Guidelines
Session #5: IMAGERY
Part B:
Paving the way to the actual telling of the story
Imagining the story fully means creating a store of sensory details in your
mind about the storyline itself. This does not mean that the storyteller is going
to convey all this sensorial experience to the audience. On the contrary, details
may certainly overwhelm the listener, as we have discussed deeply in previous
modules. The point of working with mental imagery conjured in the
storyteller’s mind is to construct a sensory pattern that will uphold the actual
telling of the story.
The creation of imagery entails a process through which the storyteller
imagines the whole story he/she is going to tell.
By images, I mean all sensory modes, especially: visual, auditory and
kinaesthetic ones; not just visual.
Telling from their own inner imagery will enable the storyteller to produce a
vivid believable tale. As with a personal anecdote that we may share with a
group of friends, we, as storytellers, may resort to our sensory experience of
what happened to be able to tell it.
So, the idea is to construct our own set of images of the story, as if it were an
internal film and, from there to tell.
Storytellers don’t tell only from words. They tell from their own inner
images of the story.
This may explain why in orature, there are several versions of the same story.
It is because each teller tells from this internal imagery frame. Since very old
times, the more spread the tale, the more versions of it there have been. Take
Little Red Riding Hood, for instance. How many versions of this traditional
story have you come across? Countless versions! Each time this or any other
story is told, a set of mental representations created by the teller come into
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play, allotting personal traits and qualities to the tale. These individual
characteristics each teller includes in their version of the story are primarily
connected with their own personal experience of life, that is to say: to their
own life story. It is the narrator’s own story interacting with the story being
told.
Now, these unique features provided by the storyteller may display themselves
through the choice of words used as well as from the movements or gestures
made, the eye behavior projected, the tonalities of voice and the use of
silence, etc. All these performative resources spring from what this narrator
has imagined in the process of creating mental imagery: the internal
representation of the story.
You could be the greatest of actors or actresses but, without mental imagery,
your story runs the risk of appearing artificial or memorized. Most important,
you may also be in danger of disconnecting from your audience, as you may be
too concerned about remembering the exact words in the story. The idea is
that your version sounds real and feasible, as if you have been a protagonist or
witness of the story. Listeners will then perceive a sense of reality that seethes
through the inner sensory details created by the storyteller.
You need a mental imagery framework to be able to connect with your
listeners.
One of the main fears of a storyteller is to forget the story in the middle of the
actual telling of it. Mental imagery will also work as a scaffold to hold on to, in
case you go blank when telling the tale. I usually tell my students; “Resort to
your images. Trust you have the story inside you.” It is impossible to forget
the storyline if you have conjured a sensorial basal pattern of each of the
scenes in the tale.
Once you’ve created your own mental representations of the scenes, you are
not likely to forget the story.
At this point of the Storytelling Online Course, we are about to carry out a key
storytelling procedure: Mental Imagery Creation. As I mentioned above, it is
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Thanks to this inner sensorial framework that the storyteller will be able to
connect with the audience and narrate as if he/she has been there.
The Three Main Imagery Modes
Visual images: They are the ones that most people find the easiest to
conjure. They fall into various
categories: Mainly shapes,
colours, sizes, light and
darkness, distance and
perspective, speed at which
people or things move.
For example: Look at the
character of The Fall of the House of Usher arriving at the house on
horseback. Observe what he is wearing, the way he moves, the colour of
his hair, eyes, etc. Focus on the horse: is its fur shiny, dark, compound?
Is it muscular? Is it walking or galloping?
Auditory images: These include: sounds & noises, background sounds
(such as the wind or any
other produced by natural
phenomena), silence, tone
of voice (of a character, for
example), pitch, volume,
articulation, intonation
patterns.
