Tag: best practices
-
Heart-Lifting for Disheartening Times – Storytelling is Satisfying WORK
•
It’s all so overwhelming and it seems everyone is tired, discouraged, maybe angry or cynical or depressed, maybe confused or disheartened…just weary. Each day during this April A-Z Blogging Challenge I’ll offer a short musing on an aspect or two of the many ways the ancient-yet-very-contemporary experience of storytelling – both listening…
-
Practice Makes Perfect?
•
Over and over again I’ve read the advice from writers that the most important thing to do, if you wish to improve your writing, be a writer, write… …the most important thing to do is to write every day. Some advise to set a daily length-target (so many words or…
-
EXcellence – Brief Note about Professional Storytellers
•
I love finding the storyteller in everyone! And nurturing it, and celebrating it! We’ve ALL got it! Much of my most satisfying work over the years has been in teaching and coaching others to find and celebrate their own storytelling capabilities. And I love, love, love story swaps – everyone…
-
Story Versions
•
Being able to deliver different versions of a story to different audiences… This is an important and valuable ability – both in terms of “stretching your repertoire,” and of respecting and responding to your audiences! As an example: There is a beautiful story from Israel I like to tell, that…
-
Stance – for Storytellers and Other Speakers!
•
Sometimes one of the biggest challenges for novice storytellers, it seems, is to learn to stand on their own two feet! 😉 Seriously – whether it’s nervousness, uncertainty about how to begin the story, or an established posture-habit – very often there’s a tendency to stand uncertainly, even awkwardly,…
-
Respond in Real-Time (Reprising a favorite blog post from March)
•
Responding to your audience, to the real-time circumstances around you – – this is one of storytelling’s most distinguishing characteristics. (This is what especially differentiates storytelling from theater, such as a monologue or “one-person play.”)
-
Others – Learn from Them!
•
When someone asks me for advice on how to get started with storytelling, I always answer, “Two things:” 1) “Tell as much and as often as you can” – you learn about yourself, about stories you like, about how to be in front of people…and 2) “Listen as much and…
-
Loud Enough! Please!
•
Please let me hear your story – Use a microphone! Too often storytellers think they “don’t need a mic.” Believe you me, I understand: not liking to be tied to a mic-on-a-stand while storytelling not liking holding a mic in your hand while storytelling not liking wearing wires while storytelling…
-
Hands – “Creating the universe in the palm of the storyteller’s hand”
•
“Behold the hands… …how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, mock and what not besides,
-
How My Dog Reminded Me: “Storytelling” is Not Just a Compliment
•
Yesterday – it was 70 degrees, blue-sunshiny, the ducks were paddling in the stream and the owls were hooting back and forth…the old doggie was enjoying stretching out on the still-dormant grass and soaking in the welcome early spring-ish warmth. Today – it’s been snowy-blowy out there, big flakes swirling…