First-person narration

“ There must be no long explanation, no descriptive scenes and painful dragging in of the plot. Children do not care a rap for the creating of atmosphere. They do not care how long ago the story events happened, or why they happened. What they are eager for is a quick story appeal made the second that the story curtain rolls up.
Each story told to children ought to be selected having in mind its beginning. The story teller must ask herself another set of questions:
“Does the story interest begin with my first paragraph, my first sentence, my first word?” ”

“ STORY CLIMAX WE have found it helpful to liken the effect that a well-written, well-told story has upon a child’s mind to the appeal that a successful drama makes to an audience. We have discovered that the opening paragraph, the first sentence of a child’s story should have the quality that characterizes the scene disclosed on the stage when the curtain rolls up—compelling interest. ”

“ In addition to being the most popular form of discourse, it is the most natural. It is the first form of connected discourse of the child; it is the form employed by the uncultured in giving his impressions; it is the form most used in conversation. Moreover, narration is the first form found in great literatures: the Iliad and the Odyssey, the songs of the troubadours in France, and the minnesingers in Germany, the chronicles and ballads of England,—all are narrative. ”

“ It is desirable that the spirit of the story should be imposed upon the room from the beginning, and this result hangs on the clearness and intensity of the teller's initiatory mood. An act of memory and of will is the requisite. The story-teller must call up—it comes with the swiftness of thought—the essential emotion of the story as he felt it first. A single volition puts him in touch with the characters and the movement of the tale. This is scarcely more than a brief and condensed reminiscence; it is the stepping back into a mood once experienced. ”

“ Thus the form in which we receive a story from some old woman, or nurse, depends in a certain measure upon the ways and habits of the population which has preserved the tale. At the same time, the ingenuity and the memory of the narrator are important factors in producing the dramatic or moral tenor appreciated by the listener. ”

“ Yet, if the story requires that the reader be given a direct view of the spiritual workings of large numbers of characters, the writer must tell it in the third person and assume universal knowledge as to event and spirit. A mode of narration must be deliberately selected for each new story with due regard to its idiosyncrasies, and to make the choice correctly cannot fail to be of great advantage. ”

“ Every one of these stories begins with narrative, and every one is a perfect tale for telling.
Next in consideration comes the body of the story, which our rhetoric teachers taught us is a succession of events moving toward the climax. Until the climax is reached the oral story must be full of suspense. In other words, the hearer must be kept guessing about what is going to happen. The child does not care about a story in which he sees the end. He does enjoy hearing the same story told over and over again if it thrilled him at the first telling, because he likes to re-experience that thrill. ”

“ Straight narration, including the whole physical progress of the story, whether detailed or general, requires no color; characterization, including the process of individualizing a person as to his nature, as to his appearance, and as to his speech, requires one; the process of touching in setting requires another; the process of preparing a reader emotionally for succeeding events requires a third; the process of intensifying atmosphere—if the story is of atmosphere—requires a fourth. ”

“ Contemporaneous with what may be termed a renaissance in story-telling is a strong sentiment in favor of dramatization. Child leaders have observed that children dramatize spontaneously, and that after they have heard a tale they often play it without suggestion from an older person. ”

“ When she has satisfactorily answered these questions, the story teller will select her story having for its theme, atmosphere and motif an idea or group of ideas that will touch the child’s mental life as she has discovered it and [7] by means of which it will find a permanent place in his mind through its comfortable friendliness and familiarity.
The child who has come directly from his home and the sheltering arms of his mother or nurse should not, at first, be taken far afield through the lands of fairies and giants. ”

“ And because of this fact they will be those which in the frequent re-tellings of ages have acquired a classic form and therefore have within themselves the possibility of taking upon them a perfect literary form. The tales selected will be those tales which, as we have pointed out, contain the interests of children; for only through his interests does the child rise to higher interests and finally develop to the ideal man. They will be those tales which stand also the test of a classic, the test of literature, the test of the short-story, and the test of narration and of description. ”

“ Let an author combine these others with a series of events, let him put them in as aids to the understanding or as ornaments on the thread of his recital, and they are accepted without question as elements of narration, be it prose or verse in form, true or fictitious in content. That is to say, though a story often contains to some extent all the other forms of writing too, we think of it as narrative because it carries us along a course of events. ”

“ Story-tellers will find it helpful to practice the sustained, or “forward pointing,” voice. It is necessary to the proper building out of units of thought. The story-teller should “make,” for example, the word picture with the voice, bit by bit, much as the painter does the line and color picture with the brush, each added detail going toward the whole.
Mastery of pause is important. In ordinary communication the story-teller, as does everyone else, uses pause a hundred times a day, but he is inclined at first to overlook its part in story-telling. ”

“ The incident is used to show that each [38] child wants to feel that the story is being told to him, and emphasizes the need of telling stories with a personal directness of appeal.
I have said that the story and the children should be the only things of which the story-teller takes note. A consciousness of one’s own self as the actor upon the boards, spoils all. ”

“ Why is there not, at least, a watchman or an attendant? There must be some unusual reason for such a condition of things.
Let us listen to the narration of a good old woman, resident in the neighborhood, who once gave us the story. We use her words, which, may be, enter too much into the detail, but bear with them the natural freshness and coloring that, it is hoped, will not be tedious to the reader. We are given to understand that if we will have the story we must begin at the beginning, and that is, like “Milton’s Paradise Lost,” with the beginning of all things. ”

