Flesh & Bones: different types of macrostructures

I attended on Saturday at workshop at the Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh. The workshop was called "Connecting with stories". It was an interesting workshop conducted with Sarah Perceval. Throughout the workshop we were presented with different ways of connecting with the story which we had chosen to tell.

I have often been puzzled by the constant tugg of war between learning by heart every minute detail of the story or the opposite approach, which is to determine the basics of the story and then depending on your life experience and the audience, let your imagination embroider around the story. The workshop addressed these tow questions in a useful manner although the topics got explored somewhat indirectly.

Deconstructing the Story. The workshop leader distributed stories to read and then made us select what she termed "the bones of the story". "Bones" are those elements without which the story would collapse or make no sense at all". "Flesh" are those elements that add context, or meaning, or embellish the story. I find the analogy of bones and flesh rather confusing becuase a squeleton would not be able to walk if the muscles would not be there to prop-up the bones.... but... nevermind. Each team had to work together to select the "bones" and the "flesh" and to our amazement, there was often quite abit of controversy over what was considered "bones" and what was considered "flesh". Some people felt very strongly that some "bones" were actually "flesh" and vice-versa. It also became very clear that depending on the audience, sometimes, "flesh" would be turned into "bones". All this discussion exemplified very clearly to me the need to work throuogh your story quite thoroughly and adapt it before presentation to an audience.

Storyboarding. After the discussion of "Bones & Flesh" we moved into representing the story linearly through storyboards. It was quite interesting to have the linear representation converge (or not) into the skeletal elements of the story. Several elements of my story for example fitted into just one or two main skeletal branches. The discussion then centred on the extent to which a storyteller can tap into personal experiences in order to unpack these "fleshy-contextual-embroidery" elements to an audience. Some people felt that the story had to have fidelity to factual elements. For example, if the story takes place in an an onlive grove and we feel that this embellishment is appropriate to the story and we have never been to an onlive grove, is it appropriate to use experiences of a Scottish pine-forest? here is where adaptation comes into play. I tend to favour throughough research. Having been both in olive groves and Scottish pine-forests, the experience is quite different in both, so although we are speaking of masses of trees, both experiences are definitely not interchangeable.... None-the-less, I found the use of storyboarding and "flesh & bones deconstruction" quite useful in helping me connect not just to the story, but to an audience.

Visualisation. Finally, we worked on visualisation of one of the elements of the story. This helped quite a lot becuase suddenly the imagination came into play and sensory elements like sound, taste, and feelings came into play. All in all, I thought that visualistion provided an emotional way of connecting to the materials within the story, and storyboards and "skeletons and flesh" techniques provided an analytical way of connecting to the story and the audiences.

Credits. The picture of the skeletons was taken by Wonderlane.


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