebirth

Example Story – ‘Thorn Rose’

Example Story – ‘The Lindworm’

‘The Lindworm’ and ‘Thorn Rose’ – Structural Investigation and Comparison

5. Comedy

Example Story – ‘Lazy Jack’

Comedy Advanced

6. Tragedy

Example Story – ‘Phaeton’s Ride’

Example Story from the Globe Theatre Telling Tales Workshop

Example Story from the Shakespeare Festival, Germany

7. Discovering the Monster

Monstrous Logic

Discovering the Monster II

Example Story – ‘Mr Fox’

8. Transformation

Example Story – ‘How the Vulture Came to be Bald’

9. Dilemma and Jump

Jump Stories

Dilemma Stories

Four Types of Plot

Shuffling the Bones

Applying the Four Types of Plot

Parable

Ending Up

One Last Thing! The Chain Story

About the Author

Endnotes

Introduction

What is This Book?

It’s bedtime. Your child or grandchild is snugly tucked up in their bed, their head, cradled in soft pillows, is turned towards you. Their eyes meet yours and there is an understanding in that look, an anticipation. So you open the book and begin, softly, to read. Soon, your child’s eyes are seeing not the room, not you, but the story you are sharing. You love this sharing.

But what do you do on a long car journey? You can’t read a book when you’re driving! What about when waiting in the interminable queue at the doctors or at hospital? Or when waiting to board a plane, a coach, a ferry? Perhaps your child is restless, perhaps distressed, what can you do? It’s not like you can simply conjure a story out of thin air.

Actually, you can. It is in your nature, it is in your power, it is your very own, very special gift. You are a born storyteller and this book, using simple, tried and tested techniques, will help release the magnetic, spellbinding storyteller in you. You will learn how to create stories that, though they have never been told before, have been tested and proven over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. You will learn simple, easy to remember structures, recipes, you might say, to guide your imagination so that you will never get lost, never lose your child’s attention, never fail to reward their longing for a story. You will learn simple ways to help you remember these recipes, so you can call them to mind instantly, the right recipe for the right occasion, and you will open worlds of wonder in your child’s mind.

Or perhaps you are a schoolteacher? It might be an away day, a school camp or just a long traffic jam and a coach full of kids. Imagine if you could confidently conjure up a story for them or, better still, conjure up a story with them, recruiting their active participation in the creative process? Or perhaps you work with older children – what if you had the power to create a story to tell your pupils that opens up discussion of key topics like citizenship, justice, equality, freedom, societal norms and biases? You can, and these techniques do not date as children grow older. As they grow, this book will help you to develop and deepen the stories you tell to them and with them, each one unique and special to you, to them, to that moment. As they mature, so too do the stories you tell them. All that time you are looking, not into a book, but straight into your child’s eyes. They are not looking at a screen; they are looking at you and you are not showing them someone else’s pictures in a book because they can see, vividly, their own pictures in their own minds, which they have created in response to your storytelling. In this telling, you are helping their minds and personalities to develop.

Now, you might say that you could never tell a story like this or that storyteller or actor you may have heard, and it’s true, you can’t. But you can do something better than that – you can tell a story like you, and that is what your child most wants. Whether you’re a parent, a grandparent or a teacher or carer, you are the one who has that connection to that child or those children. And when they are older, you can teach these techniques to them, and just see what it does to their schoolwork! And when they are all grown up, with children of their own, and they say, ‘Mum/Dad, d’you remember, when I was little, you used to just make up stories, but they were really good? How did you do that?’ You won’t have forgotten. In fact, you’ve been wondering when they’d ask. You can tell them the story of your storytelling. That story starts here, now.

Who is Your Guide?

At this stage you might be wondering, who is this author and how are they qualified to guide me on this journey? Fair point – you should never start a journey without first checking the credentials of your guide. Furthermore, I am not, in this book, attempting a definitive, exhaustive, nor comprehensive academic study of story and storytelling. I shan’t be quoting sources and authors and authorities. I can’t. You’ll find out why in a moment but I’m afraid the best I can do is lead you on a personal journey based on my personal knowledge and experience. Best I tell you who this person is, so allow me to introduce myself.

