The third and last step in story adaptation, is to prepare our story pictures for presentation to the children.
This step depends a good deal upon the children for whom you are preparing the story. If the children are foreign-born, you will need to put each story picture into a frame of very simple language. If yours are country children, you will need to put country images into the picture canvas. If they are city children, the canvas may need a few fire engines, parks and policemen to catch the children’s attention. These will be, of course, quite subsidiary to the real story interest which must be preserved at all events.
It depends, also, upon the person who wrote the story. If we are adapting Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, Eugene Field or any other master story teller for the special needs of our story group, we must use the utmost care in keeping the form of the author and preserving his marvellous English. Too often the story teller ruins a story in attempting to “tell it down” to children. It is possible to shorten a good story and still keep it the author’s own. It depends, most of all, upon determining the elements of action, dialogue and description necessary to make the story picture a fixture in the child’s mind. Children want to know “what happens” in each scene of the story. This constitutes all their interest.
These, to sum up, are our steps in story adaptation:
Read the story, analytically.
Select its necessary scenes.
Reduce these scenes to elements of action.
We shall find it helpful to apply these separate steps to some one special story which we wish to present to children and which is too long for our use.
There is no more beautiful story in all literature than Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf.” It is full of the sensory appeal, the colorful word picturing, the imagery, the ethics which we look for in a perfect story, but as it stands in the best translation, it is almost three thousand words long and so hedged about with Andersen’s beautiful, but adult philosophy that it is quite beyond the comprehension of children. As a result, it is seldom told to children and is one of the least well-known of the author’s fairy tales. Let us see if we can put it in shape for telling without, in the slightest degree, hurting Andersen’s style.
We read the story analytically and find that it divides itself into four scenes, all of which are necessary to preserve the story interest. These are:
1. Inge’s sinning.
2. Inge’s descent to the abode of the Moor Woman.