StoryLab Coaches Share Secrets to Storytelling Success

Robin Bady: When I decided that I wanted to tell personal stories, I had no idea how or where to begin. Besides, who wanted to hear my stories or my complaints? What had happened to me that was so story-worthy?  Plus, I had not written a story or essay since acting school, which was a long time ago.

So, I listened. To people who inspired me: Elizabeth Ellis and Roz Bresnick Perry among others, who helped me with the artistry of their everyday style of telling. To my new friends from the Moth, or at the many shows that have arisen in NYC in the wake of the nocturnal Lepidoptera.

My easiest learning comes from doing and reserving judgment, so that is what I did, using what I gleaned from paying attention. I began to experiment — at the Moth for starters, then at open mics for longer stories — for as my friend Megan Wells says, “storytelling is an art where you rehearse onstage.” Another friend, Loren Niemi, just said, “go for it.” As long as I had an opening line, a closing line, and a general sense of what I wanted the story to be about, I was fine.

I took a few classes that focused on the tools needed to build and improve a personal story. That was eye opening, and so useful. I even learned a little about comedy! Of course, I had the folktale/fairytale structure(s) embedded in me from telling them for so long.  I had even more years of internalizing the five-act play structure. Today, I love personal stories, competing at slams and performing longer (30/60-minute) personal pieces. I am not afraid of and welcome mistakes and taking risks. I am even working with a director.

Story is art is changing is growing is fun. Otherwise, why do it?

Jamie Brickhouse: A personal narrative performance should make the audience feel like they’re hearing a story told for the very first time by a skilled raconteur. My storytelling performances were transformed when I began to know my stories and let go of memorizing them.

I came to storytelling as a writer, telling stories from my memoir. I adapted prose for the page to prose for the stage, turning, say, 10 book pages into three tightly written six-minute story pages. I discovered that the telling of every last word of a scripted story sometimes came off as monologue-y, as if I were performing a playwright’s creation and not telling my own story. I didn’t want to lose one single word of every “perfect” sentence I’d written, but if I lost my place while performing, it could become a “panties-down” moment.

Of course, stories should be rehearsed, but I learned that knowing a story, rather than memorizing it, is the secret to not sounding rehearsed. I write the arc of the story and only memorize key lines—the opening and ending, jokes, revelations and epiphanies. Rather than write the story, I tell it out loud — to myself, at open mics, to my cat — and when it starts to gel, I record it. I play it back while I exercise, fold laundry, or clean the cat box. Because I don’t stick to a script, the story remains fluid. I never have a panties-down moment in front of an audience, because I’m not losing my place in a script — I’m finding my way as I tell. The audience feels like I’m telling the story for the very first time, which is true. Even if it’s a repeat story, I’m telling a version of that story I’ve never told before or will again.

Michele Carlo: In 2003 an acting teacher suggested I go to an event the next evening where ordinary people told short true stories about their lives. I was having difficulty being “myself,” and she thought this might help.  I’d always thought stories were what older ladies told children before juice, crackers, and naptime. But when the teacher said, “this is nothing like that,” I went, “OK, I’ll try it.” She warned me to watch a few times, first, because it was also a competition. A “story slam,” she called it. “Like a poetry slam, but for stories.” It was called The Moth.

The next evening, I found myself in a room with people who were anything but ordinary, or at least their stories weren’t: every aspect of real life from the sacred to the profane was shared — and all were riveting. At intermission, the host asked if anyone else would like to put their name in. On I don’t know what impulse, I stood up, threw my name in, got picked last, told a story about my family … and won. I haven’t looked back since. And I owe a huge debt to those who took me under their wing and showed me, by example, what made a powerful, compelling — and entertaining – story.

Now I’m the “older” (haha) lady, who tells stories of all kinds, and I do my best to pay it forward by guiding new tellers, because, as I learned early on, nothing — especially a good story — is ever created in a vacuum. Or as a former First Lady from the 1990s was fond of saying, “It takes a village.”

StoryLab: a story coaching workshop led by Robin Bady, Jamie Brickhouse and Michele Carlo, will be presented at Sharing the Fire on Sunday, April 5, from 9:15am–10:45am, in the Garden Room. https://www.nestorytelling.org/workshops/