I was born and brought up in London, starting in the 1970s, and, after school, I did my BA in English Language and Literature at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. Both my parents had been, before my birth, secondary school English teachers so that’s the ocean I swam in as a child.

With one important difference. When I was very young my mother would collect me and my big brother from primary school, sit us down and then take down a battered copy of Homer. Instead of TV, we listened to her reading, episodically, first the entire Iliad and then the entire Odyssey. She has since told me it was a rotten translation, but it’s the copy she had as a child and so she shared it with us. So, while we also watched TV, before we got TV, we got to meet Laughter-Loving Aphrodite, Flashing-Eyed Athena, Sky-Shaking Zeus and Achilles, Neoptolemus, both Ajaxes, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Menelaus and Helen and Paris, Hector, Priam, Cassandra, Penelope and, of course, Odysseus. I’m not looking these names up – they are part of me.

I thrilled at these riveting stories, learned to read myself and, as soon as I could read without stabilisers, I found books suitable for my age so, The Greek Myths by Roger Lancelyn Green and collections of Norse myths (called Horned Helmet, but I forget the author’s name). When I was a little older I devoured collections of Greek and Norse and Celtic mythology, and authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and many more. Naturally, my interests were guided towards the study of literature and that’s what I did, hence my BA, but even when I was doing my BA in literature I retained a keen interest in the pre-literate.

Then, in 1998, when I had just turned 25, I very rapidly lost all the central, and therefore focal, vision in my right eye. It took five days. Then, five months later, I lost the central vision in my left eye. This took place during a coach journey from Leeds to London so, in total, about four hours. It took four hours to lose entirely my ability to read a book, a newspaper, a face.

I’m not turning this into a sob-story, a pity party. I have now been registered blind for most of my life1 and it has been and continues to be a wonderful, exciting and joyful life. But it was very, very hard for at least seven years as I struggled to come to terms with my changed reality, my disability, its limitations and the loss of something I had dearly loved all my life – the joy of reading.

But in 1999, my girlfriend, who is now my wife, heard from a friend that, in the village 4 miles down the valley from where we were living,2 a pub called the Stubbing Wharf was hosting an evening with a group of storytellers. I was astonished – did people still do that?

So we went to the Stubbing Wharf pub in Hebden Bridge. We found seats in a crowded room at the top of the pub and I listened, mesmerised and delighted as Alan Sparkes, Christine McMahon, Rachel Lowes and Paul Degnan, known collectively as the Shaggy Dog Storytellers, took turns to tell dazzling folk stories located in and around the Calder Valley. I was a child again, sat as if at my mother’s table, my blinded eyes dancing with delight. I couldn’t see what was in front of me, couldn’t see what the storytellers looked like, but I could see, very clearly, what was not right in front of me at all, but there it was, clearly visible in that second sight, my imagination. It felt like coming home.

Throughout the evening, host and club founder Alan Sparkes told the audience that, after the featured storytellers had performed the first two forty-five-minute-long sets, and after suitable breaks to ‘refresh your drinks and undergo nicotine replacement therapy’, the last forty-five minutes would take the form of an open spot. If anyone in the audience had a story to tell, five to ten minutes long, then if they had a word with him, or with Christine, then they’d try to fit everyone in. He also kept advertising a beginners’ course that he would be running in a few months’ time in partnership with a professional storyteller from Manchester called Clive Hopwood, and there were still some spaces available …

My mind was reeling. You could be a professional storyteller? Take something as magical and fun as this and make it your job? I knew that I would be unable to afford a place on the beginners’ course because, due to my sight loss and other symptoms of the accompanying illness, I had lost my job.3 My girlfriend Sooz had quit her job to look after me and so we two were living on statutory sick pay, which really doesn’t go very far. But, I was thinking, there might be a book available about how to tell traditional stories and Sooz could read it to me, and then I might be able to craft and practise, maybe in about six months’ time, a ten-minute story that I could tell in the open spot?

