Playing With Stories

[fauxklore]

I realized that I haven’t yet gotten around to writing about Kevin Cordi’s workshop, which was the weekend before Thanksgiving. I’ve known Kevin for ages, having first met at the Southern California Storyswapping Festival somewhere back in the early 1990’s. This past summer, we were talking at the National Storytelling Conference and he mentioned that he was going to be in the D.C. area and might be able to put on a workshop based on his new book, Playing With Stories. To cut to the chase, we were able to work things out and he led a small group of us in play on a Sunday afternoon.

The basic idea is that writing is not a good process for developing stories and that various creative play activities can be more helpful. Towards that end we did a number of exercises, some in pairs, some as the complete group. They ranged from identifying unanswered questions in stories (e.g. what did Little Red Riding Hood ride?) to having additional characters enter our stories to having a partner control our volume and energy.

Overall, it was a fun afternoon and three hours was enough time for barely a taste of Kevin’s process. I will suggest that this workshop is probably best suited for someone adopting a traditional or literary story, rather than working with an original story. (I deliberately don’t use the term "personal story" here, because I believe all stories are personal.) Kevin is interested in doing this in the D.C. area again, so stay tuned.

Comments

[john sherck (from livejournal.com)]

Always interesting to hear about the writing process. I'm reminded of an interview I heard recently with a comedian, talking about his process. Obviously he's ultimately working in an oral medium, but he pretty much never writes it down, it's more like improvisation and repetition, trying out different approaches, while he's walking or driving or whatever. I'm not saying that sounds just like Kevin Cordi's approach, just that it goes along with the idea of writing not being a good process for developing stories.

[fauxklore]

This was more oriented towards oral storytelling, by the way. There are differences between written and oral language, but Kevin did not really spend time on those.