Tell Me Something Good

Make it Visual: Brainstorming Story Ideas by Bryce Barraza

If you’re like me, before you can craft a personal story, you kind of need a story idea. But what if you’re short on ideas? The good news is you have plenty of ideas –you just need to spark your memory to find them! 

Below are a couple of activities and templates that can help you spark memories and document story ideas. Making your ideas visual helps you better reflect on the sequence or location of events, critical crossroads within life, and potential characters of a story idea.

Crossroad Decision Tree

In the book, The Power of Personal Storytelling, Storyteller Jack Maguire offers the ‘Crossroads’ documentation activity. This activity helps identify turning point events or decisions that may have altered your life. The turning points events could represent changes that resulted in positive, negative or a combination of outcomes. This activity initially anchors your mind at a point in time –your age – or ‘when’ an event may have occurred. After brainstorming the turning points, you can then reflect on the characters involved in your life during the event, the resulting sequence of events, and the environment in which a decision or event took place.

For example, when I was 16 years old, my family decided to move from California to Phoenix, Arizona. Upon reflection, the decision was not exactly mine – it was my parents’. Although I have my perspective and understanding as to why we moved, as an adult, I may also want to ask my parents for additional insight as to why they made the decision. This event also introduced a slew of new characters in my life. Immediately following this turning point of moving to a new state, I was enrolled into a new high school and met my two best friends. The memories of this event – how the decision was made, what events happened after the move and the new characters that entered my life – can be the start of a story idea!

Where does your decision tree lead you? Feel free to try the activity using the template in the image at the top of the post!

My Story Influences by Dale McKinnon

Orality is why we are all pursuing the arts of storytelling. I never got to have a storyteller tell stories to my kindergarten and first grade classes. Or second, or third-grade class, or, come to think of it, any class at all. I realize that I first heard stories at home.

But almost all of us have grown up with family stories. I used to think of the stories as familial myths. The first stories in my life were from my father, about Prince Edward Island and Gloucester, Massachusetts, and my mother, about driving across the country in a ’39 coupe, with two children aged six and thirteen, in her fourth month carrying me; four souls to start a new life in San Francisco toward the end of WWII.

Our family storytelling faced strong headwinds with the advent of TV. San Francisco is where television was invented in 1927, but its growth was delayed by the war. By 1950 television sets began to become affordable for middle-class Americans. Six million homes at that time had TV sets. But radio was still the predominant form of mass entertainment and communication across the US since the content of television lacked variety and sophistication. On the radio I listened to 10-to-15-minute comedy sketches of Fibber McGee and Molly and the crime sleuth series, The Shadow. Dave McElhatton (KCBS radio) read the comics of the San Francisco Chronicle. The highlight for me was hearing the ongoing saga of Prince Valiant. However, I became a devotee (at five years old) of the very first animated children’s TV program (1950) called “Crusader Rabbit.” It consisted of 4-minute satirical stories, each with its own title, strung together to create a series.

I grew less fond of TV as it became ubiquitous. I couldn’t adequately articulate my dislike of TV. So, my father introduced me to “foreign” films and regional community theater when I was ten. Films like The Red Balloon, Mon Oncle (My Uncle), Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Wee Geordie and Tight Little Island informed my puberty and in high school my first boyfriend introduced me to Japanese Cinema and Akira Kurosawa. To this day I love samurai/kung fu movies and popcorn when I just need to be mindless. Here is Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa.

But it was in June of 1963, shortly after graduating from high school, that I first heard “Bert and I.” “Bert and I” is a collection of relatively short stories (4-20 minutes long) told by Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan, both Yale graduates, that chronicled the dry humor and quirkiness of the traditional folk of “Down East” Maine, told in a Maine accent. Dodge, the “I”, and Bryan, the “Bert” (Bryan was pastor-pilot that flew to settlements in western Quebec to collect stories and preach the good word) did extensive cultural and story research for “Bert and I” which was syndicated and published and introduced the regionally distinct Maine accent to the world. I am still moved by the dry hilarity of down east humor.

It was the success of “Bert and I” that inspired Garrison Keillor to create the famous Lake Wobegon series that started on radio in 1974. The weekly stories from “Prairie Home Companion” became a national phenomenon of self-deprecating Minnesotans that overestimated their capacities and qualities. At first, I found it funny, but after a while I began to feel uncomfortable hearing the contrived humor and put-downs of ordinary folks that flowed from Keillor’s story writing.