There was snag though. After my sight loss, Sooz had to read me my correspondence (bank, employer, that kind of thing – this is all before email) and I had identified something that was afterwards confirmed by specialists, namely that Sooz is acutely dyslexic/aphasic4 and that, when she was reading to me, she saw all the words equally well at the same time but could not decide the order in which to say them and neither could she plot a simple horizontal journey from left to right through the text. Listening, I realised she was saying all the right words but not necessarily in the right order. That was the dyslexia. Further to that was the aphasia, which meant that she would often create spoonerisms, accurately swapping the initial letters of pairs or even three successive words and, sometimes, when reading or just speaking, she would say entire, sometimes multi-syllable words accurately but backwards. It would be exhausting for her to read a whole book to me, but I was nonetheless confident that she would. Typical bloke.

Actually, she did better. That night in the pub, after the break the host, Alan, asked us all to welcome to the floor a newcomer to the club, someone who had never told a story in public before, so would we all give a warm Shaggy Dog welcome to … Sooz.

I nearly fell off my chair. My Sooz, the one who sometimes speaks entire words backwards, left her place next to me, walked to the front of the room and told a story. She told brilliantly. She engaged their attention, held their attention, rewarded their attention as she told, confidently, a story about her father’s childhood in Jamaica. She received an enthusiastic round of applause when she finished and, by the time she’d sat down, I had realised that I didn’t need her to read me a book. I didn’t need to go on a beginners’ course.

‘Where did that come from?’ I gasped.

‘I did it for you,’ she said.

Because the reason she was able to tell that story that night was because the previous night I had told it to her because the day before that her mother, who’d been visiting, had told it to me. Sooz had shown me how to tell a story – you know how it goes, so just get up there, open your mouth and do it!

The following month, when the Shaggy Dogs met again that’s exactly what I did. Somehow, by the third month I’d remembered another scrap of story that I could elaborate into a ten-minute piece. Obviously, in the beginning, Alan would put me on first (new kid, if he’s rubbish I can put so-and-so on afterwards to save the evening) but month by month Alan began to put me on later, then last to finish the night. Visiting tellers started giving me encouraging feedback and, when that beginner’s course came around, there I was, taking part. No, I hadn’t found the money. Alan told me that they had won a grant from Arts Council England to finance the course and so they were in position to offer me a free place. The course was brilliant. It was fun, practical and transformative. Then Alan and Christine started taking me to their gigs so that I could learn by listening. They started nudging me on stage,5 ‘Oh Giles, do you remember that song that so and so used to introduce that story? Well, I’m going to tell the story but I can’t remember the song. Can you help me by …’

Then Alan programmed a night of up and coming talent, and he picked me as one of three storytellers. I was elated. Later that same year, the Festival at the Edge (FATE), one of the largest storytelling festivals in the UK, contacted Alan. They wanted to programme some up and coming talent at their next festival. They were consulting certain local club promoters to ask for their recommendations and Alan recommended me. This was less than a year from when Sooz had astonished me by showing me how to tell a story. Of course, I accepted and, as the year progressed, every month, after I’d told a story in the open spot, Alan would phone me, give me meticulous, detailed and constructive feedback on what I’d done well, on what I could improve and, with his and Christine’s help, I did improve.

I performed in the up and coming slot at Festival at the Edge and felt like I’d played Vegas. Early the following year, my apprenticeship still very much under way, Festival at the Edge contacted me and offered me a full booking at their next festival. I would share an hour with an experienced teller providing stories for children. I would co-host a story round (don’t worry, I was told, there’ll be another teller there to help you), I would do some fireside telling one evening and I was to do an hour of storytelling on my own.

An hour! I needed a set! I didn’t have one and I couldn’t read one! But I remembered I had a book at my childhood home, a large, illustrated book of Viking myths that I’d read and reread as a 12-year-old. My parents posted it to me. By this time I had been awarded a grant from a charity, Electronic Aids for the Blind, which paid for a computer programme that I could use to scan text or, page by page, entire books and then, after a slow and arduous conversion process (smartphones do this instantly now) I could close my eyes and listen as a computerised voice read me the Norse myths. So I began working on my set.

