Today our topic of discussion is-Story Telling
Story Telling
We all have to tell stories sometimes, don’t we. In this lesson we will discuss about Story Telling i.e. how to create a narrative.
Objectives:
After you complete this lesson you will be able to:
create narratives make your story interesting to the listeners.
Situation: Telling a Story from Pictures
We are all makers of narrative. We love to tell our own stories; we also listen to the stories of others. When some events take place in our lives, we put words around them and narrate them in different ways. These stories are our own personal stories; they take form from the incidents, accidents and encounters of our own lives.
If some pictures are given, looking at them you can develop a plot. So, through pictures you can make up a story. You also visualize incidents in your mind and narrate them.
Review Questions :
Now that you are given the pictures and cues for a story, try to narrate them in your own words. You can use the dialogue form, for example, you can begin the story in the following manner :
“One morning, Shati was reading a comic book. She loves to read comic books very much. Her dad entered her room to see what she was doing.” Dear student, now proceed on.
Review Questions :
Now give your story a title.
Situation: Elements of a story
We often tell stories in conversation. All stories share certain basic elements. They are:
1. References to times, places and settings
2. Characters involved in the events
3. Some sort of plot or series of unusual, funny or strange events that make the story interesting.
4. Some outcome or conclusion to the events.But a good, entertaining story often has, in addition.
5. decorations by the teller, for example, exaggeration, intensification, suspense or amusing details.
6. Features that make the story more vivid, such as dialogue, changing the tense from past to present.
7. Comments on the events, telling us how people felt, what their attitude to the events was.
8. Some sort of relevance to the conversation in which the story is told, for example linking it to an earlier story or something someone has just said. Also remember, good opening and closing make a story interesting.
A story may begin in the following manners
1. A man who tried to break into a house on Friday….
2. Once when I was driving along the highway…
3. While I was having tea in a fast food shop last week…
4. Once, when I was going up in a lift…
5. I was walking in the town recently when…
Situation: Narrating a dream
Dreams can be a good source of narratives. In dreams we seem to have no control over the matters that take place. We fall asleep and then find ourselves on a journey in unknown forests or strange places. In our dream, we experience a variety and range of feelings, sometimes pleasurable and sometimes painful.
It may be so horrible that we can wake up screaming feel still part of it. Sometimes we can narrate the dream very clearly. These narratives are not made consciously but they come directly from our dreams. Dreaming is something we all do. We all make narratives of some kind in our minds as we sleep.
Read the dream in section G and then try to narrate a dream that you have dreamt recently.
While narrating a dream, remember that the following questions may arise.
1. Where were you?
2. What happened?
3. Who else was in the dream?
4. How did the dream end?
In the following sections, you will find some narratives by some famous authors on their dreams.
Situation : A few dreams
Katherine Mansfield’s Dream The first night I was in bed here, i.e. after my first day in bed, I went to sleep. And suddenly I felt my whole body breaking up. It broke up with a violent shock – an earthquake – and it broke like glass.
A long terrible shiver, you understand – and the spinal cord and the bones and every bit and particle quaking. It sounded in my ears – a low, confused din, and there was a sense of flashing greenish brilliance, like broken glass.
When I woke up I thought there had been a violent earthquake. But all was still. It slowly dawned upon me – the conviction that in that dream I died. I shall go on living now – it may be for months, or for weeks or days or hours. Time is not. In that dream I died. Katherine Mansfield, Letters and Journals 1919.
Hugh Walpole’s Dream
I was in the market-place of a town. It was filled with people, talking, buying and selling, all very happy and busy. Suddenly, as though a cloud came over the sun, the air was cold and the noise died down to the twittering of birds. Men and women looked about them. Everyone was silent. I myself felt a trembling expectant fear.
I looked about me, wondering why I was so apprehensive, and found that the place was emptied like a bowl of water. It was dark and cold. Not a sound. Something told me to run for my life but I could not move. Then, from a side street, a little procession came into the square. A woman was carried on a kind of stretcher that also resembled a barrow.
Two men in black carried it. They were followed by a small group of quite silent persons. And in front of the stretcher was a tall, thin man with a sallow face. But what was especially horrible about him was that his head was twisted to one side as though his neck was broken.
They advanced without a sound, their feet making no apparent contact with the pavement. There was a cold silence everywhere and great but crowded emptiness as though somewhere hundreds of people were holding their breath. I was exactly in the path of the little procession. I knew that if the yellow-faced man touched me something appalling would follow.
