Story Swap
Sep. 27th, 2008 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreTo round off the day (and keep me from finishing the mystery I'm in the middle of), I went to a story swap at Ralph and Margaret's tonight. It was a pretty small group - them, me, Bill, Jane, Tim, and Adam. Bill had a rather cute joke which I will steal tell to people I tell jokes to. (Who are not, in general, the same people I tell stories to.) Ralph and Margaret had tales related to their trip to Alaska. Tim told his watermelon story and got a lesson about freighters from Ralph in the process. (It had to do with a detail about rudders. Note to self: don't tell stories involving ships to guys who were in the Navy.) Adam had a pretty interesting piece about Benjamin Franklin. I hadn't known that Franklin taught himself to swim from a book and then invented flippers to swim faster.
I told "Meeting Gandalf" for the second time. It's coming along, though not quite where I want it to be yet. But it always takes several tellings before anything is. At least I'm actually working on new material.
We also had general chitchat about storytelling, particularly about whether or not one should memorize. I'm not a fan of word for word memorization, in general, but there are certainly times it is appropriate. It's essential for a couple of stories I tell (one in rhyme, another which is a 400+ word tongue twister). The danger is, of course, that it's harder to recover from a distraction. My general rule is that if somebody says you should never do something, they're wrong.
I told "Meeting Gandalf" for the second time. It's coming along, though not quite where I want it to be yet. But it always takes several tellings before anything is. At least I'm actually working on new material.
We also had general chitchat about storytelling, particularly about whether or not one should memorize. I'm not a fan of word for word memorization, in general, but there are certainly times it is appropriate. It's essential for a couple of stories I tell (one in rhyme, another which is a 400+ word tongue twister). The danger is, of course, that it's harder to recover from a distraction. My general rule is that if somebody says you should never do something, they're wrong.