To assist my preparations, Alan suggested and arranged opportunities for me to practise a full-length solo performance. He arranged for me to take forty-five-minute slots, unpaid, in storytelling clubs locally, in Manchester and Lancaster. He drove me to these clubs, helped familiarise me with strange surroundings, listened to me perform and then, on the journey back, he gave me meticulous, detailed and constructive feedback on what I’d done well and on what I should next focus on to improve. I will never forget this generosity from club promoters, from FATE, from the Shaggy Dogs and, above all, from Alan Sparkes. It was, literally, life changing.

Overview

So, what about your apprenticeship? This book is intended for parents, grandparents, teachers and carers who want to actively engage their children’s imagination and help them to develop aspects of their personality such as confidence with words, such as imagination, such as empathy. The course laid out in this book can also be used by teachers to get children to quickly make up, rehearse and perform exciting new stories, then recruit that excitement and investment and use it to help children through the harder task of writing their ideas down. All the exercises in this book have been used many times with classes of children and young people from 4–17 years old. Or perhaps you’re a traditional storyteller? Fantastic – the structural analysis of story in this book will help sharpen your storytelling skills as you get better at learning the crucial bits quicker. They will improve your composition skills too, fine-tuning your sense of narrative. I’ve also used these techniques with high-ranking business people, management and C-Suite, but that’s another story. This book will help with all of these things but – important note – in order to learn to do something fast you must be prepared to learn slow. You will notice changes and improvements in your storytelling skills with every new exercise, but please be prepared to go through every exercise thoroughly, developing your skills and confidence before you read on. You can’t just arrive at the end. The journey is important.

The first thing you will do is create one story and then we will be able to use this one story as a lab, exploring it in many different ways, applying numerous techniques of creation and performance. We should do this before we move on to exploring all the Nine Forms of Story and the Four Types of Plot. The idea is that, having been so thorough in the creation of one story, you will already be well on your way to calling up these skills spontaneously at any moment to serve any moment.

Throughout this book it will be perfectly possible for you to read quickly through the pages, scanning each exercise, saying to yourself, ‘Ok, I get that, I’ll do that later.’ You will finish the book fast and learn little. This book is meant to help you acquire not conceptual understanding (fast) but practical skills (slow), and skills can only be learned by doing and doing again. If you have children, or work with children, you will have seen how, in early years, they play. We use the word ‘play’ to describe adults who are not really trying their best but ‘play’, for children, is an intensely committed activity. I would like you to play at the exercises in this book as a child plays, with intensity, focus, commitment. Above all, be prepared to fail. There is no grievous failure in this book except failure to try. It’s meant to be fun. The more you attempt, the more fun it is. Above all, the things you will attempt in this book are natural and instinctive. You already do them; I’m just working with you to help you do them better. So throw yourself in and dare to fail, because daring to fail is the surest route to success.

Lastly, in this book you will find, for each Form of Story, an example story. These stories are all drawn from traditional sources and have been composed following the numbered stages of each of the Forms of Story. They are meant for your pleasure as well as illustration of the Forms. But most of them are not directly suitable for children younger than 14, so please don’t read anything to children without reading it through first! I’ve done this on purpose – I don’t want you to read my written versions of spoken stories to children – I want you to tell your own versions in your own words.

Story and the Study of Story

Once upon a time, a woman or a man opened their mouth to tell the first ever story and, for the first time, that hush fell. Or maybe, it wasn’t in our time, nor our parents’, nor our grandparents’, nor our great, great, great grandparents’ parents’ time (but it was a good time, a fine time, when ducks spoke rhyme and monkeys chewed tobacco). Or maybe, a long, long time ago, in a place that is miles from here and years from now (though it is near at hand and only a breath away), it did and it did not happen that there was and there was not a person who began something that had already started, who jumped into a stream that was already flowing, yet, however it was, they spoke, and their words were the world’s first story. Stories worldwide start with openings that, in different ways, invite the listener to enter another world; a world that, at the exact same time is real and unreal. However it was that it first happened, and how-ever-so-many ways there are to start a story, somewhere, some once, by someone, the world’s first story started. It is still being told.

There are different ideas about where humanity itself started. There are different ideas about how speech started, which was the first language, and there are many different theories about how many stories there are and where they originated.

For example, the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm and Jacob, published their first anthology of stories for children in 1812. The Brothers Grimm are often described as storytellers. As far as I know, they were no such thing. They were academics, linguists, folklorists, they were collectors and writers-down of stories. Thanks to them we have ‘The Frog Prince’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Snow White’ and many more.