“ The material through which we are to exercise the imagination and develop imaginative vigor is the narrative form of discourse. Narration is successful when it records or has the effect of recording actual experience. ”

“ What national and racial customs intensify the setting?
“To me, a narrative that has for its aim to interest the reader in its plot is an anecdote, be its plot ever so thick. A narrative that aims to interest the reader in a slice of palpitating life—the joys or sorrows of people—be its plot ever so thin, I call it a short story.”—Benjamin Rosenblatt. ”

“ A caution which directly concerns the art of story-telling itself, must be added here. There is a definite distinction between the arts of narration and dramatisation which must never be overlooked. Do not, yourself, half tell and half act the story ”

“ Narrators, while preserving the original plot and characters of a Tale, vary it, and make it graphic by introducing objects known and familiar to their audience. These inconsistencies do not interfere with belief or offend the taste of a people with whom even the impossible is not a bar to faith; rather, the inconsistency sharpens their enjoyment of the story. ”

“ Our narrative will be improved by adapting it to an imaginary audience in case we do not know exactly who our readers will be. In your high school work you know your readers and can select your facts accordingly.
To summarize: a narration should possess unity, that is, it should say all that should be said about the subject and not more than needs to be said. The length of the theme, the character of the audience to which it is addressed, and the purpose for which it is written, determine what facts are necessary and how many to choose in order to give unity. ”

“ The story-teller who has grasped even the simplest outlines of literary development will be able to present to the children a sequence of stories which shall, dimly at first, but more and more clearly as time goes on, enable them to look at the literature of the world as a related whole. ”

“ The realistic school following on Wagner's footsteps discovered that a novel had much better be all narrative—an uninterrupted flow of narrative. Description is narrative, analysis of character is narrative, dialogue is narrative ”

“ If you have ever listened to a little girl of five artlessly proceeding to tell a story, such as Little Black Sambo, which she had gathered from looking at a neighbor's book, but which she had not yet mastered sufficiently to grasp its central theme, reiterating the particular incidents with the enthusiasm and joy and narrative tone of the story-teller, you realized how the child likes to talk. ”

“ Again, novices err frequently through introducing a multiplicity of narrators, either writing a patchwork story in which all take a hand, or placing narration within narration as in the "Arabian Nights." The method of allowing a number of persons consecutively to carry on the plot is very attractive, since it offers a way of introducing a personally interested narrator without making him preternaturally wise ”

“ Those were not days, be it remembered, when people wrote fiction for the sake of introducing discussions. There still lingered in the novelist's mind the time-worn heresy that he had a story to tell, and that his people must act as well as talk. The plot—delightful and obsolete word!—was then in good repute, and conversation was mainly useful in helping on the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, with really good novelists, in illustrating and developing character. ”

“ We lead the child from one story interest to another with slight attention to the influence which the story group will have upon the minds of the children. We tell, perhaps, a home story, then a nature story, and last of all a holiday story in one story hour, and in doing this we so quickly transfer the child’s attention from one theme to a distinctly different one that there is no cohesion [246] in our story building. ”

“ What every story-teller finds as specially attractive to children, is the epic smoothness, the clear comprehensiveness of the tale, its consistent objectivity. Every narrative which will win the attention of the child, whether it be from Scandinavian, classical, or biblical history, must have these characteristics of the tale. There are hardly any story-tellers who so completely absorb children as old nurses. ”

“ Then, reading sympathetically, thoughtfully, and slowly if need be, visualize the figures as they come and go. The lines of any good play mean more than appears at a hasty glance. They have been chosen not simply because they say what the character might have said, but because what is said will advance the plot, and, because better than some half dozen other phrases considered by the author, they will rouse the emotions of the audience. Keep the sympathetic, not the critical mood, to the fore. Reading to visualize, feel because you visualize, and feel as fully as you can. ”

“ Many a story, from the large panoramic chronicle to the small and single impression, postulates the story-teller, the picture-maker, and by that method gives its best. Speak [186] ing in person or reported obliquely, the narrator serves his turn. But where there is no positive reason for him there is a reason, equally positive, for a different method, one that assigns the point of view to the reader himself. An undramatic subject, we find, can be treated dramatically, so that the different method is at hand. ”

“ It had cultivated the sense of a well-knit plot, of effective situation, and of the interplay of character and action—all elements transferable to prose narrative. And when, in the middle of the eighteenth century, we find the novel beginning to take the place of the stage as the dominant kind of imaginative entertainment, it is easy to see how much the younger form owed to the elder. ”

“ It (first person narrative) is better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to analysis, and better to the expression of humour than to the realization of tragedy. As far as the presentation of character is concerned, what it is usual for it to achieve ... is this: a life size, full length, generally too flattering portrait of the hero of the story—a personage who has the limelight all to himself—on whom no inconvenient shadows are ever thrown ”

“ These narrations are never a slavish reproduction of the original. A child’s individuality plays about what he enjoys, and the story comes from his lips, not precisely as the author tells it, but with a certain spirit and colouring which express the narrator. ”

“ It is in the story hour that the true story-teller comes into her kingdom. Here she is free to give to the expectant hearers just the tale which they love to hear. She is not bound by rules or regulations, by systems or courses, but may follow the promptings of her intuition and sway her small auditors at her will. ”