Hey, ho, let’s go!
Reading Assignment for this class: “In View of the Dead” and “The Man on the Bridge” chapters from Teardrop Road
Tell the story orally
Telling the story orally will help you figure out where the stresses are. When you tell a story orally, you have an audience and you can look and watch the people around you. This is like watching readers read your book. If somebody is agitated and looking at the door, you know they don’t wanna be there. Then maybe when they’re reading that part of the story, they’ll be bored. What kind of changes do you need to make in order to capture that person’s attention?
There may be somebody leaned forward while you’re performing your oral storytelling. That person is on the edge of their seat. Pay attention to what you’re saying. It’s all good. It’s all important. It needs to be in the story. But more important than all of that, because all of that is subjective based on the actual person who’s listening to the story, more than that, pay attention to the mood. There’ll be a scent on the air.
A good storyteller is like the one who told me about Wolverine, you know, X-men, Wolverine. I heard a friend of mine in high school my freshman year trying to describe to me what Wolverine was and who he was. They were a Dungeon Master, and I’m going to credit them. His name was Donnie Aten. Donnie lives in Springfield. He teaches welding and he’s also an artist. I think he works in ink. He and I don’t talk anymore. That friendship rotted. But before it did, I fed on this description:
“Wolverine can track you from upwind. He can track an eagle by yesterday’s shadow. Wolverine will sneak up on you and snatch the scream from your throat.”
It’s gorgeous, right? It’s gorgeous description of a character. Now, I don’t know if that was actually written about Wolverine and he was repeating it. And I don’t know if Donnie Aten is so good that he came up with that on his own. And I’m not gonna place judgment. I don’t wanna know. If you go out, because you’re an X-Men fan and you’ve always felt partial to Wolverine, and you have to know, if you find out that Donnie Aten isn’t the one who came up with that description, I swear to God I’ll take a letter grade off of your actual grade if you tell me. That’s not a joke. That’s an absolute promise, because I’m crazy and I can get away with it. I don’t have to answer for myself. They knew I was crazy when they hired me. I don’t want to know.
Right there is a hateful comment of what we do in this building, in this university. It goes against everything this university stands for. You wanna give credit where credit is due. You want to quote the source. My encouragement is for you to go and quote the source. But in my life, I have the distant memory of a great storyteller. Let me hold onto it.
If there was a way that I could give a writing assignment and make you all search everything that’s ever been written about the character Wolverine, I would. But this is the thing, and this is why I brought up Wolverine, Donnie Aten, the rotten friendship, and welding. When you’re telling a story orally, it doesn’t matter. Oral storytelling is so fleeting. Imagine what would happen if I said, track you upwind, the Uncanny X-men, 22nd edition, track an eagle by a day-old shadow, Wolverine 7th edition, 1991, rip the scream from your throat. Uncanny X-Men, edition 78, page 7. As an oral storyteller, has that gotten in my way? It has, and it hasn’t done its job. It hasn’t captured the drama of the character Wolverine. It hasn’t painted the picture of what Donnie Aten was to me back then.
I was a high school freshman, he was a junior. I was the greatest Dungeon Master he’d ever met, and he’s obsessed with my stories. He’s got long hair and short cut bangs. He’s a quarter Japanese, thin. When he laughs, when Donnie Aten laughs, you wanna laugh with him. It doesn’t matter what he said. When Donnie Aten laughs, it’s in his face, it’s in his eyes, it’s in the way he moves his head. It’s in his shoulders. And his hands are doing other things. His whole upper body is laughing, and his hands are pointing, and they’re moving around.
Donnie Aten is a great storyteller. So when he described Wolverine, I wanted to believe they were his words that were being spoken. You’ll have people like that, when they hear you tell stories orally. You’ll have people who want to believe you and they wanna believe in you so that the experience they’re having is perfect.