Except they sourced some of their stories, ‘Cinderella’, for example, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, from the writings of Charles Perrault (1628– 1703), who is credited with inventing the fairy tale (at least in its written form). Yet all the stories he wrote down already existed as spoken word stories. Perrault wrote down his version of a version of ‘Cinderella’ that he happened to hear. Had he gone to a different village, or the same village on a different occasion, might the story we all know as ‘Cinderella’ be different? Might, for example, the fairy godmother have been a kindly vixen? Or might she have gone to the ball not in a pumpkin but a melon? We do know, for example, that the glass slipper we all know the prince had to fit on the correct foot was actually made of fur, and that Cinderella has had to dance in glass shoes as a result of confusion between the English word ‘fur’ with the French word ‘verre’. Worldwide, there are reckoned to be 3,000 versions of a story recognisable as ‘Cinderella’ in which a prince, for example, seeks the owner of a glass slipper, or a tin nose ring, or…

The point here is that stories move from teller to teller, place to place, culture to culture, language to language, and they have been doing so for centuries, long before scholars and linguists got involved. They have changed with every telling. Writers pen down stories like naturalists pin down butterflies, so that they can be studied. But, pinned down, they’ve stopped flying, or at least, that version has. The writer gets credited with having invented something they merely wrote down and anyone telling the story differently is told they’re telling it ‘wrong’. That version, written by an author, has become ‘author-itative’, the definitive version of that story.

So, Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), in his Canterbury Tales, has his pilgrims tell stories which we may think of as English folk stories, but many of which he learned from Boccaccio (1313–75), who collected them from his native Italy. Somewhere, beneath all these versions of versions, lies an original tale, a first version. But where, when and what?

This is what Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were looking for. As linguists, they were aware of the idea that all European and Indian languages have a common ancestor, Indo-European. No one really knows what Indo-European sounded like, what its words or its grammar exactly were. Its very existence is assumed from the way that many Indian and European languages share words with the same or related meanings, which share the same or related sounds. It existed as one language, it is inferred, because once, a very long time ago, before these people split off to become Indians, and these to be Greeks or Italians or Germans or Britons, we were one small clump of humanity. It may be true. The Brothers Grimm reckoned that if there was once one language then once there must have been only one story, the ancestor of all other stories. So when they wrote down versions of the stories they read in Perrault or heard in childhood from their nanny (French), they were looking for the evidence of that one story, that mono-myth. Rumour has it that they changed the stories they recorded to better support their hypothesis. Researchers changing evidence to support their hypothesis? That in itself is an old story.

Other writers also began making collections of stories to support an idea of nationhood. The idea, tempting and seductive, is that ‘these stories are uniquely of this people, they are the special creation and property of this people’. So, in Norway, in 1841, two friends, Asbjørnsen and Moe (a schoolteacher and a minister) decided to collect Norwegian stories from the people living in the valleys and mountains of Norway inspired, in part, by a growing sense of national identity (Norway did not become fully independent from Denmark until 1905). Coming from such secluded communities, cut off from their countrymen (let alone the world) by mountains, cut off from their neighbours by snow, there are many features of Norwegian storytelling that seem unique to Norway. Except they’re not, because you find them in Scotland, and (small surprise) in Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides, which were ruled by a Norwegian king for centuries. Clearly some Norwegian stories left the dales and sailed to the islands, but who can say the same thing didn’t happen the other way round? Well, it did. Asbjørnsen and Moe’s excellent collection is called East of the Sun, West of the Moon. The title story is a glorious adventure with love, courage, magic, trolls, so very Norwegian. Except it is actually a Norwegianised version of ‘Eros and Psyche’, a Greek myth. And before it was Greek, what was it? People will keep going to places, meeting other people and talking with them, which is terribly inconvenient to those keen on classification …

So it seems that no one culture can definitively claim to be the originator of this or that tale, though many people will have tried to do so on behalf of this or that culture. It seems that when studying stories you can study the things that make things special by their difference or you can study what makes things special by their commonality. If you think this is all a bit of a pickle, it is. But the good news is, for you? No one can ever tell you that you are telling a story ‘wrong’. Your version differs from their version, that’s all.

