Building a narrative vocabulary

Sharpen the tools of the mind: your use of the word.

One way to do this is to buy a Synonyms and Antonyms book. No, don’t trust a computer program on your PC. These words must be stored in your memory banks, not those of your computer. They must be words that you have practiced in some way to make them your own. You may have done this by writing them down in a sentence or three, so you’ve actually used them before.

Why Synonyms? Most people need to expand their vocabulary from a certain coarseness to a softer grain, one of subtlety. Take a look at these words.

They shine, they shine, they shine, they shine, they shine, they shine. They all refer to the way the eye can perceive an object, but there are subtle differences. Learn them. Practice using them all.

Another word with a huge number of synonyms is big. We have big, huge, gigantic, gigantic, gigantic, gigantic, colossal, huge -and grand- which is usually done to death. So use them all instead of just big or cool.

One could also generalize and say that the word ‘great’ is a lazy word, used for multiple purposes. Its excessive use really detracts from value.

Variety is ‘the spice of life’ when it comes to listening.

In a presentation, if the same adjective is used over and over again, it starts to ring in the listener’s ear. The thought occurs: “Is this the only word the speaker knows to describe this?” and once such a thought arises, the absorbed being is lost. The story goes out the window. I can’t stress enough that as speakers and storytellers, ‘words are our business tools’. The more we have in our toolboxes, the more adaptable we will be.

Short words produce more power!

Also, the shorter the words, the more power they convey. A generalization, perhaps, but it is true in most cases. Greek, Latin and French words can have a certain ‘pizza’. They can indicate an intellectual or highly educated man or woman. They don’t do much for the story. Take an example from the famous writer Ernest Hemingway who, in his story The Old Man and the Sea, uses sentence after sentence of single-syllable words. This is power!

Anglo and Norse words are the English words you want to add to your vocabulary: Leg, cut, hit, dab, stab, club, ran, fled, plot, plod, clod, plop, clot, clash clank, cliff, cllet, hey

Build your oral work vocabulary with short words.

Most of these words are familiar to you, do you use them? Learn as many short one-syllable words as you can. Three letter words. Then four-letter words: no, they’re not all swear words. Yes, most of them are Anglo-Saxon. And haven’t you noticed that so many long words are deliberately shortened nowadays? Information becomes information, police, police and psychiatrist, psychiatrist. We like short words!

Currency a system to learn short words. Don’t go overboard and say, “I’m going to learn fifty a week.” Learn two or three in a week. After a year or so you will have many more colorful and useful words to draw. And over the years you will add more. One thing about public speaking or storytelling, generally, the older we get, the better we get. Like creative writing, it is probably one of the few fields of activity in which we never “go beyond”. Discounting medical conditions like senility and Alzheimer’s of course. We are better at eighty than at forty. So give yourself time to become that master storyteller you may be imagining right now.

So how can we develop our preparation? How can we prepare for what is inside us to ignite in a spark, then in a flame, then in a conflagration? By having abundant fuel highly combustible. And what is this fuel? It’s a lot of useful knowledge that can be mixed, shaped, combined and manufactured in the mind. It was not without much foresight that the famous Scottish philosopher, Thomas Carlisle, pronounced

“Man is more original than can be adapted from the most resources.”

What Carlisle meant is that the more knowledgeable we are, the greater our chances of coming up with new ideas. He was implying that we should study broadly rather than specialize in narrow fields of activity. If he looks at the great inventions of the world, he will see that many of them were discovered or invented by people who were not in the particular field to which that invention could be applied. Alexander Graham Bell was a vocal physiologist, not a technician or engineer. Samuel Morse was above all an artist, a painter. The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, were bicycle mechanics.

If you have studied, say, Anthropology, Economics, Psychology, Engineering, and Zoology, you will probably have a much larger data bank for your subconscious to work with than if you spent your entire life studying Medicine. Most likely, you will be the one proposing the medical advances (even if they upset The Establishment) rather than the medical specialist.

Now you may not be an intellectual or a ‘brain’, but you have the opportunity to study a lot throughout your life, even if it’s just reading a lot. And it is this broad reading that will provide the fuel that will ignite the spark of intention. With the knowledge there, you are just waiting for intuition to tell you when the time is right.

The right kind of reading will help you as a storyteller.

