How to Practice a story?
When you are telling a story either to your kids or in front of audience members who are completely new to you, your job is to take the audience away to an imaginative world and make emotional connection. If you are able to do that through your narration, they can remember and reap the benefits of listening to your story. The result depends on how well you practiced that story.
This article helps you how to select and prepare your stories and deliver them in a memorable way.
Select a Story: It is always better to choose a story that interests you. Everybody says that as a first point. Yes! There is no short cut to this, you have to read a lot of stories and chose a few that interest you.
But sometimes (I think very often) we have to follow specified themes, contexts and cultures, so always we are not fortunate enough to tell our favourite stories, however we can select a story which is very close to our heart according to the theme. The more you are interested in the story, the easier it will be to remember it.
Reciting Vs. remembering a story
By the time you select your story you must have read it 1 or 2 times. Once you are done with selection process, take some time and read aloud the story a few times, it helps you to get used to unfamiliar words and their meaning, and also you can make sure of proper pronunciations before you start practicing it.
There is only one way to an elephant a bite at a time – Desmond Tutu
Practice as many times as you can. While you are practicing the story try to create strong mental images of your story so that you can remember it easily. Tall tales are very long so break the story into smaller sections, and create a link for each of them and then Practice! Practice! Practice!
Rather than learning stories through by heart each word, we should find key moments of the story and retell in our own words.
And don’t forget to do additional research on the story background; it helps you to be confident while delivering it and also they will sense your knowledge on the topic, which in turn helps you to connect with your audience and that connection makes your session as a memorable event.
Make it Alive
Once you are comfortable with the story then start telling it in front of a mirror with all your modulations and gestures, and make sure that your emotions, gestures and voice are inline, and that gives the opportunity to your audience to enjoy the story.
Happy Storytelling 🙂