But when you’re telling your story, there’ll be a scent on the air. I said that earlier. I wandered off with Donnie. Part of that freshman still wants to follow that junior into the world. I always will. But there’ll be a scent on the air. Wolverine can smell it, and you as an oral storyteller will be able to smell it as well. It is dank. There’s no freshness to this at all. It is heavy. Everyone listening to you tell the story, and you the storyteller, are all living within a humidity. There’s a certain whimsical factor to it as well because while you’re telling your story, anybody can get up and go to the bathroom. They can get up and go smoke a cigarette.
I can’t be there when you tell your story. I wish that I could. I wanna watch what you do with your hands. I wanna cling tight to every breath of your pauses. I wanna get caught up in that hand that reaches to stroke that perfect crease of bloody meat before the knife slice. I wanna know when you get loud. I wanna feel and strain when you get soft, and I wanna hear the difference in the butter of your words verses the mailed fist of your words.
I can’t be there. But I want you to do it. There is no measurable way that I can grade you on this assignment. (Isn’t that gorgeous? Isn’t that exactly what we’re talking about?) What I want you to do is I want you to go out there and I want you to tell the story of your short to a group of people. But there’s no way for me to grade you on that. There’s no way for me to grade you on that unless you wanna meet me on office hours, bring a few fellow students or just some guy you met on a corner with you, and tell me that story. There’s no way for me to grade you even if you did that.
I have a weakness. With some people it’s root beer. There’s a comedian. His name is Bill Burr. Bill Burr has a weakness with root beer. I have a friend, he has a weakness for any scotch. Any scotch, good or bad. He wants to taste it. My wife’s obsession right now is dark chocolate.
Did you know that dark chocolate has so much iron in it that it’s actually recommended for people with anemia? When my wife was in high school, in ’95 she had anemia, so now we buy her dark chocolate. She calls it her medicine. That’s not a jump right? Both dogs are asleep, I’m in a room covered in tapestries, and I just said that while my wife takes dictation. Guys, you should’ve seen the look on her face. My God. My weakness is Stevie Ray Vaughn. Stevie has a song called “Pride and Joy”. Lots of bass. Lots of drums. And of course, because it’s Stevie Ray Vaughn, he’s a blues guitarist, there’s lots of guitar.
And then there’s the way he sings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to the song “Pride and Joy.” It’s immeasurable. Listening to “Pride and Joy,” the recorded version, is like reading a book. You’ve got all that bass. You’ve got all that rhythm. You’ve got the scream of the cymbals. You’ve got the whine of the guitar. So many things are happening.
I’m gonna show you now a video of Stevie, but he’s telling the story like a musician instead of recording it. Musicians tell stories differently. This is a storytelling atmosphere Stevie’s in here. He’s using a different tool than he normally does. He’s doing it all a different way. Not writing it. Writing the story has all the motif of the bass, and the rhythm of the dialogue, and the scream of the description. Recording a song is like writing a book. You’ve got all the editing equipment. You can record one instrument at a time, one voice at a time. You can scramble it all up. Just like when you’re writing a book.
Writing a book you’ve got first draft, you’ve got to get your spellcheck draft, you have your editor. You’ve gotta go back and make sure all the characters are doing what they would actually do instead of acting out of character. And you have plenty of time. Just like recording a song.
Storytelling’s different. Storytelling’s live. You’ll see. You’ll see when I show you Stevie. You’ll see what I’m talking about in the video I’m about to play for you. What I’m gonna play for you now is just a storyteller telling you the story of “Pride and Joy.” Video quality is terrible. I hope that by the time I play this for you I’ve found a better version of this. But this is my Stevie Ray Vaughn telling the story of “Pride and Joy.” And just like every well-told oral story, there has to be a set up. So let me do that set up now.
We’re in early 90s. For so long, everything has been screaming wailing guitars, and dancing, and your mama can’t dance but your daddy can’t rock n roll. And then in comes the grunge movement. And MTV decides there is value in acoustics, the acoustic guitar, the hand played drums, and they create a television show called Unplugged.