In 1997 Berns and I moved to Bellingham, WA, 25 miles south of the Canadian border, and discovered we could receive CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corporation), Radio One, from Victoria, BC in addition to CBC TV via cable. Every morning we would listen weekdays to Julie Nusrallah (a Canadian mezzo-soprano) host her classical music show, “TEMPO” on CBC Radio One. Forgetting that it was a weekend, I tuned into CBC and heard a man named Stuart McClean telling a story about Dave and Morley and their two kids, on a program called “the Vinyl Café.” I laughed until my eyes teared up. It became a Sunday morning ritual for me and Berns to listen to Vinyl Café.

It was unlike any other radio or TV program I’d ever encountered. And it was the first time I began to understand that relatively short oral stories (and some lengthy ones) could bring warmth and laughter into hundreds of thousands of lives, via radio. Years later I discovered that McClean’s unique storytelling style resulted from his efforts at overcoming a severe stutter in his childhood.

In format, Vinyl Café was a musical variety show with performances that ranged from famous Canadian performers like the McGarrigle Sisters, Gordon Lightfoot and Buffy St. Marie to local performers of the towns and cities to which the Vinyl Café production team traveled. The team consisted of researchers that spent a week ahead of the production crew, interviewing local residents to glean stories about the town, its history and notable citizens. McClean took that research and created stories that became part of the performance with the live local audience often laughing the hardest and loudest when they heard Stuart McClean tell it to all of Canada (and northern US states that could receive the programs). Within the 21-year life of the Vinyl Café there are over 400 episodes (the first in the US was via KUOW of Seattle). One episode actually took place on board the dome observation car of the transcontinental passenger train, The Canadian, replete with a live audience. Sadly, Stuart McClean died in 2016 of melanoma. All of Canada mourned, flags lowered to half-staff for a week.

What McClean did was weave together the various stories of the extremely diverse cultures of Canada, (Quebecois, Athabascan, Iroquois, Inuit, Italian, Scottish, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Parsi, Buddhist…), and did so in ways that allowed people to laugh at their humanity. McClean said “I have no agenda to spark…I just think there should be a conversation. We have something to learn from each other – we’re very different.” Canada’s favorite fictional family– Dave, Morley their kids, friends and neighbors–became the template to break down cultural isolation and barriers in the long process of assimilation in whatever form that would take and celebrated the tapestry of Canadian life without pompousness or divisiveness. And this is why, I’m now realizing, I am in class learning to tell my stories, thanks to all of you! I leave you with a Christmas story. 

The Power of Storytelling by Nereyda Martinez

On September 10th, 2019, my husband forced me to get out of the house to attend a workshop. It was a workshop held by a nonprofit for its sponsors. My husband had become a Sponsor by providing photography and videography for this nonprofit, so we were invited.

At that point in my life, I couldn’t think clearly. I was in what you would call survival mode. My daughter, who was my second child, was nine months old. I had hardly left the house since having her. I was overwhelmed with now caring for two children while supporting my husband in his growing business. The last thing I wanted to do was get out of my house and talk to strangers. He didn’t even tell me what it was! I basically went in blindfolded.

Well, what do you know? It was such a gift to speak and connect with other adults. We were told to tell stories. I ended up telling a story about how my marriage almost came to an end during my pregnancy with my daughter and how I realized all the work it’s going to take to keep our marriage thriving. It felt SO good to be able to share that part of my life and for the listener to be able to relate. I was also in awe listening to the teller who I partnered with. She told a story of bravery and strength as she had complications after giving birth. I was so moved by this experience.

That was the day I first met Liz Warren. On September 10th, 2019. I had no idea that in December of 2022, three years later, I would be taking my third Storytelling class, Fact-Based Stories. Storytelling has become such an important part of my life, but I never realized it until finally taking my first class with Liz, herself.

You see, I realized, as mothers, we need to share our stories and listen to stories of fellow mothers. This is how we normalize the hard stuff. This is how we connect and don’t feel so lonely through the ups and downs of motherhood. So here I am three years later using social media platforms and mom circles to share stories with other mothers.

And after taking Personal Storytelling, The Art of Storytelling and now Fact-Based Stories, I have become so empowered and motivated to strengthen my skills. Why? Because through these classes, I have witnessed first-hand the impact others’ stories have on us and the power of connecting with others who may have been considered strangers initially but soon after listening to their stories, have become people I deeply care about. They are now people who I see for who they are and have such a loving appreciation for what they’ve lived. They are people whose stories have left an everlasting impact on me. 

That is the power of Storytelling. 

(The image at the top shows Nereyda at the first workshop she attended holding her daughter.)