Red Pen

My horoscope today advises me:

Capricorn: Be sure not to let anybody down
by holding up your end of an agreement.

Verbatim. Now, if I am to implement this as instructed, it would mean that by holding up my end of an agreement, I would be letting someone down. Which is to say, the game plan for today should be to drop the ball or otherwise flake out on an agreement, thus avoiding letting anybody down.

Hmm, what have I agreed to today? Not much. I could not show up at rehearsal tonight, if it would circumvent a let-down.

When you have an editorial brain, the whole world is you own personal mine field.

Learning To Tell Stories

In spite of my theatre background, I have never been successful as a conversational storyteller. Last night I finally figured out precisely what mistake I'd been making.

I was having a long, rambling conversation with a friend who is known for his outstanding storytelling ability. Both of us were telling stories, affording much opportunity for comparison in delivery style, and to see why a skilled storyteller captivates listeners while I very seldom make it to the end of a conversational story without "losing the house."

In listening to myself, and him, I became aware for the first time of my habit of prefacing every story with a huge spoiler, then giving backstory. Thus, my storytelling has usually sounded like this:

"Hamlet got killed. You see, Hamlet was a young prince and he really had a lot of problems..."

Having already fed the listeners the culmination of the story, the backstory just becomes yadda yadda, and about 80% of the time I can't hold listener interest and the subject changes before I'm done. It's basically newspaper headline-style delivery, and the backstory becomes optional and/or uninteresting because the listeners already know what happens at the end. That's a no-brainer that I should have figured out long ago, but hey.

Observed: The most skilled storytellers I know start more like this:

"So...Hamlet was a prince in Denmark, and although most people didn't know it, the guy was all kinds of messed up..."

We listeners are then drawn in with that hook, because we want to know just how messed up Hamlet was, or whatever story is being introduced. The storyteller compels us to shut up and listen to the end because he/she got us to invest the time to get interested. We might be thinking "this better be good," but we do listen until we're delivered an ending. Real narrative-style storytelling.

So, live and learn, I guess. This gives me opportunities, though, to nip that spoiler habit and learn to tell stories not just on the page, but in conversation.

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Aside: Link to full image of icon image for above friend who likes portrait photography:
Corona by J. Leopold