The Trick in the Tale by Steve Gladwin

Part One - The Cannibal Who Didn't Know Any Better

I'm reading Philip Pullman's fascinating essay collection, Daemonic Voices. He has a lot to say about storytelling and the oral tradition and as an ex-teacher who spent years actually telling stories just to entertain his classes, (something which he points out is no longer encouraged by successive governments), he's in a good position to comment on this. I don't agree with absolutely everything he says about the art of storytelling but it got me thinking about advice I would offer any potential storyteller who wants to tell their first stories either just for fun or with a view to making it professionally. I've been a storyteller for over twenty years now and obviously I've learnt a lot, some of which I will pass on in these two blogs. 

So how do you tell stories? Perhaps the reason why nearly all the books about telling stories concentrate on ways of using the stories themselves rather than methods for telling them is because more than most professions the phrase ‘each to their own’ applies. It’s really up to you, but whether or not you want to just entertain a group of friends or your children, or are thinking to seriously think about it as a potential profession, over the next couple of blogs I'm going to run through a few of the ideas I’ve picked up in twenty years of being a storyteller.

But in this first blog I'm actually going to concentrate mainly on learning to tell one story - the all singing, all chomping classic of the title. Before I do however here are some general points

Before you make any kind of start, decide that however and whatever you decide to tell, you’re going to enjoy it. Worthy storytelling done halfheartedly and parrot fashion is no good to anyone. Tell a story because you want to and that means finding the right story for you, especially the right one to start with. Take your time looking through books etc to find the right story. Any storyteller will tell you that the first story you find to tell, (or if you attend a workshop or something similar, which you might be given to tell), can be important to you for the rest of your life, especially if you do choose to go into it professionally. The first story I was given was  The Juniper Tree, and although it’s one of the darkest of all tales, I still tell it and continue to find the light in it as well as the dark.

The other reason for spending time looking through stories is that not only do you get some idea of the range available, (something which can also be a bit daunting), but next time you go back to that book it will hopefully not just be as someone who’s told one story, but feeling like a storyteller.

It's best to choose something neither too long or too short. About ten minutes is fine, but you don’t want it too unwieldy for a first attempt or almost told before you’ve started it.

Read it through no more than a couple of times, and read it as you’d read anything else rather than thinking you have to remember it.

Now when you’ve done that there comes the most important part. You need to remember the basic sequence of the story and feel increasingly confident that it’s in the right order. Don’t focus on detail yet because if you look at your average folk or fairy-tale, you’ll find there’s hardly any. That’s because the story is everything and all most people want to hear. You can embellish all you like later but for now make sure you know the sequence.

The way storytellers often practice doing this is through a method called the 'bones.' For example say your story has twelve things happen in it and you’ve memorised them.

So for the purposes of this exercise let's take a story and demonstrate how it's bones, which in this case is the one below,

A Fisherman makes a man out of clay.

His Wife warns him that the Clay Man will eat them.

The Clay Man eats the fisherman and his wife and their fishing nets.

The Clay Man meets and eats two girls on the lane, carrying milk  

The Clay Man meets and eats two old ladies gathering blackberries.

The Clay Man meets and eats old man at the river repairing canoe.

The Clay Man meets and eats two lumberjacks and their fallen trees.

The Clay Man sees a little elk at the top of a hill.

The Clay Man tells the little elk he will eat him too.

The Little elk tells the Clay Man to open his mouth wide so he can jump in.

The Little elk runs down the hill, butts the Clay Man in the stomach and he shatters.

Out of the Clay Man’s stomach come –

the fisherman and his wife and their nets, the two girls and their milk, the two old ladies with their baskets of blackberries, the old man and his canoe, and the two lumberjacks and their fallen trees.

As a reward the people make the elk a pair of special golden antlers. 