But you can tell a story well and you can tell a story badly. Follow the procedures in this book and you will learn to tell a story well, every time.

Storymaking Games – Nursery Slopes

So let’s start! At this point, I wish to introduce you to some games you can play with children on journeys or during long waits that will work to develop the memory of both children and yourself, also your ability to remember things in sequence by means of the connections between them. These are crucial skills in storytelling. ‘Winding and Unwinding’ and ‘Fortunately/Unfortunately’ are great creative ‘limbering up’ exercises as they also show how inspiration comes in that moment when you, not knowing what you are going to say, nonetheless commit to the moment and open yourself up to it. When you need inspiration it comes, and committing to that moment makes you need it. These storymaking games will lead into the Forms of Story and, if you do these first, you’ll be off to a great start.

Nursery Slopes 1: Winding and Unwinding

Winding and Unwinding is a simple word association game, great for car journeys, etc. One person starts by saying a word, next person says a word they associate with the previous word, or simply inspired by it, and so on. This part of the game is called Winding and this is the easy part.

At a certain point (a point that can be extended as you all get better at the game), the person who started the game announces that it is time to start Unwinding. Now you have to start working backwards retrieving, in order, the words that precede each other. For an easier version, the order of speech can also reverse, so you end up retrieving words you yourself said. To make it harder the order of speech remains the same, so players have to remember words that other people contributed, not what they themselves said. Retrieve words originally spoken by another? Well, that sounds like storytelling to me. Give it a try.

Was that fun? Good – now you’re ready for the next-level collaborative storymaking game, a game you can play with young people and which will also develop the skills in memory and a connection that will help you on your journey.

Nursery Slopes 2: Fortunately/Unfortunately

The purpose of this book, put simply, is to take you through a practical and progressional course, one in which you will learn how to successfully make up and tell brilliant stories using simple numbered structures that you will also learn how to memorise. You will learn how to improvise in the way that a jazz musician improvises, in that your flights of fancy will be grounded in a tested structure that provides scaffolding for your imagination to build on. Or you can think of the story structures as a kind of mental trellis that supports the growing, the flowering, of your creativity. You will learn how to ‘conjure up’ a gripping, compelling story as if from nothing. Now you might be thinking, ‘Unfortunately, I’m no good at imagining and I can’t magic a story out of thin air!’ Fortunately, you can, and it isn’t quite from thin air. You might be thinking, ‘Unfortunately, you don’t know me and I know I can’t do it!’ Fortunately, though I don’t know you, I have, over the last two decades, worked with probably thousands of clients of different ages, different backgrounds, in different contexts and countries and all with different aims (some have been schoolteachers, some middle, senior management, some chief executives). I have met many people who say they can’t make things up and I have never yet met one who really couldn’t.

So now this is a very simple game that can be played in pairs or in groups and will enable anyone to spontaneously create a functional story. You may already know the game and you may already have guessed what it is. Do you know a game called Fortunately/Unfortunately? When I was a child we used to play it on car journeys. It made dull journeys exciting! More recently, I’ve used it with creatively shy children and adults as a way of limbering up their imaginations and ensuring that everyone makes a contribution.

How does it work? One person starts by making a short statement that must begin with the word ‘Fortunately …’ The next person must follow with a statement that is connected to the first statement, but which must begin with the word ‘Unfortunately …’

Grab a child or bother your partner and have a go now. I’ll give you an example:

Fortunately, Elliot was picked for the football team.

Unfortunately, he had no boots!

Fortunately, the game wasn’t until Saturday.

Unfortunately it was Friday!

Fortunately, the shops were still open.

Unfortunately, Elliot had no money.

Fortunately, his father did.

Unfortunately, his father was still at work.

Fortunately, it was nearly five o’clock.

Unfortunately, Elliot’s dad was away working in America!

Fortunately, Elliot was in America too!

Unfortunately, the football game was in Stockport.

