Wise Words on How to Tell the Stories of the Bible

Thought I would share with you the process for learning to tell the stories of the Bible. Anyone interested in learning your favorite story and then sharing it?

How to Learn a Story by Heart
By Dennis Dewey

As you’re preparing to learn a story to tell on our trip, it’s important to understand the difference between "learning by heart" and "memorizing."

First, the Hebrew Bible tradition understands the word of God primarily as a spoken word---the "scripture" to be a recording for the reproduction of sound or a "cue-card." The primary repository for the word is not the written page, but the human heart---both the individual heart and the heart of the community's memory.

Hebrew anatomy and physiology regards the heart as the seat of memory, not the brain. The metaphor means that "learning by heart" involves the whole person. Learning by heart is living with the words as sounds and images, not just getting ink into the memory by rote. It is a process of meditation and prayer and---yes---repetition. It comes out in the same place in the text is pretty much word-for-word, but it entails visualizing the images, feeling the feelings, moving around in the imaginary "space" of the story or passage, getting the story into the body and muscles and not just into the head.

If you spend some time with your passage each day between now and the time of our trip, you will have it. The important thing is to begin now. Give it 5 minutes each day. Let it grow in you. You can memorize a story in a few hours. But you cannot “learn it by heart” in less than six weeks. It's like pregnancy.

Learning by heart is a total immersion in the text as spiritual discipline. It is not just “memorizing” but creating deep memory in the deep places, “marinating” in the texts.

The kind of storytelling that results from using the techniques of heart-learning is lively and animated, full of nuance and variety—not the mere mechanical recitation of rote text. It stays close to the text that has been traditioned to us, but is never merely the repeating of memorized words. We aim for 95 % content accuracy and 75% verbal accuracy.

I suggest that you begin by reading the passage out loud THREE TIMES. (NOTE: It's important that this be ALOUD.) Then close the book and tell yourself (in your own words) what you remember of what you just heard yourself read. The next step is to prepare a "script." You can type this or write it in long hand. Each line should be complete (ending in a sensible place---usually on line is a breath). Group the lines together in episodes of about three lines (more or less). Draw pictures in the margins if you like. Underline key words. Connect words that repeat (we call those "verbal threads," and they are left over from a time when these words were kept in the memory). Chuck the episodes by drawing blocks around the major units. Use the script as you begin go visualize the story/passage out loud.

It will seem like hard work at first, but, trust me, if you do a little day, letting the passage be your devotion, it will be part of you by the time of our trip, and you will end up expending next-to-no effort to remember it. That's when the fun begins---when you are able to "play the tune" that you know by heart. A good book on the subject is Thomas Boomershine’s Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling, which you can order from the Network of Biblical Storytellers (www.nbsint.org).

Below are some notes from my workshop on the process. Please take a moment to look them over. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me! This is going to be a very meaningful experience for those who have elected to learn and tell---and for those of us who get to hear them as well!

Some pointers:

* Terminology: Not "memorizing." Memorizing is a flat process that involves only the head and proceeds serially. "Learning by heart" implies a process that involves and engages all the senses and the whole person.

* Print memory - As literate people, we have a memory of the "lay" of the text on the page. Scripting will make use of "chunking" in bits that are easier to remember than serial lines of margin-justified text. Units of text that represent chunks of oral/aural experience are called episodes. The storytelling "script" of the story should reveal at a glance the story's structure. Scripting helps to "map" the movement of the story.

* Always aloud: The text should always be treated as sound---not silent print, but notation for vocalization. Even in the preparation of the text by scripting, the text should be read aloud.

* Semantic memory: Look for the connections between/among words, repetitions, images, logic, cause/effect, parallelism, chiastic structures, verbal threads; engage in a semantic mapping of the story.

* Aural memory: Listen for assonance, rhythm, consonance, onomatopoeia. Listen to how the story breaths and find its natural rhythms. In general, observe the "up/down" rule: Speak up and slow down!

* Visualization: Story of Simonides of Ceos, inventor of mnemonics commended the practice of placing memory objects in three dimensional space for easy retrieval.

* Synaesthesias: Observe the other sensory cues in the story---taste, smell, texture, sound.

* Muscle memory - Move through the story as it is being spoken aloud. In the learning process, employ too many gestures. Exaggerate the face, hands, body movements. Over indulge in the emotions associated with the story: contempt, pleasure, fear, anger, joy, derision, offense, etc.

*Geography of story: Notice the "macro-geographical structures (with respect to setting of the story in a real geographically identifiable place) and micro-geographical structures (with respect to the internal placement of characters and objects) in the story. Moving through the geography of the story represents a "felt visualization," akin to watching the events unfold in space before the teller.

* Repetition: This is the drudgery. There is no way around doing the story over and over. This should be undertaken not as mindless drill, but as a whole-person enterprise in which all of the techniques of "learning by heart" are employed. Most people believe that they cannot learn long passages of text because they have poor memory. The reality is that most people give up before attaining a sufficient number of repetitions to retain an extended text in long term memory.

* "Felt effort expended" in placing a text in memory graphed against the number of repetitions shows that second learning (after elapsed time) feels nearly as difficult as the first effort, but that feeling drops off dramatically toward a low level of maintenance.

*Fallow time: The analogy to growing has sometimes been used of learning the story. One cannot make the story grow any faster than it will. It is best to work for an hour at a time on a story, allowing fallow time for the story to take root and send forth shoots.

* Tempo: Use silence. The audience hears at a rate about 20% that of the average speaker. Frame moments of the story with silence---time to let the story sink in. Be sure to allow a significant pause before the story begins and after the story concludes to "frame" it.

* Enjoy the story: Get lost in it. Feel it. Savor it. The audience will join you in the story if you do. As you are lost in the story, you disappear and the characters emerge for the audience. Ironically, being steeped in the story directs attention away from the teller and to the story itself.

* Practice: Tell the story with a small, supportive audience and with distractions that will help you sharpen your concentration.