This is the story of the Sami people called The Clay Man and the Golden Antlered Elk and you can find it in, among other places, a wonderful collection called 'The Sun Maiden and the Crescent Moon, Siberian Folk-Tales by James Riordan. I used the basic bones method above but I actually prefer to think of a story more like a washing line. This is because on your average washing line you're likely to find articles of all shapes and sizes, so I like to think of big incidents like a sheet or a shirt with small socks and pants the not so important bits in between. 

Image From The Rutland Reader

This is because your average story has a lot of run-on or repetition, of which this story is a classic example There are also say countless stories in which there are ‘magical three’. You don’t want to be that detailed all three times or your audience will lose focus, so usually you spend more time on the first task or peril, not as much on the second and hardly anything on the third, (or you might, if you prefer, put the latter two the other way round).

Anyway here’s our Clay Man story in washing line form.

A Fisherman makes a man out of clay.

His Wife warns him of the danger.

The Clay Man eats the fisherman and his wife and their fishing nets.

He goes on to the lane.

The Clay Man meets and eats two girls carrying milk on the lane, and eats them.

He goes out into the country.  

The Clay Man meets and eats two old ladies gathering blackberries.

He goes down by the river.

The Clay Man meets and eats an old man at the river who is repairing his canoe and smoking his pipe.

He goes into the woods.

The Clay Man meets and eats two lumberjacks and their fallen trees.

He goes to the bottom of the hill.

The Clay Man sees a little elk at the top of hill.

The Clay Man tells the little elk he will eat him too.

The Little elk tells the Clay Man to open his mouth wide so he can jump in.

The Little elk runs down the hill, butts the Clay Man in the stomach and he shatters.

Out of the Clay Man’s stomach come –

the fisherman and his wife and their nets, the two girls and their milk, the two old ladies with their baskets of blackberries, the old man and his pipe and canoe, and the two lumberjacks and their fallen trees.

As a reward the people make the elk a pair of special golden antlers.

 

Of course you’ll notice that this almost doubles the ‘bones’ count and you may even be out of pegs! Also as you get closer to the end there’s less run-off.

Thanks to Wikipedia

With this story I also encourage a lot of audience participation, so I’ll need some help with the noises the Clay Man makes like so –

Slurp. Pop. Slurp. Pop. Slurp. Pop.

The slurp speaks for itself but the pops use that mouth popping sound I’ve never been able to do, so I have to get the audience to do it for me!

I also get them to join in with the following after the Clay Man has helped himself each time.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

So here’s the story frame as it stands now.

A Fisherman makes man out of clay.

His Wife warns him of danger.

Slurp. Pop x 3

The Clay Man eats the fisherman and his wife and their fishing nets. Yum. Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

Clay Man meets two girls on the lane, carrying milk

Slurp. Pop x 3.

He gobbles them up. Yum Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

The Clay Man meets two old ladies each carrying a basket and gathering blackberries.

Slurp. Pop x 3.

He gobbles them up.Yum Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

The Clay Man meets an old man at the river repairing his canoe with pine tar while smoking his pipe.

Slurp. Pop x 3

He gobbles him up, and his pipe, and his canoe. Yum Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

The Clay Man meets two lumberjacks eating lunch in the forest, by their fallen trees. One has peanut butter sandwiches and lemonade and the other cheese and pickle and coffee.

Slurp. Pop x 3

He gobbles up both of them, both the fallen trees and their sandwiches and drinks. Yum Yum.

‘But it wasn’t his fault, because he’d only been created to do one thing and that was to eat. BUT HE WAS STILL HUNGRY.

The Clay Man sees a Little Elk at the top of the hill. The Little Elk is embarrassed because he hardly has any antlers yet.

Slurp. Pop x 3

The Clay Man tells the little elk he will eat him too.

The Little Elk tells the Clay Man that he’s only young and he wants to do it right, so if the Clay man could please open his mouth wide so he can jump in.

The Little Elk runs down the hill towards the Clay Man's open mouth.Yum. Yum.

But at the last minute he lowers his new little antlers. He butts Clay Man in the stomach, whereupon he shatters.

