Tail to Tale to Tell
Moving from my own Theater of the Mind to a tale worthy of telling
Telling a story to a live audience comes more naturally to some. To be a raconteur who can spin an engrossing tale is a form of performance art that I’ve enjoyed as an engaged listener more than once, but I’ve never considered myself a natural storyteller. However, I’ve often wondered why it’s easier to remember and recall stories over factual details and information — at least for me. According to Thomas Newkirk, when we read, we naturally look for meaning through causation; the narrative form of a story is a series of causes and effects, one thing leading to another. So it makes sense that in a way, we use stories not just to entertain us, but to explain, make sense of and ultimately understand things in our world — and ourselves, too:
“We need stories, not simply for some aesthetic pleasure, but to reassure ourselves that we live in a comprehensible world.”
So then…what if the story to be told is a personal one?
How does the storyteller tell her own story if she isn’t even sure what her own story is, and what it means?
And how is that story different when digitally told to a digital audience using audiovisual media as the medium?
In tackling this digital storytelling project for EDC 534, I found myself wavering between states of creative insight and unproductive overthinking. Is this the right story to tell? How can I tell it, if I don’t even understand it? And if I settle on one form or style, will that ultimately “work” as a narrative that is both personal and universal?
Ask me to tell someone else’s story, and I embrace that as a creative endeavor worth tackling. Yet ask me to share a personal story of my own choice, and I find myself rooting around in my mind for something tangible enough beyond childhood memories and familiar anecdotes to piece together like the ragged fragments of a mental crazy quilt.
I have been telling audiovisual stories of the dogs I’ve fostered for the last several years through short bio-narrative videos to accompany their online profiles posted on pet adoption websites. Now, this is a story I feel confident telling, and initially wanted to profile the day in the life of a foster dog as my own digital story for this project. Inspired by this PSA-style persuasive video advertisement for Save the Children, I immediately played a video storyboard in my mind, starring one of the They Have Right to Live Rescue’s newest foster dogs, Toby.
Yet, I knew that I couldn’t tell his story in a personal way, since I am not his human foster — and am still learning what Toby’s story will be. Although it will be Toby’s personal story and universally representative of the journey a foster dog takes on its path to a new life, his story is still unfolding.
So that left me with my own personal fostering experiences-turned-singular story.
The problem: I wasn’t quite sure what story to tell and how to tell it, once I settled on dog fostering as the theme. I’m no stranger to introspection, but am not someone who usually lets those thoughts leave the comfortable amniotic theater inside my own mind. And my relationship with fostering has experienced some real highs and lows since I formally began fostering about eight years ago. I’ve had thumb surgery after being bitten accidentally in a dog fight, to having one foster dog escape my yard and go missing for several months, to currently fostering one dog, Barnaby, for over two years now because of his special needs (i.e., incontinence) and lack of anyone willing to adopt him. When reflecting on all of these fostering experiences and particular foster dogs I’ve had in my life, I felt that an essay format made sense — but not one linear story.
After drafting some anecdotal thoughts and potential mini-narratives, I decided to work in reverse: Instead of writing a script, I began with the cloud archive of images and videos I’ve curated through fostering, wading through them all chronologically until I helped myself remember my own narrative relationship with this pseudo-addictive-imperative non-hobby of fostering dogs.
As our class colleague and friend Mariana Ochs has wisely shared, we need to “ask a story how it wants to be told.” So I gave myself over to this audiovisual collection and listened to what they shared with me about what story I should then share. Once I had the images and videos that resonated with how I mentally visualized my fostering narrative, I used those to create a skeletal storyboard for my script. I had to see all of those dogs’ faces again to reactivate the memories connected to them, like looking through an old photo album from childhood.
While my shared digital story is definitely “selective and incomplete” (Hobbs, 125), and likewise reality has eluded its structure because the reality of my fostering experience is more complex and multivocal than I myself even truly want to acknowledge or understand, what I have come to understand through this highly creatively challenging endeavor is that it’s more than just creating to learn…it’s creating to live. If we don’t stop to think of our own stories as a way to understand ourselves and our place in the world, then I’m not sure if we can truly appreciate, comprehend, and connect with the stories around us.
To quote Joan Didion, “We tell stories in order to live.”
References
Didion, J. (1979). The White Album: Essays. Simon & Schuster.
Hobbs, R. (2017). Create to learn: Introduction to digital literacy. John Wiley & Sons.
Lambert, J. (2010). Digital Storytelling Cookbook. Center for Digital Storytelling.
Newkirk, T. (2014). Minds made for stories: How we really read and write informational and persuasive texts. Heinemann.
This post and video project were created for EDC 534: Digital Authorship as part of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Literacy at the University of Rhode Island.
