able to remember a story that has been heard probably means that the previous story-
teller has told it in a memorable way, the words, sounds and meaning already shaped
and patterned for telling. With a story found in a book, the work of bringing it to life has
to be done from scratch. In either case, preparation involves considering how to make
the story your own.
Imagination is crucial and strongly linked with memory. Remembering a story requires
making a relationship with it and visualisation, essentially the act of making pictures in
the mind, is an important technique. (Significantly, storytellers have often been blind).
The mental pictures, on which the story-teller subsequently draws during the telling,
may be formed from all kinds of information, visual, aural, olfactory and textural. They
may also be fed by research.
Another primary technique involves getting to know the story’s underlying shape and
structure, a task which is also helpful in identifying different types of stories and their
inter-relationships. In America, Margaret Read Macdonald has published a source-book
for story-tellers giving motif indexes and guides to tracing variants.
Words are also important. In traditional story-telling, freshness and beauty are
important requirements but so is the reassurance of phrasings which sound wellsettled,
honed by time and repeated use. According to Alan Garner, the writer and collector of
folk-tales, ‘folktale is no dull matter that anyone may touch, but more a collection of
patterns to be translated with the skill, bias and authority of the craftsman, who, in
serving his craft, allows that craft to serve the people’ (Garner 1980:10).
The word stock of oral tradition consists of a wealth of phrases, refrains, formulaic
runs, dialect words and proverbs and riddles. Alliteration is a frequent feature: There
wasn’t a stone but was for his stumbling, not a branch but beat his face, not a bramble
but tore his skin’. Metaphor, too, is common. A person may disappear ‘into the night of
the wood’ or run ‘as swift as the thoughts of a woman caught between two lovers’. Also
available are patterned beginnings and endings. ‘Crick!’ says the West Indian story-
teller. ‘Crack!’ the audience replies. ‘There was, there was not...’ may be a starter in
Ireland. Other starters summon another kind of time: ‘When birds made nests in old
men’s beards...’
Endings soften the return to reality: ‘They lived happily, so may we. Put on the kettle,
we’ll have a cup of tea.’ One common Armenian ending reminds the audience of the
nature of the oral tradition: ‘three apples fell from heaven: one for the story, one for
those who listened and one for those who first told this story long, long ago.’
Particularly important with children are refrains and chants encouraging participation.
‘Run, run, as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man’: chanted or
sung, such choral forms are also a peg for memory. Where they have not been handed
on, it is worth making new ones. Where research can dig them out, it is good to bring
them back into currency, adapted or in their original form.
Bringing stories to life in these ways is something which children can enjoy just as
much as adults.
ReferencesColwell, E. (1963) Story-telling, London: Bodley Head.
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