By and by see whether you know the story. Let no mistrust born of book dependence and neglect of the constructive imagination daunt you. Boldly sketch in time and place, introduce the first characters, suggest the motive of the action, start the action, carry it forward to climax and solution, wind up the whole. Now criticise your product. Is it the thing you meant it to be? Thackeray tells us his characters and plots got out of his hands and finished themselves. Is it the tale as “’twas told to you,” is it an improved version, is it a new story? One and all may be in place.
Some will feel that they have spoiled the story. They have bungled the structure through unskillful placing, or omission of necessary details. They have dulled life, dimmed beauty, obscured truth for lack of words. Well, there is no harm done as yet. These students, studying again the parts in which they failed, will appreciate now more thoroughly play and interplay of character, detail and course of action, vivid word. The cat in “The Bremen Town Musicians,” they will note, is capitally described (in some accepted texts) as having a face that looked like “three days of rainy weather;” Snow-White and Rose-Red were “like the rose-bushes in their mother’s garden;” they will not miss in “The Cat and the Mouse” the cat’s sly description of the pot of fat and the apt names he gives his bogus godchildren. In this way the appropriate word or phrase will come to them easily.
The question often asked, “Am I to hold myself to the text?” is interesting. It applies of course only to artistic texts, not to formless source material. Some people contend that this destroys the spirit of story-telling, making the art mechanical instead of creative.
Story-telling is creative effort, never mere repetition of the letter. It is creative effort, whether you make live again something produced by another, or make live more abundantly by perfecting matter and form produced by another, or make new life. The question cannot be answered offhand. If it were true that the text form, the composition and diction, in which you found the story, were the perfect reflection of its life and that the story suffered no change in your comprehension of it, and that it were your intention to pass it on without modification or loss to the child, and that he could receive it without change in form, then the answer appears to follow: you are to be faithful to the text. In some cases the form in which the folk tale is found has suffered through translation, in others it may be intrinsically faulty; in many texts of “The Frog Prince,” for example, the Iron John incident is too detached and very much out of perspective. The story-teller who can make it better should do so, or who feels prompted to give the children another product from old materials will use them, though the folklorists will forbid him to palm off his product as old-world lore. Any training in story-telling that does not give outlet and direction to such ability and to originality neglects an important obligation to the student. It is notable, by the way, that it is the student with the literary artist’s instinct who is surest to “get” the style of any good original he may be reproducing. Proper simplification of standard texts and the question of adaptation to younger and older audiences will be considered later.
Are we not inconsistent in our attitude toward form in language? We profess to recognize reverently an intimate relation between the matter and the manner in the sculptor’s, the painter’s, the musician’s art. But we constantly deny any integrity to language as a medium of expression. We do not, to be sure, attempt to tamper with the form the great poets gave their message. Indeed we “get” the verse running through the simple prose tale, although it is scarcely less artless than is the prose. But everyone because he can speak in words appears to feel competent to tell the prose body of the stories in “his own words.” Now, every word in the folktale may not be so necessary to its thought as very minute details in Shakespeare’s or even in Kipling’s or Andersen’s or Stockton’s form are considered to his thought. But there is such a thing as folk-story style, easy, loose sentence liberally sprinkled with ands and sos, picture-making word, distinctive epithet, recurrent jingle, rhythmic swing. It is surprising how insensible students are to it. Yet it is due largely, no doubt, to the best of all causes, the belief that the story is to be given living form by the teller. Dull rote memorizing will not of course do this. The method of study set forth suggests how the story-teller may easily develop sensibility to folk-story style and easily train himself to “do,” or “catch,” it.
Let us not be afraid of a due regard for form. Right attention to form is not testimony to the worth of the superficial. The poet says, “The soul is form and doth the body make.” Let us see to it that we make the language body of our story by clear reflection of its spirit.
The question of oral interpretation, or oral form, the more important aspect of form, while properly a matter to be settled by the student during the stage of preparation, is here more conveniently considered under the next head.
Telling the Story
This is truly the stage of creation. No matter how familiar you made yourself with the story in the privacy of your studio, you will now find happening something surprising. The story will come to your own ears and stand revealed to your imagination with the joy of discovery. The truth is, it was made to be shared with another, and you hadn’t it at all until you gave it away. What spontaneity rewards you! How you find yourself rising to the occasion—your own latent capabilities, the expanding possibilities in the story, the response of your audience!