But I could not move. The man and the stretcher and the followers advanced nearer and nearer. I was in an agony of terror. I woke and my pyjamas were soaked with sweat. I have never had a more horrible dream.
Hugh Walpole, 1993
Situation: Autobiography
Another form of narrative is an autobiography. We may attempt to make the narrative of our own lives in the form of autobiography. This sort of narrative may begin with the earliest memories and move slowly forward through childhood and youth to the point where we are now. Look at the example of the earliest memories of the French writer Nathalie Sarraute as recorded in her autobiography “Child” in Section I.
Situation : Autobiography of Nathalie Sarraute
Outside that luminous, dazzling, vibrant garden, everything seems to be covered in a pall of greyness, it has a rather dismal, or rather, a sort of cramped air … but it is never sad. Not even what I still remember of the nursery school… a bare courtyard surrounded by high, somber walls, round which we marched in Indian file, dressed in black overalls and wearing clogs. Here, However, looming up out of that mist is the sudden violence of terror, of horror… I scream, I struggle….
What has happened? What is happening to me? ‘Your grandmother is coming to see you’… Mama told me that … My grandmother? Papa’s mother? Is that possible? is she really going to come? she never comes, she is so far away.. I don’t remember her at all, but I feel her presence in the affectionate little letters she sends me from over there, in the softwood boxes with pretty pictures carved in them, whose hollowed-out contours you can trace with your finger, in the painted wooden cups covered by a varnish that is soft to the touch… ‘When will she come? when will she be here/”.. “Tomorrow afternoon.. You won’t go out for your walk…’
I wait, I watch out for her, I listen to the footsteps on the stairs, on the landing… there, here she is, the bell has rung, I want to rush out, I’m stopped, wait, don’t move… the door to my room opens, a man and women dressed in white overalls grab hold of me, I’ve been put on someone’s knees, I’m being held, I struggle, they press a piece of cotton wool over my mouth, over my nose, a mask, from which something atrocious, asphyxiating, emanates, suffocates me, fills my lungs, rises to my head, dying, that’s what it is, I’m dying…
And then, I am alive again, I’m in my bed, my throat is burning, my tears are flowing, Mama is wiping them away… ‘My little kitten, you had to have an operation, you know, they took something out of your throat, is was harming you, it was bad for you… go to sleep now, it’s all over …’
How long did it take you to realize that she never tried – unless very absent-mindedly and clumsily – to put herself in your place? … Yes, curiously enough that indifference, that casualness, were part of her charm, in the literal sense of the word, she charmed me … No word, however powerfully uttered, has ever sunk into me with the same percussive force as some of hers. ‘If you touch one of those poles, you’ll die.. -Perhaps she didn’t say it exactly in those terms… -Perhaps not… but that was how it reached me.
If you touch that, you’ll die… We are going for a walk somewhere in the country, I don’t remember where, Mama is walking slowly, on Kolya’s arm… I am behind, rooted to the spot in front of the wooden telegraph pole… ‘If you touch that, you’ll die, Mama said that…
I have an urge to touch it, I want to know, I’m very frightened, I want to see what it will be like, I stretch out my hand, I touch the wood of the telegraph pole with my finger … and, immediately, that’s it, it’s happened to me, Mama knew it, Mama knows everything, it’s certain, I’m dead, I run up to them screaming, I hide my head in Mama’s skirts, I shout with all my strength: I’m dead…
they don’t know it, I’m dead… But what’s the matter with you? I’m dead, dead, dead, I touched the pole, there it’s happened, the horrible thing, the most horrible thing possible was in that pole, I touched it and it passed into me, it’s in me, I roll on the ground to get it to come out, I sob, I howl, I’m dead — they pick me up in the their arms, they shake me, kiss me… No, no, you’re quite all right… I touched the pole, Mama told me… she laughs, they both laugh, and this calms me…
Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood.
Situation: How to tell a story
Storytelling is an interesting affair. Using voice, intonation (rise and fall of voice) and gesture, the storyteller engages the interest of the audience, and once engaged, the audience often shows their appreciation by interest and joining in parts of the story.
A storyteller is to be a keen observer, remembering the great stories of the society and must have the ability to keep them alive in the imagination of the listener. As you now know the techniques of story telling can also attract an audience when you are narrating. The whole thing is very interesting, isn’t