Now I could play for you Aerosmith’s Unplugged performance of their song “The Train Kept A’ Rollin” but I’m not. I’m going with Stevie.
In the recording of his albums and most of his concerts, Stevie plays a 6-string electric Fender telecaster, sometimes a Stratocaster. When they found him dead, in his pocket was a picture of Robert Johnson, the greatest blues player that ever lived, and two ink pens, in case one of them ran out of ink and somebody wanted an autograph. I’m gonna give you my Stevie now. Be careful with him. Be gentle with him. He means a lot to me. I’m gonna play for you this extremely rare piece in which he doesn’t play the song “Pride and Joy,” he sits down and he tells the song “Pride and Joy” with a 12-string acoustic guitar.
Ever played a 12-string? I have. If you have, then you can truly grasp what’s happening here. And in our analogy, I will say this is a master storyteller with an instrument most could never play. And my wife sitting here taking dictation is my pride. And Stevie, with this 12-string, is nothing but joy. I’m really excited because my wife is writing this now. I’m about to have her write the words “play video.” She’s gonna throw in the link, then I get to watch Stevie tell you this story. My Rottweiler’s gonna sleep right through it. My bullador has a look he’s giving me. But me and my wife, me and my soulmate, are gonna sit here with all of you (because you’re coming too), and we’re gonna listen to Stevie tell this story.
If you watch this video, Stevie gets tied up twice in the power of the moment. Once when he starts talking about a man getting mean, he makes a fist. And another point is when he says the line, A love like ours will never get old. But instead of saying that line, he gets caught up in the moment. Love like ours will never, never, never get old. And the crowd goes crazy. Stevie is caught up in doing all of the things that he couldn’t do during the recording. And when you tell your story orally, you’re gonna get caught up in all the things you couldn’t do when you were writing it.
It’s not good enough. Fingertips are round. Keys on a keyboard are square, yet somehow they find a way to work with each other. It’s the same thing with oral storytelling and written word. I want all of you to go out, find a group, find a person, and tell your story orally. The beauty of this whole thing is that oral storytelling is fleeting and ethereal. So I can’t be there, I can’t see it, and I can’t grade it. The round bits of fingertips that you have are the oral storytelling. They’ll curl, they’ll point, they’ll swipe through the air as you are telling your story. And you have to find a way to translate that to the square keys on your keyboard.
It’ll help you figure out how to cut down description. When you’re telling an oral story, you do find yourself expounding on the story you’ve already written. But from what my personal experience is, the description has a tendency to go down. If you just listen to somebody tell a story and you’re not actually in the room with them, you just have their words, and usually the description is light. The description is lighter when you’re telling an oral story because you’re getting so much conveyed to the audience by the way you look at them, the way your body moves and your hand movements. So much is getting across to the audience that normally wouldn’t be there in a written story.
Do not read your story off of a paper. That destroys the whole point. Tell your story out loud from memory.
Talk to the wall
Went to debate/drama match over a weekend when I was a junior. I’d like to say I was there for debate and drama. It was actually a girl. I was doing a dramatic duet acting with some guy I hated, but I was really there for the girl. Teacher signed me up for extemporaneous speaking, which is standing in front of a group of people and making a speech about something you haven’t prepared very long for.
I didn’t take it seriously at all. My speech was seven and a half seconds long because I knew this, I was never gonna have to do any kind of public speaking or stand in front of a group of people ever in my life. I hadn’t been prepared by the drama teacher. I’m not even sure how he let me on the bus, to be honest. I think he was taking me with him because he wanted to recruit me to the program. I did have a dramatic duet I was doing with this guy that I hated. So you can imagine how practices went. I wasn’t even in the teacher’s drama class.
