Three steps to writing a story for the stage
My least favourite way to be introduced is, “This is Marsha, she’s a professional storyteller!”
I always jump in quickly with the correction, “—Storytelling Coach”. There’s a good reason for that.
As a storytelling coach (please pretend for a moment I’m not British or Canadian and don’t expect humility), I am excellent. Part of how I can say this with confidence is because I don’t totally know how I do it — my brain just constructs people’s stories for me in a way that works. The other reason I say this is from 13 years of doing it, and people telling me (or telling me how hard the audience cried when listening to their talk).
But actually being the storyteller? Not so much.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m fine. When it comes to actual keynotes or teaching-style talks, I’m great! But as a storyteller who is just telling a story on stage, I’m… average. Which is why I don’t do it very often.
BUT for reasons I can’t totally fathom, I have agreed…
Not how I planned to become famous but oh well, I guess?
I have somehow landed myself in the middle of a good news story that’s already been published in one online paper, with serious interest from CBC (Canada’s BBC/NPR) — for their web, radio AND TV — as well as the Toronto Star (the most leftie* of our Canadian national newspapers, and therefore the one I read).
This has all happened because of a whim I had a few weeks ago. It is kind of delightful and honestly the news we need in These Times — partly because DEAR GOD THE REST IS GRIM, and partly because it is showing the power of community, which is the only thing likely to save us**. Here’s the story:
A couple of weeks before Christmas, I go down the weird secret corridor in my local mall…
Well that’s depressing
I’m on a zoom call, looking at the man with a big smile and blue glasses, feeling the familiar buzzing in the pit of my belly, when he says something and I’m like, “Wait, WHAT? Why aren’t we talking more about that?” I get that fizzy feeling in my stomach every time I’m on a call…
How to sneak in your agenda when you’re given a platform (as a speaker or anything else)
It’s last Monday at 8am. I step out of the elevator and, as my feet hit the carpet, my heart is suddenly pounding and my breathing is short.
As I notice what’s happening in my body, I think, INTERESTING.
This week, I got to do one of my FAVOURITE things:
GOING ON THE RADIO. In this case, CBC Radio 1 (for non-Canadians: this is our National Public Radio’s speech station, and the one I listen to every morning of my life). I was a guest on the breakfast show, Metro Morning with David Common. Going on the radio is one of my favourite things for two reasons:
1) my first career was in radio, so stepping into a studio kicks up warm, familiar feelings
and
2) i *LOVE* playing at being famous.
Like, I think being ACTUAL famous would be a kind of…
My FAVOURITE EVER piece of advice
I wave at the receptionist then push my way through the giant glass doors of our building, out into Leicester Square, and think,
Did that just HAPPEN????
I’m 30 years old and I’ve spent seven years doing what is almost my ideal job. Almost.
I’d wanted to be a radio DJ for as long as I could remember; amazingly, I’ve managed it… sort of. After a few years in the business, I’d landed a job at my dream place — an indie radio station called Xfm. And while people who aren’t in radio assume I am wildly successful, I know that I haven’t “made it”-made it. Because to make it-make it means having a regular show on weekday daytime. I have only ever been on late night or weekends.
Having a meeting with one of my mentors earlier that week, he says, “You know what, you should go and talk to Keith Pringle. I feel like you two would get on!”
I am surprised and kind of delighted. Keith Pringle is the boss of our sister station Capital Radio. Capital isn’t just London’s biggest pop radio station, it is legendary, the station we all listened to as kids. I can still sing you most of the jingles — “Ninety five point eight! Capital, effffff eeeehhhhhhm!” “Pat! Sharp! Woo! Woo!” “Doctor Doctor! EFF! Doctor Doctor! OH! Doctor Doctor! EX! Doctor Doctor! FOX! Di-ni-ni-niiwwwwwww!!”
It also has a breakfast show hosted by Johnny Vaughan, a former TV presenter who is one of the funniest and most famous men in the country. Capital Radio is a HUGE deal. And, it turns out, my mentor is right: Keith and I get on a treat. He tells me about how they’re in the process of auditioning to find the new co-host for the breakfast show. I know that lady who’d been doing it has left, and I also know the rumour that she was on £100,000 a year (translate that into today’s money and USD and it’s around $215,000). A YEAR.
Then Keith says, “You know what, YOU should audition.”…
One of my greatest ever naps (and my most important Storytelling lesson)
“I can’t eat! If I eat, I vomit!”
Lucy, the old lady I’m sitting with, is upset.
I’m at the day centre for seniors with dementia, where I volunteer once a week. Lucy is my favourite. Six foot tall and rake thin, with short, scrappy hair and clothes that hang off her, she’s usually very sweet. A big smiler. And she loves to sing.
LOVES.