So, I didn’t pre-plan that (no, really?) but the basic structure, by and of itself sets up expectations and, as soon as you have expectations you can create twists. When it looks like it is going one way, you can send it somewhere else. This is the simplest technique for keeping an audience engaged in a story, basically by changing direction. Bear this in mind the next time you watch/listen to a soap opera or a drama serial or, for that matter, read a Charles Dickens novel – Fortunately/Unfortunately is the basic stock in trade. Many of the Forms of Story that you will meet as you move through this book have Fortunately/Unfortunately more or less obviously coded into them. So have a go at playing Fortunately/Unfortunately now.

Did it work? Good! This is the most fundamental technique that storytelling employs, namely, the teller follows a structure from which ideas can spring spontaneously.

When playing ‘Fortunately/Unfortunately’ with people who are creatively shy (of all ages) I have sometimes found people play safe and simply reverse things such as:

Unfortunately, Elliot didn’t have any boots.

Fortunately, he did have some boots.

This is a cop out. If you’re playing this with kids, gently insist they have another go because people do get better with practice. I began using this game with a group of young blind students who were very timid and used this cop out a lot. I let them, for a bit, and then said, ‘That’s good but I’m sure we can do better …’ Little by little they did get better, then much better. So do it again.

Better? Good. Now read on …

The Forms of Story

I said at the start of this book that the techniques we’ll explore together are derived from the study and analysis of traditional story. I think it better to base analysis on traditional stories because traditional stories have been edited over centuries, sometimes millennia, by the harshest editor in the world – forgetfulness. Over time the weaker bits have been forgotten and the best bits passed on. These best bits are the forms I have found by comparing and studying the stories, hundreds of them, that I have in my head. I’ve had to do it in my head because I’ve been registered blind since 2000 and for at least twelve years I was completely unable to access the printed word. I learned storytelling by listening. So, how many types of story are there?

The answer to this question will again depend on who you ask. I have already mentioned how the Brothers Grimm thought, at root, there was only one story, and you could say that all stories feature a character who, in the course of the story, struggles to overcome a problem. All stories, therefore, are the same story, the story of humanity’s struggle to survive against the odds. Probably true, but a bit vague, don’t you think? What other ideas are there on the subject? Or what versions of that struggle?

The great Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that all stories must contain a beginning, a middle and an end. You probably heard that at primary school. It’s true, but a bit meaningless, because all he’s really said is that a story starts, goes on a bit, and then stops. This is probably not the kind of thinking that has made Aristotle so famous. Many primary schools in the United Kingdom nowadays use something called the Story Mountain, which dictates there must be a start, then rising action, then falling action and then the end. Better, yes, but still a bit vague? We’ll come back to this later when we explore the arc of a story. For now, Story Mountain still seems a bit sparse.

At the other end of the scale you have the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index. First published in 1910, but added to and reissued, the taxonomy of folktales known as ATU enumerates distinct types of folk tale, grouping them not by structure but by motifs or incidents common across stories, such as swords being drawn from stones or oak trees, heroes made invulnerable apart from a fatal weak spot (the heel, between the shoulder blades, kryptonite, a weakness for Jaffa Cakes), mysterious companions who help young men to their fortune then disappear, magical animals, talking horses, etc. Aarne-Thompson narrows it down to only two thousand-plus types of folktale. Too much? Don’t worry – Vladimir Propp (1895–1970), who published his Morphology of the Folktale in 1928, analysed the structure of Russian folktales and broke them down into just thirty-one functions. I’m guessing these numbers seem a little intimidating? Isn’t there anything simpler?

There is. Perhaps you’ve heard the theory that there are only seven stories? That sounds a bit more manageable, I hope? This theory claims that all stories everywhere will fit into one of the following seven story structure categories:

