Telling Stories With A Jar of Pickles

In this blogging challenge, I was given three nouns to use, in any way I wished – the only requirement being that all three must be included under one subject. Lucky me. The nouns are: pickles, chills, and snakes.

Besides my bovine-oriented job as a milk harvester, I also spent a lot of time over the years working in schools as a professional storyteller and running creative writing workshops for the children as well. A hugely enjoyable job, I only reluctantly gave it up when I realized that Fibromyalgia not only put a stop to the active style of performance I gave – jumping around, acting my little heart out – it affected my memory so that I could no longer rely on being able to tell a story straight through, even the ones I’d performed for years. It is not a pretty thing to get half way through the story of the Magic Porridge Pot and realize you cannot remember the words to make the pot stop boiling. Especially when fifty adorable five and six year olds are gazing up at you like you’re the best thing they’ve seen that wasn’t on television.

But it was great work while I could do it, and the kids and I had a lot of fun in the workshops as well. Usually only having an hour to impart as much writerly wisdom into their darling heads as I could, I concentrated on the absolute basics.

Which funnily enough, are still the basics even when you’re grown up and calling yourself a proper writer.

First – and this was especially popular with the little kids – we would spend some time playing with language. Literally playing. I would tell them all about how wonderful and fun words can be, to say, hear, write – words like ‘pickles’, which if you say it often enough, actually kinda tickles inside your mouth. (Go on, try it, I bet you want to). Then we’d throw a ball around and whoever caught the ball had to say a word they liked – for any reason, whether for the way it sounded or what it meant. Usually I would have a room full of giggling kiddies giving me many great examples of onomatopoeia by this stage of the game.

The next job, for the older kids as well, was to work together to write a passage encompassing both action and description. But I had specific criteria for the description.

A lot of people, when they’re writing, only describe things using one or two of the senses. Showing what the character sees and hears are the easy ones, but to really make a scene come alive, what about the others? How things smell? Feel? Taste?

I always picked a scary scene for the older classes to describe – I found that when they were getting the chills, they were more apt to use their language and their senses more creatively. (Or maybe I just had more fun when we were writing about someone lost in the woods in the middle of the night, I don’t rightly know, come to think of it). But the whole thing worked a treat. Learning to filter scenes and action through all your senses is an important part of discovering how to write with life, depth and authenticity. Plus, the kids had a terrific time describing the dangerous slithering of snakes through the undergrowth, the pungent smell of damp earth, the gritty, sour taste of that soil in your mouth when you tripped on a hidden tree root, the sudden hoot of a snowy owl, the yellow light of a torch running out of batteries. We all had a great time.

I still do. Whenever I write a story.

Filed under: Writerly Workbox