If you want to become a good storyteller but have gotten stuck, or are stuck, in what you consider to be a pretty dull and monotonous life, read a lot. Escape to history. Most of us escape the visual stories presented on popular television every day. Change just a little of this by escaping into written history. That way you are in a much more active state. You are creating from the stories you read with images in your mind. Like I said, you will be in an active rather than passive state when watching TV.

I think it is no accident that those born before the advent of popular television in the home are much more imaginative and enjoy storytelling than our younger generations. Older people grew up on a diet of radio plays and variety shows where voices and sound effects came through the airwaves for them to create the images in their own minds. However, we all realize that we will not return to those days. However, it is possible to get stories that can be read or listened to, rather than viewed. Go for them! Grab the CDs they appear on. Put them on your iPod.

How to practice delivery.

Once again it is about the written word and reading. Here, you practice reading aloud. You read in such a way that your words are clear. You read in such a way that breaks are apt. You read in such a way that the meaning of the story is conveyed rather than just the information. You write it. You play it again. You time. You write it again. You play it again. You time.

If you want to go a step further and develop the voice you’d like to have for storytelling, practice voice exercises to broaden the range of your voice. If you’ve been hurt with a beautiful voice, use it to effect. If you feel like you would like to improve, then get to work on those voice exercises. There are many books out there that will tell you how to do this.

Telling the story.

Once you’ve started the story, don’t stop until you finish it. No asides that will take your audience away from the continuity; there are no explanations as to why this particular part is the way it is. The audience doesn’t want a description of how you put the thread together or where you got any particular information from. If you stop the continuity, it messes up for your listener. As he or she speaks, he or she gradually builds up a picture of the events. They could very well be creating the ‘personality and character’ of the hero of the story in their minds with the words you are saying.

Remember, these are your creations, and if the audience understands a hundred people, there will be a hundred slightly different heroes in those minds. It is a matter of semantics. Is the ‘dog’ a Kelpie, German Shepherd, Border Collie, or Jack Russell Terrier? They are still working on that as it goes.

Participation hearing.

That said, if the aside doesn’t detract in any way, but enhances the listener’s understanding, by all means use it. For example, in my story about a drone over Sydney, The Runaway Auster, I stop and ask if anyone here has noticed that when they get into a car accident, tow trucks arrive almost as if by magic. Not only is this humorous, but it allows the story to jump to how the media finds out about the situation without me going into lengthy gibberish.

What if you’re telling a series of stories?

In my own repertoire of stories I have threads that last between five and fifty minutes. On some occasions, particularly when one has to make some quick adjustments because my time slot has shrunk, I may switch to a shorter story (as long as they haven’t heard it before) or a series of short stories. If I do this, I take the advice of professional comedians. I use three or five, an odd number. Most of the time, three. The shortest often goes in the middle. I present my second best story first, weakest second, my best last.

Better? What is this better?

It depends on the audience. I determine in what order I think the audience will be excited about the stories I tell. For example, if the audience is made up of both men and women, I tell a story that would appeal to both genders first. The second could be directed at the men in the audience, the last at the women.

I generally tend to tell a story that is well practiced first. It is very important to win over the audience from the beginning. Stories that may be less familiar to me, maybe a bit controversial, and have more of a message than entertainment value could be placed in the middle. The last story is usually one aimed at their hearts. Not always, of course. But this is a general practice. You are, in a way, putting on a show.

If you have stories that have religious connotations, don’t present one of them first. The audience might well decide that you have come to preach. By all means, use these stories if you have them, but use them sparingly and after your audience has ‘deceived’ you and grown fond of you. This does not apply, of course, if you are speaking to a church group. They will probably love those stories with a religious flavor.

you forgot something in your history

Do not worry about it. Unless it’s essential to the plot, no one will ever know. It’s your story after all. Just keep going. Don’t apologize and then try to include it. That will create discomfort and a feeling that you are being made up.

Is it essential to the plot?

Then bring it back into the story with a phrase like that. “But what had happened before”, or “As it happened at that time a…” or something like that. I have done it before today. However, you must be so familiar with the story that you can do this and no one will notice that you ‘returned to put something essential’.

You have an interruption.

The microphone fails. An alarm sounds in the building. Again, if you know your repertoire of stories backwards, so to speak, as soon as the glitch is rectified, go back a sentence or two from where the interrupt occurred and continue. Don’t leave the story in the middle and start a new one. Finish the story.

I hope you have gained something from the tips given here.

Keep happy,