For example: Listen to the
scene when the protagonist of The Fall of the House of Usher arrives at
the house. Listen to the horse’s shoes steps against the ground; listen to
the storm, to the sounds of the horse against the wind. Maybe the
protagonist says something and you can hear his voice. Focus on his
voice features: pitch, articulation (how he pronounces the sounds,
accent, etc.), volume, rhythm and pace.
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Kinesthetic images: They are the most rare to evoke. They have to do
with temperature, texture, body posture, muscle
tension, muscle laxity. Is the character erect,
stiff, bent, weary?
For example: Feel the scene when the
protagonist of The Fall of the House of Usher
arrives at the house. Is it cold? How does the
wind strike against the man’s face and body?
How does she hold the reins of the horse? Is
there tension in his arms? How does he hold
himself? Is he stiff and erect or bent and weary?
Is his skin rough? How about the horse? How heavy is it? What about its
muscular tension? How strong are movements that this animal displays,
etc?
The Transfer of Imagery
The Transfer of Imagery:
“What actually takes place when a story is told? There is a transfer of
imagery. Before the story is told, you – the storyteller – have mental images
of the story. You see, hear or feel the events of the story you are about to tell.
After the story is told, the listeners have created their own mental images if
the story, too – but not necessarily in exactly the same way you did.”
Doug Lipman, Storyteller
There is a cause-and-effect mechanism that is ignited through imagery
creation. If the storyteller makes their own images, it causes the listeners to
call up their own images too.
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As a result, the listeners will be very busy constructing their own sensory
scaffold of the story. They will be eager to listen to the storyteller, because
they will need the information produced, to be able to confirm or discard what
they have imagined. The key to enable this process to take place is to convey
the facts along the story in such a way, that the listeners will be able to
process, compare and contrast their own imagery with what is being told.
Consequently, listeners will be participating actively in the storyline, filling the
descriptive gaps, which the storyteller has discarded on purpose, with their
own inner images. In this way, eloquence is also carried out by the listeners:
At the same time as that of listening to a story, they are creating their own
inner version of that same story. (See image: The Listener’s [Link], in the
library under Module 5 – Part B)
The art of the storyteller lies in administrating the information in the story in
such a way that the listener will get the necessary elements to create their
own imagery and confirm or discard each image, as the story unfolds.
As language teachers, at this moment you may be worried about the level of
the students and their comprehensive competence. Simply bear in mind that
you are not only going to tell the story with your words but also with your body
and voice. I will help you out in this respect through our face-to-face meeting
through Skype in Module#7.
Good news!
The transfer of imagery, both verbally and/or nonverbally, is practically
inevitable. A word, a gesture, a certain voice trait will immediately lead the
listeners to mentally represent something triggered by the former expressions.
In her chapter: Visualization, language learning with the mind’s eye*, Jane
Arnold mentions that Neurologist Antonio Damasio has pointed out that “the
neural basis of knowledge is dependent on image formation, which seems to
occur not in one particular site in the brain but rather in a parcelllated manner
in different neural locations.” This may probably explain why imagining fully is
so memorable. Later, Arnold describes what she considers “an essential
condition of mind” by quoting Damasio again: “the ability to display images
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internally and to order those images in a process called thought.” In this same
chapter, Arnold goes a step further when she says, “The importance, then, of
images for our mental processes should not be underestimated. They help us
make sense of and organize incoming data.”
In a nutshell:
Images are not in the least skin deep! It is very important to
work on these inner representations of the events in the story so
as to enable the listeners go along their own inner processes of
image creation, apart from enjoying the storytelling event.
And last but not least:
Conjuring personal mental representations of events will
certainly evoke emotion as well. As described above to create an
image, we need to resort to our own experience. Life experience
is loaded with endless emotions that will surely be spurred as the story is told.
Image and emotion are strongly connected.
So, what makes an oral story memorable, is not the choice of words by
the storyteller, but the transfer of imagery and the emotional impact
produced by it.
* Arnold, J. 1999. Affect in Language Learning (Cambridge University Press)
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