1. The Quest

2. Journey and Return

3. Rags to Riches

4. Rebirth

5. Discovering the Monster

6. Comedy

7. Tragedy

That probably makes sense, seems familiar, right? As we go forward our work will be based on these seven structures, plus two more, so nine story structures in total. Unlike the original proponents of this theory, or the proponents of many of the others, I do not claim this list is exhaustive, complete, definitive or even ‘true’. There may be many more, indeed, I hope there are because I’d love to learn them. What I do know is that I have used these story structures hundreds of times to help children, adults, businesses, museums, more, to quickly create new stories and, whether or not they’re true or exhaustive, they work. They will work for you too if you work with them. It is not necessary that every story you create should conform exactly to these Forms of Story. It’s OK to shift from one to the other, taking a bit from here, a bit from there, and for the character you primarily focus on to shift as the tale goes on, but, certainly while you are learning, the closer you can stick to these structures the more assured your results will be. In my own practice, I have worked with ancient source materials (Irish wonder tale, Icelandic saga) and, finding myself unsatisfied with the written version I’m using, I have looked for the story structure beneath a given version. Having identified which structure it is closest to, I have sharpened things where I feel they have got vague or muddled. It works; the tale flows better and makes more sense to listeners.

Memory I: Building Your Palace

Building Your Memory

How good is your memory? How much do you even use it nowadays? How much do you rely on a smartphone to do your remembering for you? A tablet? Pen and paper? Probably quite a lot. Except these items don’t help you remember things. Quite the opposite; they help you forget. Because, once you write something down you no longer need to remember it, and you don’t remember them, but you do remember to look at your list. You have effectively and efficiently outsourced your memory to what becomes an extension of your brain and as long as you remember to look at it, it works. But what if you forget to do that? Or you lose it? And what becomes of your capacity to remember things if you underuse it in this way?

Memory, for most people, is predominantly visual, but ultimately it works with all your senses. Smells are evocative of memory, the body has memory, sounds will ‘ring a bell’. How can you use your memory better?

The good news is that it’s easy! Let’s learn how to build your Memory Palace.

Your Memory Palace

If you watch British TV you probably already know what this is, though you may not know you do. Sherlock Holmes (as played by Benedict Cumberbatch) uses a Memory Palace in a way that (and this always happens!) reimagines ancient techniques in the guise of contemporary technology. So, when struggling with a conundrum, Holmes is shown flipping through a bewildering slide show of mental images with the speed of a processor chip until he reaches his ‘Aha!’ moment. Not bad for a character born before the computer. But Memory Palaces are real and can be used to achieve prodigious feats of recollection. The mentalist Derren Brown uses a Memory Palace to simultaneously count four complete packs of cards in order to beat the house in casinos. The good news for casinos is that, although knowing how to do this is simple, doing it is not – it takes tremendous effort, practise and talent. Luckily, using a Memory Palace for storytelling is much easier.

The first historically known use of Memory Palace goes back to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC). Cicero was a lawyer, philosopher, rhetorician and politician in Ancient Rome and was famous, still is, for being the greatest public speaker of his age. Cicero’s speeches could change the actions of the entire Roman Empire. He rose to be Consul of Rome (the head of state) on the strength of this speech making and he did it all without a slide projector or PowerPoint. As Cicero himself said, ‘Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts pointlessly!’6 He spoke at length to large crowds in the Forum of Rome or in the Senate, and he spoke confidently without the use of notes. Somebody once asked him how he was able to speak at such length and in such detail without the use of notes and he asked his questioner if they had noticed that, as he spoke, he moved around the Forum, delivering one section of his speech by this column, another by that column? The questioner said yes, they had noticed, and wasn’t that to make sure all parts of the audience felt included? Cicero said that was partly the case, but it was also how he remembered his speeches.

Cicero used the Forum of Rome as his Memory Palace. He explained that, when he was memorising his speech he would make images that would remind him of particular sections of his speech and, in his mind, ‘place’ them at this or that column. Then, as he spoke, when he moved to this or that column, the appropriate part of his speech would appear in his mind. Brilliant, right? And the good news for you is that what you have to do is far, far simpler.

Because you don’t need to memorise facts, data or complex sections of a speech. You can, of course, use these techniques to do just that, and I teach my business students to do so, but that is not the focus of this book. You only need to make Memory Palaces to memorise, permanently, the handful of words that will guide you confidently through the spontaneous creation of a cracking story. I’ve noticed, when I’m working with students, that Memory Palace helps them build the memory. When I test them a week later they can quickly, confidently, accurately recall items without actually using the Memory Palace. It’s done its work and the memory is distributed in the mind. So let’s start now.

1

The Quest: Six-Part Story and Hero’s Journey

The Quest