When I first started notebooking I was a pretty good story teller.  Or so I thought.  I could tell a few funny stories and I could tell someone about my day.  I was often told I was a good storyteller.

What I learned, through notebooking, was that people were more polite than I was engaging.  I learned good story telling and here’s how it happened.

I started by telling stories like everyone else, recounting what had happened.  That worked well enough but in retrospect I think I left a lot of people unsure of whether my story was done or not.  Of course, in my naive delusion, I probably thought I was leaving them speechless!

Like most adolescents, I basically vomited the details of a story.  Eventually I started writing in a notebook.  Not Notebooking as we talk about it here, mind you.  I would write down things in a way that I felt was clever.  It was not.

Basically, I was more, “Brevity is the soul of wit” and less “specificity is the soul of narrative.”  Eventually, my storytelling suffered as I lost the most important part of a story, the point.

Thankfully, through notebooking, I learned that stories weren’t stories without a point.  More specifically I learned this during the assessment phase.  Most specifically, it was that someone else had gotten a hold of my notebook (it happens).  She asked what these “stories” were about.  That floored me.  I had a notebook full of stories that she had read and had no idea what they were about!

Everyone knows that a story needs a beginning, middle and an end.  Notebooking taught me that a story needs a point.

Notebooking also taught me that a story needs an audience.  In your notebook, that’s you during assessment.  In your jokes, the audience is the listener.  If you’re reading Dr. Seuss your audience is most likely children.  Notebooking allows you to re-read a story of yours.  To hone it and focus it for a purpose or a point.

I knew I had improved my story telling when people stopped telling me I was a good story teller and started asking me to re-tell stories.

A not so final word about whining

The greatest gift notebooking can give you is to destroy that complaining little child that lives inside all of us.  This gift takes the form of re-reading your notebook and it making you cringe.  That cringe is the feeling of whining leaving your storytelling.