I just finished performing at the Forest Storytelling Festival in Port Angeles, WA, and had a great time. The other tellers were all very good (Lyn Ford, Robert Greygrass, Will Hornyak, and Alison Cox) and we complemented each other very well and had a great time. And while I was busy, I got out before the festival started and took a nice hike up Hurricane Ridge where I only got a little wet. The Northwest, you know. Picture above – it was really raining when I took the picture.
The stories were good, but I am thinking a lot about what happened in the workshop I gave before the festival started. I did a 2 ½ hour workshop on personal stories (anathema to all the European tellers, and those who are sick of hearing people talk about themselves). I talked a lot about trying to place a personal story in the context of myth so it would have resonance. That’s all good, but I also talked a lot about imaging – seeing the story in the mind’s eye – which I have considered essential to good storytelling. It’s how I work, and how I teach. But that’s where I ran into trouble.
One of the workshop participants, who has been telling stories for a long time, told me that he doesn’t see stories – he doesn’t have pictures in his head. I have run into this before, and usually have found a way around it. I have ways of tricking people into admitting they have pictures in their heads when they tell stories. It’s how I operate, and I suspect how most tellers, or writers (and certainly filmmakers) operate. I usually can get them to admit that they do.
But this one wasn’t budging. No, he insisted, he didn’t see anything, he just told the story.
I was confronted with a problem. I didn’t get it. As a workshop leader, I am supposed to know everything. He was messing up my workshop. And he wasn’t going along with my tricks. I was trying to get on to the next point, but here I was, with an embarrassing moment.
So I said (essentially), “Wow, I don’t get this. I believe you but I don’t get this. You see, or do things differently from me, and I don’t get it, and I don’t know what to say.”
I was confronted with a way of being that I did not understand, and I gave up and admitted it. “Seeing” the story is essential to my work, and I considered it universal, but here was someone saying there was another way to do it.
Rather than tell him he was wrong, I just said, “Okay with me – I need to understand it.”
After the workshop, he thanked me for affirming that his way of doing things was valid – he said it was the first time a workshop leader had done so. All I had said was “I don’t get it. I don’t understand it, but what do I know?” Who knows everything? Another workshop participant, a psychologist, came up to me and said that there’s a number of ways to experience things – it could be visual, but it could also be auditory, or it could be affectively – the emotions in the experience might give you the path towards finding the words. And afterwards, I thought about how smell or touch could do it, too. Diane Ackerman’s sensational (ha ha ha) book A Natural History of the Senses talks about this and suggests that smell is the strongest sense when it comes to dwelling in memory. Could you tell a story about your grandmother baking bread without having any images in your head?Well, evidently, even though I don’t know how.
Over the weekend, I had several conversations with my non-visual storyteller. At one point, he said he tried to feel what was going on in the story, and operated from that perspective. I understood that. My stories often start with a feeling that I would like to elicit – one I’ve had and want to evoke. And then, a day later, he told me that he was working on a new story and that morning he had tried to picture it and for a few fleeting seconds, he could see it happening in a way he hadn’t before. It was a small breakthrough. I think if I had just told him he was wrong, he would not have done that.
It got me thinking about what a visual culture we are – we are addicted to images, often at the expense of the other senses, which might provide a deeper experience.
This process is all very interesting to me. I take away at least two things from the experience.
First – I’m a better teacher when I admit that I don’t know everything. Teachers spend so much time trying to have all the answers, it’s very difficult to admit when they don’t. But when they do (or in my case, are forced to), something else happens. We can go deeper into the experience of learning – it’s a wide open space with no easy answers, and kind of uncomfortable. But it’s also very liberating.
Second, I was forced to recognize that there are ways of being that I do not really understand. This is a very humbling experience, especially for someone who professes to be an expert. I am a moderately synaesthetic person – music has colors to me, words evoke feelings, visual things may evoke smells – but there is still a lot that I just don’t get. It’s a big world, and I only understand a little part of it. I should shut up and pay more attention.
I said to my non-seeing workshop participant that I suspected the more we could draw on all of our senses, the better off we would be in our work. He may, in the long run, gain from his attempts to “see” stories in a way he never has before. It will probably make him a better storyteller. And I should probably be more willing to admit that someone understands the world differently than I. It will make me a better workshop leader, and maybe more than that.
What drives your creativity? Something else than image?
“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.” Ray Bradbury
Well done Bill! Nicely played. An excellent question, if it doesn’t start with the image, where else can it start? Not saying I have an answer, but I like the question.
Hi Bill,
Great post, thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I read, a long time ago, that your kids build you up to be a superhero and one of the first big disappointments, and sometimes emotional crashes kids have, is when they realize that you are NOT a superhero. Because I have a brilliant wife I know that there is so much more to learn, and although I try to be a superhero to my kids I also quickly and readily admit my short-comings with a little: “I have no idea, let’s find out together”. I use that in almost everything I do. It is amazing how much I do not know! Also with my kids I have found that when I am totally and utterly in the present WITH THEM things go smoother, we get on better and have more fun. I think both of the above is true of life and workshop teaching, or any teaching. If we admit our lack of knowledge it gives those who think we are all knowing and that they will never be as good as us a clue that that is not so and we all have stumbling blocks – that we are human. I will never forget the time I heard a VERY well known storyteller make a mistake, one who I have seen many times and thought them infallible. The mistake was minor and I doubt anyone who was not a storyteller would have spotted it, but it made me feel so good. Not because they had made a mistake, but because even they – god-like and universally known as they are – could make mistakes and it gave me permission to make mistakes!
