The Palace of Stories

I’ve happened upon a new way of recording stories recently!

Most of the stories that you will currently find in the Palace of Stories catalogue are actually retellings of stories that I told at my children’s bedside. The Sun’s Message, The Handkerchief’s Story, and about 70 others were all created by first listening back to the recordings I made at bedtime and then re-telling them in the recording booth I have installed in a shed at the bottom of my garden.

In recent months I had been getting restless with this way of creating material, finding less and less enthusiasm for it. Finally, this summer a new form emerged: I’ve started simply going into the studio and telling the story live, i.e. with no idea of what’s going to come.

This is how I usually tell, whether for children or adults, it’s the Intuitive Storytelling method I’ve been developing for over 17 years (for more on this, listen to my recent talk at the Norre Vosborg Storytelling Festival in Denmark). The strategy of listening back to an old story and then retelling it was a bit of an aberration, but it worked well for a time. But this new form is more exacting.

And that’s because I’m treating this studio recording as if it were a live performance – that means no pauses, no edits, no rewording. All of these sap the energy of the telling, making it cautious and buttoned up. I’m looking here for something wild and flowing. So sometimes I might stumble on a word, but I do that when telling live also, and don’t bother with it here. This raises the energy of the telling.

I’ve spent over 20 years creating audio recordings that have no slips, coughs, slurred words or other verbal stumbles. As soon as I make a fumble like that, I simply leave the recorder running and repeat the offending sentence. But this entails a lot of recordings that are substantially longer than the final edit, and hours and hours of working on those sessions on the computer afterwards to remove all those bum notes and replace them with the fault-free versions.

I feel like I’ve had it with this strategy. After all these years I’ve developed a low tolerance for audio editing on the computer: I only want to do what’s really necessary. And further, my telling style is now fluent enough that I can tell a whole story pretty much without these slips and slurs. What little there are simply add to the atmosphere, I think.

And that’s the other thing that’s changed: my confidence has grown to the point where I can actually stand behind such tellings and say “Yes, it’s NOT the BBC, or some actor reading a children’s book without an audible slip, but I no longer care!” I think my strength is in the telling, and the telling comes alive when it’s real and unknown and alive.

The Lazy Husband was recorded like this. If your child is aged seven or older, I hope they enjoy this story as much as my son Luke did!

Visit the story page.

This morning, Luke and Lara and I went to the recording studio and I told them this story. I’m really excited about this new way of working! Instead of re-recording stories that I have told them at bedtime, I’m going to seek to record stories live, in the moment of telling.

This has always been the primary way that I tell, this re-recording process was always a bit of an anomoly, and one that I was growing less and less inspired by. I feel positively electrified by this approach, within 10 minutes we had a brand new story, perfectly recorded and ready to add go on the website.

I’m drumming live in this story, as I have been for a month or two whenever I tell live to adults or children, as well as shaking some indian bells strapped to my ankles. I like how the rhythm adds to the story.

And this is a sweet story, too, about how a foolish sailor boy saves his ship without trying. “Doof” is a wonderful German word, meaning “stupid”, that is quite frequently used in our house to describe something really dumb. I love the sound of the word, and we all usually laugh whenever one of us uses it. So here’s a story about a Doof, and how such characters are often actually wise, or at least more helpful than we might suppose.

Visit this story page.

This is a live recording from my children’s bedside! Normally I take the best stories that I’ve told Luke and Lara at bedtime and re-record them in my recording studio. But this one was simply too good. I was obviously in an especially good mood, and for some reason had plenty of energy. I don’t think I could improve upon it!

Bedtimes are in many ways the worst times for me to be telling stories to my kids. It’s the end of a long day (we usually wake up around 6am, and bedtime is sometime after 7pm) and we’ve just cleaned the house, cooked and eaten supper, which is usually pretty exhausting. Sometimes after eating, Stella and I play accordion together while the children play. In recent months this has seemed to work really well, they actually let us play several tunes without interrupting (it used to be that we would be lucky to get just a couple of tunes in before someone would come running, injured or enraged at some injustice the other had just commited). Now we can play for twenty minutes or more without being disturbed.

The only problem with that is that the kids tend to get more and more excited the longer they play and the closer to bedtime it gets. So that by the time we get to actually going to bed, they are high as kites, and hard to bring down.

I don’t like using stories to do so. Well, I guess it beats yelling. But ideally we’d all be calm and settled, and I’d have great energy.

On this occasion, it was me who had the wild energy, not them! But there’s something lovely about having their giggling in the background. This has me wanting to find quality time in the day to sit and tell them a story, when we’re all calm and awake, and nothing else is happening.

I’ll look into that soon…..

Visit this story page.

I use a lot of big words in my stories. For example, just recently I used extravagant, ostentatious and conspicuous in Jim and the Colourful Coat. And I threw in the shorter but equally uncommon gourd, gradient and plateau when telling Counting to a Hundred. I know it’s not conventional, but I’ve never been able to shrink my vocabulary for children, not when I was telling regularly in Primary Schools, and not now that I’m recording stories for the Palace of Stories.

Partly this is because, as an intuitive storyteller, I need to lay my hands on words fast, and my job is made easier by having a big vocabulary (and by the English language having so many words to choose from!). But it also comes from a hunch that I’m helping children stretch their own vocabulary this way. Children pick up the meaning of a word from the context it’s in. And even if they don’t pick it up straight away, they’ll get closer to understanding it every time they relisten to the story. My son Luke asks me the meaning of any word in one of my stories that he doesn’t understand, and I imagine children listening to my stories are doing the same with their parents or older siblings.

And the flow of the story is not interrupted by such words. The other words carry the story along. Once a friend brought his Brazilian girlfriend along to one of my adult storytelling performances, at a time when she had a very shaky grasp of English. At the end, she came to me with a beaming face, “I understood everything!”

If we are engaged in the story, we are actively involved in creating its momentum. A few new words here and there are not going to stop our enthusiastic meaning-making. Rather, I can think of few better ways to learn new words.