prac·ti·cum
/ˈpraktəkəm/
noun
NORTH AMERICAN
noun: practicum; plural noun: practicums
- a practical section of a course of study.
Practicum, from the Latin practicus is a practical training or application of a skill learned over time. I went to school to become an ultrasound technologist, with plenty of practice and learning on my fellow students, but the real test of my incipient abilities was when I was thrown into the world to ‘practice’ those skills on live patients. My practicum was closely supervised. To the best of my knowledge, nothing I did hurt or killed anyone.
Phew.
Now I’m doing a practicum for my storytelling skills. Fifteen hours of telling in the community is required. Not fifteen tellings, fifteen HOURS. That means I could spend days researching and crafting and practicing for a six minute story, and I can list SIX minutes on my tally.
Six minutes.
I took ten years to write the first novel I got published. Note the difference. Not my first novel. The first novel I got published. That first published novel was the fourth novel I’d written. Six years, two more published novels, and a variety of smaller works, later, crafting a written story has become second nature.
Crafting a story for telling, rather than reading, is a little different. For one thing, I don’t get 80,000 words to tell my story. If I’m lucky, I get eight minutes. Those eight minutes have to demonstrate every turning I craft into my 80,000 words. I have six minutes to tell a story for The Storyline Slam at Changing Hands. I did the math. That gives me 5.5 seconds to hit every one of the sixty-four turnings I consider essential to a complete and cohesive storyline. Five point five seconds.
Nobody told me telling stories would involve so much math.
Though I am working on my last class and my last semester for the South Mountain Storytelling Institute’s certificate program, I won’t be walking with my fellow storytellers this May. I’m not extroverted nor organized enough to craft and tell fifteen hours at various venues outside of my classroom in one semester. So I’ll be working on this the rest of the year, through the summer during my writer-in-residency at Tempe Public Library, and on into the autumn and winter.
The Storyline Slam is my first time telling on a live stage since the pandemic’s start. And a hundred lifetimes ahead of the shaky, terror-stricken mess-of-a-teller who stood up in my first class and told a story in front of my fellow students for the first time.
Wish me luck.
(That first story was titled The Old Woman Who Wanted to Cheat Death. The story involved chicken feathers. The story I’ve crafted for The Storyline Slam involves weed.)
Onward.
Mindy Tarquini is the author of three award-winning and critically acclaimed novels that feature fables, foibles, fairytales, pandemics, past lives & lost loves. Find Mindy and her stories at www.MindyTarquini.com
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