Sorry, I kind of went on a bit there!
Thanks again Bill!
Simon
I see images, but I also see words. I love story, you know, but often while listening, I see the spoken words in my head as typed words as if I were reading a book. Yes, I know I am odd. It is part of my charm.
Anyway, as an educator, it encourages me to see you affirming each learning style. We do all experience life from different perspectives and in different ways, and the more we are willing to understand and embrace all, the more fun we all have!
Great blog.
Kay
Hi, Bill – I’m glad to read this great post about your experience. More of us storytellers-teachers need to understand, even embrace and celebrate, this I think. For several years I’ve been working in my “Deep Imagery” workshop with just this awareness…lots of stories I could tell you! About the best one: a few years ago I was all hot to emphasize this in an upcoming workshop; I had all these plans for oh-so-creative ways to “teach” my workshop participants about other-than-visual imagery…Due to shoulda-been-forseen circumstances (the workshop had been scheduled during finals week at the seminary) only one person other than the organizer showed up (!)…and she had been blind since birth-!!!!!!! What I can say is, she taught me a thing or two more about non-visual imagery.
*Really key, I think: to remember that “image” and “imagery” are not etymologically related to “vision” or “visual”…rather, to “IMAGINATION.” – !
In my workshops I have a wonderful guided-imagery exercise I take people through, and am careful to use that term: “guided imagery,” not “guided visualization,” and have learned to use terms and phrases throughout that either avoid or expand upon visual elements. I have another student who wrote out a fantastic articulation of his experience of being in a workshop and egged on to strive for finding internal visual imagery …and…just… couldn’t…do…it… He’s given me permission to share his articulation; if you’d be interested perhaps I could look it up and share it with you at some point – it’s a real insight for those of us who do experience primarily visual imagery!
…Imagination…images of all sorts…love it!
Thanks, Bill.
(and I think I’ll copy and paste this as a huge comment-response to your FB posting…some FB-storyteller folks might find it of some interest…) – Pam F
If you want to approach it from a bio-mechanical perspective : the percentage of our brains dedicated to the visual far outstrips that of the other senses .. Makes sense, then, that we use visualization as widely as we do, even for verbal storytelling (never mind those of us who are actually visual storytellers).
Spoken like a true photographer…
This was a really interesting read, Bill. Thanks for sharing your experiences (and for being a teacher who is also open to being taught!) It put me much in mind of Feynman’s “One, Two, Three…” story and experiment:
“By that experience Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people’s heads when they *think* they’re doing the same thing – something as simple as *counting* – is different for different people.” http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
Thanks Lynz (lyndsay?). Just read the article – I had read Feynman’s book but forgot that part. What a weird and wonderful guy, and a reminder that we’re all pin our own worlds, somehow.
You’re welcome! (Lynz sounds like Lynn’s, and is short for Lindsay, yes
) I met you at the Stone Soup concert with Aubrey and Elwood and Cathy and everyone…
Feynman was such an amazing human being. I’m glad we get access to his thought processes… I find this particular experiment of his to be such a great reminder that we all approach things differently, even things that we think of as simple and fundamental.
You’ve done it again Bill. How much better to continue the conversation rather than ‘win’ your point. Very cool to hear that you “see” colors–Hve you read “Musicology” (I think that was the title) by Oliver Sacks? Very cool discussion of this way of seeing. As for me, I “see” stories. This whole topic is such fun. Thanks!
I feel like “that guy” in your class.
I’ve only had one (in-the-flesh-in-front-of-me) storytelling teacher, and I think she was very visual as well. (Though in fairness she tried to emphasize kinesthetic stuff, too; but I learned that’s even further from my skill-set/earning style. *Eep!*)
Here’s what I think we (human beings) confuse: the technique of learning with the trouble of learning.
That is, I was one of those pseudo-blessed kids that didn’t have to try very hard to do well in school.
As a result, I’ve had to learn as a grown-up how to try hard. And any time something is hard, I have to ask, Is this what I should be doing? Is this HOW I should do it?
And my own insecurities will make me vulnerable to every (however well-meaning but) immovable teacher/book/article that insists THIS is how it’s done!
The thing I trip over may be the actual *work* of story-learning, and the time necessary to bring it down deep. I do try different techniques, but so much just comes down to time.
I see events as pictures and words, however, my very musical cousin always see stories and events through music, song and melodies. I talked with another friend, who likes to paint and everything she does is through art – not my word pictures – but through colors and different spatial ideas, that I can’t see, but I understand as she shares. It’s rather cool.
great piece Bill, for me sometimes a story starts with a yearning, a need to answer something that sits before the question, imagery is quick to start the process of an answer, or a way to pose the question through voice. and a story forms. like entering a room …
my friend ingrid has aphasia a condition that makes it difficult for thoughts to become words, she said before her aphasia she felt ‘i think therefore i am’ but now she knows we come from a deeper place , now she feels ‘i am therefore i think’