So, he tells me on the bus as soon as we get there, he’s like, “Oh yeah, and by the way, you’re also doing extemporaneous speaking,” which I didn’t even know what that was at the time. So I’m standing outside the door waiting to go in and do this speech I haven’t prepared for at all. And I just, I hear shouting start up. But it’s not really shouting, it’s just passionate speaking. Like this guy is really getting into this speech. And I look over at him. He’s all dressed up. Tie, vest, nice pants, perfect shoes. He’s got his suit coat folded over his forearm. And this guy is standing one and a half feet away from the wall in the hallway. No door near him. He’s just standing one and a half feet from the wall, staring directly at the taupe paint. And he was giving this fiery speech about something that was important to him probably, or that he was good at pretending was important to him.
I’d never seen that before. I’m a guy who has to have an audience. Sure, I talk to myself, we work it out, but nothing like that. When you’re practicing to give your oral storytelling, feel free to stare at a wall. Unfortunately, you do have to be part actor, but only part. Sometimes the more nervous you are, the better. Gives it all a shaky sort of urgent quality that you’re not gonna get any other way.
Be completely clean and sober. I live for it. I’m collecting stories that I can tell orally. I’ve got one called “The Nun.” It’s amazing. I’m very proud of it. I’ve got another one named after a Neil Young song called “The Needle and the Damage Done.” It breaks my heart. I’m still working on it. I’m still trying to perfect it. And the other day I told a third one, and my wife said, “This is another story that you could tell orally.” And then we partied for a while, which just means we sat and talked and laughed and giggled. And then we forgot it. I’m still hoping to remember. Because I think it might’ve been good. “In View of the Dead” used to be a story. I could make an entire class about the day that I told it, the situation we were in and how it went, but that’s more for a drama class than a writing class.
There’s a Tom Cruise movie called The Last Samurai. You may have seen it, it’s brilliant. Tom’s in this temple and he’s talking to this master samurai. There on the temple grounds is a cherry tree. And the samurai says, “if a man spent his entire life searching for the perfect cherry blossom, it would not be a life wasted.” That’s paraphrased. I play that over and over in my head.
When it hit me, the first time I heard it, I knew he was talking to me. I just didn’t know what he was saying. The movie’s clipping right along. It’s not very slow. And there’s a lot of really dramatic, really intense moments in this movie. When the movie was over, I figured there would be the part with the flag, the assault of the ninja clan, there were so many different things I thought it would be that really hit me and stuck with me when it came to that movie. I didn’t expect for it to be the cherry blossom moment. I still didn’t know why it affected me the way that it did. I carry it around.
I never carry backpacks with both straps, slid over both shoulders. When I was a kid, I was in a really rough elementary school. I was running away from this guy. He reached out, grabbed my backpack, jerked me back. I was on my back and helpless. I decided never to carry it like that again, so I always just sling it over one shoulder. That’s how I carried this quote from this movie. I carried it over one shoulder. I didn’t tie it to my back because I thought I’d be trapped by it. So I just slung this search for the perfect cherry blossom over my shoulder and walked around for years with it.
I set it down as often as I could, I went and did other things, but I always ended up slinging that comment back over my shoulder and walking down the lonely road of writing and storytelling, trying to thumb an audience.
Well, I figured it out. I was talking to my wife one day, pulled the bag off my shoulder and started going through the contents, the emotions and thoughts I had every time I thought about that scene, and I realized I was on the same quest as that man searching for that cherry blossom. I was trying to tell the perfect story.
It suddenly became so important to me. It seemed like such a daunting task, and I knew I would take it so seriously that I actually looked at my wife and asked her if I could spend my life trying to tell the best story, the perfect story. Because I knew it would take up so much of my time and my mind. She looked at me like I was crazy. I had in essence asked her if I could do the thing that I was constantly doing already. I remember when she said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I just burst into tears. Purpose. It seemed that I had actually accepted my fate, that I had agreed to some destiny that had been written about me long before I was real. And I embraced that a life spent in search of a perfect story is not a life wasted.
I got close once when I told the story of “In View of the Dead,” my first kiss in that haunted hotel. I got close another time, when I told “The Nun.” Both times, something, some tiny thing was wrong. Everything else was perfect. So I’ll do it. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking for stories I can tell orally and trying to find the greatest telling of that story I possibly can. Because a life spent telling the perfect story under the perfect circumstances to the perfect people, one pristine time, is not a life wasted. Something as fleeting as words on the air.
Well I’ve always been an oral storyteller. I started studying the greats of my family when I was about three. Since then I’ve been captivated by stories. Just absolutely captivated by them.
You should see how long it’s taking me to write this lecture. You guys have heard about the dogs over and over again, well they’re here and I’m in the tapestry room. You may or may not remember, we call it The Veil. You know I have hallucinations, so I can tell you that the entire room is rumbling and moving and swaying as it rides down some road, some road going somewhere. And it’s a Romani cart, it’s my Romani cart. This is how I can put it together. I’ve done all the research on ancestry.com and 23andMe, and I had a nonfiction writer who specializes in research look at all of it and sift through all of it and I came up with a theory and put everything together. This is what I found.
My grandmother was a full-blooded Romani and she must have been cast out of her tribe. I have no idea. I don’t know the politics. I don’t know the culture very well. When you start looking at the family that she built, you can start to see that she was trying to build a tribe. She trained me since the age of three until the age of eight, when I was separated from her, how to tell stories. She had a son who was a scholar, was brilliant, a few PhDs to his name, the ability to read and speak in, I think it’s nine different languages.
She had a craftsman, was able to fix anything. He was also an actor, a writer, a dancer, a lover. She had a musician, dancer, lover, prostitute. She herself was a masterful cook, a writer, a conwoman, a matron. Her granddaughter ended up being a fortune teller, an astrologist, a dancer, a clothing designer, photographer, a performer. She has another grandson who is a shaman. She has me, the storyteller, the teacher, the dancer, the leader. She has another guy who’s the, he’s a contact for the rest of her world. The front man that everybody saw. The alpha. The family is filled with monsters. The family went all wrong. But a tribe was the goal, that was the goal.
You can’t make a lot of money telling stories. I think the only real way to do it is becoming an actor. The stage will let you tell stories. So I became a writer and I’m satisfied with the outcome. I’m proud of my work. But, I’m still searching for that cherry blossom. Just the right story, just the right environment, just the right audience, the perfect telling of the perfect story.
My dream is one day to teach a joint writing/acting class, but I don’t even know if that’s possible. I’m allowed to dream though. Even if it’s not possible, I’m allowed to dream.
I want one more shot at telling “The Nun.” One more shot. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get it. But here in this caravan cart, I might be able to get a few people together who would be willing to let me tell my story.
Night in the woods
The night I told “In View of the Dead,” I was at a picnic table by a walking park. Trees all around me, middle of the night. There were a few stars peeking through the canopy, but for the most part they were blotted out. No moon. We got a 12-pack of beer, and we’re just talking, then it turns into stories. Everybody’s trying to tell the best horror story. There’s four of us. I let them go. I laid back. There were some good talkers, but I could figure out pretty quick that there were no storytellers here.
Two of these guys had grown up together. They were in their 50s now. They told this one story, it was done well. One of them is going through this terrifying experience, and then the door slams open and the other one comes in in the story. Soon as the other guy comes in in the story, they switch tellers. And the guy who just entered the room is now telling his half of the story. Tag team storytelling, it was really cool.
One guy’s marriage was falling apart and he was really drunk. His story crumbled pretty quick. It was not an original. He said it was Oscar Wilde, I’ve never read the story itself. He only remembered half of it. I slapped an ending on it. It was not the author’s original ending, but I couldn’t just let a story be half told. So I threw something on it.
Then I told “In View of the Dead.” When I was telling the story, I had a bottle of beer in my hand. I knew how much beer was in that bottle, and I needed the last swig to be directly after the story was finished. From the weight of it, I judged how many sips of beer it would take. That’s how many long pauses I had. The area was hushed. Nobody was saying anything. There were no animals moving. It was between seasons. I was the new guy to the group. The other three had spent time together before, and two of them had grown up together, as I said, and I was the guy only one of them knew, so they really had no idea what to expect from me.
I started telling the story. Pauses are just as important as the words, in storytelling. I’m gonna teach you later in the semester how to create long pauses in the middle of your written dialogue, more than just what a comma will give you. I’m gonna teach you how to do that, but first, first this.
I told the story, used the bottle as a prop. It wasn’t really a prop exactly, it was more like a pointer, I guess you could say. I waved it around a little bit, not like a maniac, but just to stress points.
I finished my story, took the last swig of beer. Nobody said a word. The whole group was stunned. I knew from experience that I needed something to break that daze. If we all just left, then people would have to walk around with that. It changed the whole atmosphere of the night. They needed an explosion. I’d been planning for that too. I slammed my beer bottle down on the table, and as soon as they heard that loud noise, they all exploded. That was close to the best I ever did. That was close.
There was another one I told in Milwaukee to Mentor and Marigold when we went to visit. For that one, I didn’t use a bottle or a glass. I used body positions. Every time I would get to a stressful moment in the story, or a beautiful moment in the story, I would take a few minutes to fidget in my chair as if I was struggling to find the very best position to give them the story. And it made it seem like the story was being served and I just didn’t know how to set it in front of them. It created the correct pauses and gave me a bewildered quality.
When I told “The Nun,” it was in the caravan room. We turned off all the lights, except a few candles, and we kept the ceiling fan on so the candles would not be still. They would be flickering light, wild dances. Above my chair hangs a hanging lamp with a weak light bulb in it that worked as like a spotlight almost. And on that one, my prop was the shadows. I knew if I leaned forward, my face would go into complete blackness. I had control over the light and the way my hands would glow golden at times. At other times they would simply disappear. So using that, I made the whole thing work.
It’s an art form, and you’re gonna try it, because it makes you understand your story much better than you ever could have otherwise. I’ve gotta tell “The Nun” again. It’s a good story. It has the potential. It’s the best I’ve done so far.
Oral storytelling is going to throw you a quantum leap forward in writing dialogue. If you pay attention to the way that you move as you’re talking, you’re gonna be able to learn a lot more about how to make your character move while they’re talking, learn where the stresses are and how to capture them in the work that you’re writing. Your dialogue skills fly forward once you’ve done enough storytelling. But for me I had to do it myself. I had to pay close attention and look at my oral storytelling through the eyes of a writer. And once I did that, that’s when things really changed.
On the way to class
If you decide to tell the story on the way to class, you should look like a mad person. I didn’t say this, and I’m gonna get it wrong. It might be a meme. It might be part of a story. It might just have been a Facebook post that I saw once. Imagine you’re across the street and you see somebody walking on the sidewalk. And then suddenly, their arms start flailing, their head starts moving, they start slapping themselves, they start kicking, they spin, wild eyes. They start slapping their face, rubbing their body. And then they go straight back to walking calmly.
What just happened? Come on, we don’t have a lot of time. Hands up. Somebody yell it out. What just happened? Well, according to this story I heard, this meme I saw, or this Facebook post, that person just walked through a spider web. If you’re going to tell your story on the way to class, in order to practice for your writing, this right here is what you should look like. As you talk, as you begin, you just stepped into a spider web. There is a spider on your body. Your story will decide what kind of spider, harmless, brown recluse, or the mighty black widow. But if you tell your story on the way to class, you better do this dance. And when you show up at my class, and you step through the gelled door, gasping on the other side, now nothing but a writer, and you look in the eyes of the fiend at the table, I had better see the wisps of spider webs on your face.
I never accidentally tell a story. I always purposely tell a story. I’m aware of every person’s face in the room. Exactly how I feel, the position everybody is holding their body, everything. I’m aware of all of it. And when I write, my dialogue is stellar because of it.
Reading Assignment
Reading assignment for next class: “The Four Queens” chapter from Teardrop Road
Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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