“At the most basic level there are three steps to crafting a story,” says Ward Rubrecht.
The essence of creating art is in the crafting. While art needs creative play for inspiration, it is the work of perspiration that separates the amateur from the master. As a performance art, the storyteller makes the difficult look effortless with the work behind the scenes of crating and practice.
Ward Rubrecht is a master storyteller and winner of multiple Slam storytelling events. He knows the work of crafting a story: taking it from lunch table conversation, wrestling with it, and elevating it to the stage as performance art as a gift to the audience. Everyone has something to say, but not all of us are willing to put in the work to make it art.
From Ward Rubrecht, On Crafting Story as Performance Art:
At the most basic level there are three steps to crafting a story.
(1) First, you gotta go into your heart and muck around in there to find a story, and then you gotta pull it out of your heart and examine it with a critical and unfeeling eye.
(2) Then once you get the story outta your heart and into the harsh light of day, you gotta tinker with it. Get all the parts lined up just right, pick the right words, practice it ‘til it hums.
(3) The last part is, before you get on stage, you gotta remember to put the story back in its place inside your heart.
A critical error can occur at any point in this process.
(1) When you go mucking around inside your heart, you might not find a story at all. That’s not really a crafting mistake. You just never even got started in the first place.
(2) When you do find a story, you might fail to pull it out of your heart and examine it with a critical and unfeeling eye, in which case you’ll commit the cardinal sin of over-sentimentality.
If you do get the story outta your heart and take a proper look at it, you might not tinker with it right. Might not pick the right words, might screw up the structure, might not practice it enough.
(3) But the worst is, even if you find a story inside your heart and pull it out into the harsh light of day and even if you tinker with that puppy just right so it ticks along like a well-tuned watch, you might forget to put the story back inside your heart before you get on stage.
In which case it isn’t really a story at all. Just a bunch of words you say into a microphone, hoping somebody’ll buy you a beer afterwards.
~ by Ward Rubrecht, re-posted from FaceBook with permission from the author.
Find Ward Rubrecht online at https://www.wrubrecht.com/