Out of the Clay Man’s stomach come –

the fisherman and his wife and their nets, the two girls and their milk, with not a drop spilt, the two old ladies with their baskets still full of blackberries, the old man with his pipe and his canoe, and the two lumberjacks and their fallen trees and their uneaten sandwiches and drinks with not a drop spilled.

As a reward the people make the elk a pair of special golden antlers. 

Ever after he will be known as ‘The Golden Antlered Elk, slayer of The Clay Man.

The Golden Antlered Elk by Rose Foran

You’ll see from that final frame that I’ve added the embellishments that make the story more my version, like the slurping noises for audience participation and the drinks and sandwiches which I'd usually get two volunteers to choose. If you should find the James Riordan version or the original Siberian tale, you’ll notice an absence of some of this stuff! You’ll also see here important details like the fact that the little elk is not only very young but rather challenged antler wise!

Having got your tale frame you now need to learn it and there are of course lots of methods for doing that too, but all you need, as with everything else, to do is to follow this very useful piece of advice – ‘if it works for you, it works.’

My preferred method is to learn the first bit of a story and then add a second and then go back to the first bit and add as you go until you have the whole thing, stringing it together also like building a washing line I suppose, which is maybe why the other version works for me.

Even with a story as simple and ‘shaggy-doglike’ as this one you can still add colour, but that colour can come in less obvious forms than the purple of the old ladies blackberries. One of these is the use of a voice for each character; the fisherman’s wife might be quavery, the Clay Man making the very most of his Yum Yums and slurping, (try stopping me!) and the little elk sounding all naive innocence, but with a crafty heart. These are the sort of things a storyteller needs to use to draw up the heart and soul of a story or even dredge up its guts. You might also give the characters lines to speak like the Clay Man might say, 'Little Elk, Little Elk. I'm, going to eat you' etc etc.

And somewhere in the learning process there comes a time when the sense of the learnt and mechanical stops and the natural sense of wearing your new story makes itself apparent. As you become more confident so your story suit begins to come more and more comfortable with you, and more and more you. Now you can stretch your arms out in your story suit, or adjust the trousers and make them looser. Eventually you might even be ready to put a big sweeping cloak over the top of it and go out and kick ass.

Of course before any half successful ass kicking can commence you need to have tried out your story on someone or thing a couple of times, so whether it’s a partner or spouse or pet, or an innocent soft toy who lacks the power to make a swift exit, you need to have a go. You could also record it, but only if you’re comfortable with the sound of your own voice, which many people aren’t, and of course that’s the last thing you want.

But may I push the glories of the great outdoors, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in the country like I do. Within ten minutes I can be beside the river with only a few passing ducks and the odd dog-walker to question my mutterings. If there’s no-one for miles around there’s no place better to exercise your new story suit.

If you don’t have such access it works just as well pacing round whichever convenient room has the stronger floorboards, although it may be best done when your long-suffering nearest and dearest is out.

I could tell you an awful lot more, but I need to leave some for next time I’ll tackle beginnings and endings, building an atmosphere and peopling your own universe and use as my example a far more serious tale. In the meantime my tale-frame should give you all you need to tell someone my own version of that Siberian cannibal classic, The Clay Man and the Golden Antlered Elk, or adapt your own from the same frame. Have fun with your washing line.

My own journey as a storyteller has been enhanced and enriched by the Order of Bards,Ovates and Druids Iona retreat of 1995, the storytelling retreats at Ty Newydd Writing Centre between 2000-2008 with Eric Maddern and Hugh Lupton and multiple storytelling friends, the 'Juniper Tree' storytelling workshop at Bridgwater Arts Centre with Ben Haggerty in 1994, TIr Coch Magical Weekends with Ana Adnan and Professor Ronald Hutton, and the many places and audience with whom I have shared the Clayman.

I'd also like to mention (again!) Channel 4's The Storyteller, if you still haven't seen it and Jane Yolen's Favourite Folk Tales from round the World, the book and series which started it all.  

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Steve Gladwin - 'Grove of Seven' and 'The Year in Mind'

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

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