'Structure in stories' - week 2 of a course from by the Cambridge Storytellers

Week two of the story-telling course, in the wonderfully atmospheric space of Cambridge's Michaelhouse Church and Arts Centre - big enough to give you a real feeling of performance, and yet intimate enough for us to work in pairs and small groups without any difficulty.

Cambridge Storytellers are a wonderful group of people, talented storytellers all, who come together to celebrate, practise and encourage this wonderful art. Folk tales, new stories, retellings of people's lives - all sorts of shapes and stories are told at the monthly Story Circle.

And now, in the darkest part of the year, they're organising a series of story-telling classes, taking novice story-tellers through on a journey

I was first inspired to join the classes after hearing Marion Leeper recount an elderly Cambridge man's memories, in story form, at a local history celebration in a graveyard (I have some wild nights out). I then tried my hand at a bit of storytelling in the Story Circle (sharing a wonderful old Viking tale, translated by my old friend Ralph O'Connor), and am now working on the craft during the story-telling course.

This week's class focused on structure. We looked at the idea of the 3 part structure - beginning, middle and end - identifiying the structures of first various folk tales and myths, and then the stories that we'd all brought. It was felt-tip and paper time, and we drew out our stories as cartoons, ready to analyse the structure without getting caught up in the language.

I'd 'brought along' two stories - one, a set of reminiscences of a local woman that I'm shaping into a story, and second, a fully worked out tale by the great 19th century Yiddish writer Isaac Peretz. The Yiddish tale fitted perfectly into the 3-part structure, but I soon realised that part of the problem with my local-history story is that it doesn't have a proper end. One task for the week is going to be finding an end! On the other hand, Marion had also suggested that the three parts themselves, particularly the middle, Marian said, can in turn be divided into three parts. I was glad to realise that the middle of my tale already separates nicely into three parts.

We next looked at tracking the characters' ups and downs, drawing graphs across the story outline with their changes of fortune. If we had two contrasting protagonists, Marion suggested, the graphs might form mirror images of each other - the hero's triumph is the villain's downfall, and vice versa. Again, I realised one of the issues with my local-history story - a real lack of change of fortune. After a bad start, my main character currently seems to continue on a fairly even keel for the rest of the story, which isn't keeping the listeners' attention, although the individual incidents are good. Definitely something to think about and work on, before next week's class on 'creating a setting'. 

To find out more, see http://www.cambridgestorytellers.com/