It’s clear that, in her younger days, she was some kind of professional. You can tell from the sharp, clear vibrato she randomly lets out at various points in the day.
Her memory is almost completely shot. She asks if her daughter is coming, and is placated when I tell her, “Later, Lucy”. Then she asks again in thirty seconds time.
Lunchtime is always stressful. And always the same…
Biggest opportunity of my life…and I was dreading it
G looks at me with something that is a cross between confusion and horror.
She says, “You HAVE to stop this!”
“No, I don’t, it’s fine. I’ll handle it,” I reply, trying to convince myself as much as I am her.
When I was 31 years old, Sony offered me my own record label.
A few months earlier, I’d heard about how a friend of mine, Imran, had an imprint (a sort of “sub-label”) on XL records. He’d put out the first UK single by this new band Vampire Weekend, which had blown up. One night, I’m out with my music lawyer friend Martin, and I’m feeling hard done by.
I whine, “Imran has a label. Why don’t I?”
Martin smiles and says, “Let’s get you one.”
A few weeks and several meetings later, Martin and Sony’s lawyers are getting the contracts ready for Huckster Records, an imprint of the Epic label (whose parent company is Sony). On Epic are artists like Abba, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, and now… whoever I decide to sign.
In the meantime, I am figuring out the logistics. It’s going to be a 7” vinyl records label and Epic are giving me an extremely generous budget: they’ll pay for the vinyl, radio promo, press promo, a *music video*, and a small live tour. And — because I don’t yet have either — they are also going to buy me a laptop and an iPod (this is before the days of smartphones). All I have to do is to take care of finding someone to print the actual vinyl and the record covers, then figure out distributing those to record shops.
Which, it turns out, is really hard. And really stressful. And not my skillset. And I don’t want to do any of it. Like, ANY of it.
But I don’t tell anyone that…
The most useful book I’ve ever read (and some personal info)
For someone who’s loved social media since the birth of myspace, I am weirdly protective about what information I put online — so it’s VERY unusual that I just said all this stuff publicly, where literally anyone with an internet connection can listen. Just over a decade ago, I watched the documentary “Terms and Conditions…
Genuinely the funniest moment of my life (up until that point)
I’m 13 years old, I’m on the couch at home, and I am HORIZONTAL with laughter. Laughing so hard I’m crying. Laughing so hard I can barely breathe.
On the screen, a man with glasses is leaping about, saying things like, “can you imagine the sheer joy of an empty bin in your kitchen, a new fresh bin liner in the swing top bin? It’d be like a bin in heaven, wouldn’t it?”
What i don’t know at that tender age is that, for the first time in my life, I’m watching observational stand-up comedy.
I love it more than I’ve loved almost anything else I’ve ever seen.
The routine was by Ben Elton on his show The Man From Auntie. It’s still on Youtube (and still holds up) on re-watch, I was once again crying laughing. His delivery! The physical stuff! The fact that he seamlessly brings the point back to politics at the end! How you can hear people SCREAMING in the audience!] And while, yes, I was being introduced to Ben Elton and to stand up in general, what I was more specifically being introduced to was one of my favourite concepts in comedy AND presentations, which is…
One of my favourite EVER pieces of art (5 mins long)
“This is what I know – first your heart will break…
You will start by staying in bed. Being awake is the first and hardest thing to get through. You may ache every minute of the hours in between the relief of sleep. The ache will overwhelm you at times. The ache will press on your chest so hard it will be difficult to move. The ache will shake through your body in uncontrollable sobs. The ache will numb you to all feeling. The ache will want to break things. The ache won’t care what does break.
Try to wait.”
The first time I read those words, in early 2020, I was in my home office, tears streaming down my face.
That quote is the opening of the final part of the final chapter of How To Lose Everything by Christa Couture — writer, musician, broadcaster and, co-incidentally, my co-parent (which is how I got to read such an early copy). The rest of her book is a memoir, each chapter about a loss she experienced (cancer; amputation; abortion; death; death; divorce; more cancer — she’s had a few). She is a INCREDIBLE storyteller; she has this gift of being able to show you these really, really hard things, in a way that doesn’t pull you under. One of the reviews of her book talked about how the reviewer didn’t want to read the book at first — too sad. But when they did, they found that it “is actually uplifting.”
The part I want to tell you about today — the part that starts with that passage above — is not the part where she’s telling stories.
right now, your not having clicked display images is denying you a picture of BOOBIES
That might seem like a strange choice, given that I’m supposed to be writing here about how to tell stories. But it’s because this passage — on the page, and on the astonishingly beautiful animation that has just been released on YouTube — does the MOST IMPORTANT thing that our stories do. The thing that I think about every time I even talk about this passage (and, inevitably, cry).
It says, to the right people, the four most powerful words in the English language: