Somewhere in the future I see myself having a number of different types of programs to offer schools, libraries, festivals, and re-enactments. To do that I need to have a broader base of stories that I can tell. If I’m going to tell in schools, historical events become a focus of the types of stories that would best suit me. Being able to come into schools and present American Revolution, Civil War, Industrial Revolution, Native American tales, etc. would make me very marketable. Where do you find these types of stories, that I can learn and enjoy telling similar to the tales that I already tell now?
A number of the books I own deal with historical events and stories. We go back to writing again. I need to be able to take historical events that are written for readers and figure out a way to transpose them into a telling version. One way I might consider is to take a third person narrative and try to turn it into a first person tale. I do that with a couple of the stories that I tell now and find that I can really get into the roles.
The difficulty with becoming a teller of historical stories is that I feel you really need to know the framework of the story and where it is coming from. I’ve learned a couple of Native American tales, which when I used in my own classroom as part of my curriculum had no problem sharing. Now as I go out on the stage (so to speak) I feel uncomfortable even telling those tales in that all I did was get them from books. I am not versed in the Native American Culture and from readings that I’ve done, wouldn’t want to insult or incorrectly represent that culture.
Similarly as a teller of Revolution or Civil War tales, I feel that I need to know a lot more about the times, the people, the history surrounding the tales that I will be telling. This process takes time.
That is why I see the expansion of my storytelling career to be something that will evolve over time. I feel confident that I will succeed on some level and have the repertoire that will be necessary to get me hired more often.
The other piece to all of this is that I need to keep reminding myself, that as much as I would like to make an income out of storytelling, I do it because I enjoy doing it. Once it becomes a job not an avocation, then the pleasure of storytelling leaves. As the pleasure leaves, so can the spirit of storytelling.
To continued progress…
