Using the Art of Storytelling to Enhance Your Public Speaking

Using the Art of Storytelling to Enhance Your Public Speaking

What was the first story you remember hearing as a child? Little Red Riding Hood? Sleeping Beauty? Snow White? Hansel and Gretel? Johnny Appleseed? Maybe something from the Bible ... like the story of Noah and the Great Flood or Moses leading the Pharaoh's chariots across the Red Sea? Regardless of what your first story was, chances are you have a cherished memory of a parent or older loved one reading or telling you a story.

Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture, across every land as a way to entertain, educate, preserve culture, and impart moral values. Through stories, we use words, images, and sounds to convey the details of events, both real and imagined.

Storytelling differs from reading in that the oral tradition - the habit of handing down a story, whether it was an anecdote or a tall tale - required committing the stories to memory, and then passing them down, generation to generation. Once we developed written language, though, we largely lost the art of telling storeries. And it is an art.

I had the privelege of attending the final evening of the Mesa Storytelling Festival this weekend. Now these weren't campfire ghost stories or the jokes you hear at the start of a Toastmasters meeting. These were storytellers who have honed their craft to weave word pictures that leave you laughing till you cannot breathe. Each of the tellers, as the MC referred to them, was diverse in their ethnicity, skill, and style. One wove a tale of her granddaughter's first outing to the library, where she proceeded to strip naked and run through the stacks, a literary pixie gone mad. Another told the folktale of a Japanese woman's awesome "skill" at breaking wind. We heard one man's tale of the weeks of insecurity, research, practice, and nerves involved in the preparation for his first kiss. We heard a story of Baby Hawk's efforts to learn to fly.

However, my boyfriend and I both agreed that we preferred the Native American woman teller, Dovie Thomason, who told an epic folktale of how death came to the world because First Woman needed to have the last word in her every conversation with First Man. It was funny and wise and insulting and breathtaking and tragic - and her telling of the story was nothing short of magical.

Although I'd taken a storytelling class a few years back from my good friends Steve and Resa Ferreira, I was completely unaware until this weekend that there is a Storytelling Institute at South Mountain Community College. Enchanted by my experience this weekend, I am intrigued enough to want to investigate the program further ... and perhaps sign up for a class or two.

I find storytelling fascinating because it seems to me to be the perfect marriage between the art and spectacle of a poetry slam and the professional presentation involved in public speaking. Ever since seeing a poetry slam competition in the spring, the winners of which were headed to D.C. to represent Arizona in a national contest, I've begun approaching public speaking from a new perspective. There are so many different methods - and so many ways to improve. Some professional speakers take standup comedy classes. Some focus on technicalities like vocal variety and perfecting their stage movements and gestures. Others are adept at developing audience rapport, while still others master the INSPIRATIONAL PERSONA.

But what I am starting to see is how these art forms of poetry and storytelling - generally held in strict abeyance from anything as boring as professional speaking (and vice-versa, no doubt) - can truly enhance our ability to connect with an audience. If you're a professional - or aspiring professional - speaker, I highly advise getting yourself to a high-caliber poetry slam or a storytelling festival. Open your eyes, ears, mind, and heart - and I promise you will not only learn a lot, but you will be delighted and awestruck in the process.
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For answers to your questions about writing, editing, marketing, or design e-mail Laura or visit Write | Market | Design where we specialize in teaching our writers to think like marketers!
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The Three Most Dangerous Words in the English Language: "I know that"

The Three Most Dangerous Words in the English Language: "I know that"

How open are you to learning new things? While I've no scientific proof of this, I'm willing to bet that those who succeed are much more open to new ideas and possibilities than those who think they already know everything - or that their way is the only way.

When you say "yes" - or at least "maybe" - an endless array of possibilities belongs to you. When you say, "I know that," you are not only saying "no," but you are digging in and proclaiming, "You can't teach or give me anything new because I'm already all full. There's no room for any new|different|inspired ideas." It's as though the metal shutters slam closed with a reverberating "CLANG!"

So imagine being 20 years old and thinking you know everything. Perhaps it's just a human right of passage, a phase we all go through. I have relatively few regrets in my life, but one of them is that I didn't listen to my college advisor when he told me I needed to take more poetry. "No, sir, I don't. It sasy right here in the course catalogue that I can graduate with my degree in nonfiction writing with two poetry classes - and I've taken two poetry classes."

My advisor put on his glasses and examined the line I pointed to with my know-it-all index finger and said, "Well, I'll be damned." He knew he had lost the argument, but he tried valiantly to change my mind. His exact words were, "You will regret it later if you don't take more poetry."

And my know-it-all response was, "No, I won't." I hated poetry and was terrible at writing it. It was boring and I just didn't see the point. So, at the time, from my very limited vantage point, I thought I knew how I would feel in the future. Was I ever wrong!

Turns out, sometimes it's a good idea to listen to the older, wiser advisors in our lives. Particularly since this advisor happened to be none other than Richard Shelton.

Richard Shelton is an Arizona writer, poet, and emeritus Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona. He has written nine books of poetry; his first collection of poems, The Tattooed Desert, won the International Poetry Forum's U.S. Award. His 1992 memoir, Going Back to Bisbee, wond the Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1992, became a New York Times Notable Book, and was selected for the One Book Arizona program in 2007. In 2000, Shelton received a $100,000 grant from the Lannan Foundation to complete two books. You can practically count the living poets who get paid for their work on one hand - so this accomplishment alone is astonishing!

If that weren't enough, Shelton's poems and prose work have appeared in more than 200 magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and The Antioch Review and have been translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Polish, and Japanese.

Back in 1974, Shelton established a writer's workshop at the Arizona State Prison, and a number of books of prose and poetry written by men in Shelton’s prison workshops have been published. His latest book, Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer details this experience. It won the 2007 Southwest Books of the Year award.

So now I can't help but wonder what I could have learned from this man, if I had simply had the common sense not to think, "I know that." While he doesn't come to the top of my mind as one of the people who's been most influential in my life, I really wish I'd heeded his advice back then: "You need to take more poetry." My life is great now - but it could be richer, fuller, more lyrical, and filled with much more beauty and joy if I'd known to avoid the three most dangerous words in the English language. The good news is that it's never too late to start learning something new!
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For answers to your questions about writing, editing, marketing, or design e-mail Laura or visit Write |
Market | Design, where we specialize in teaching our writers to think like marketers!
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