Paul Clement Czaja

The Art of Storytelling

To be a storyteller, you must first of all be gloriously alive—alive to yourself and all that is going on around you, alive in your seeing, hearing, touching—and especially alive to your heart’s feeling. The sure sign you are becoming the storyteller you want to be will be found in the pure fact of the happiness of being alive.

The word “story” comes from the more ancient word “history” and means literally “a narration of a life.” It is the leading edge of personal communication for it enables us to share life experiences in a way that makes words come alive and experiential. Mankind’s basic problem has always been that the profundity of the human spirit makes every personal experience ineffable—“more than words can tell” as the saying goes when we are in love. Such personal living is based on a felt experiencing that has more to do with the revelation of truth and beauty (or lies and chaos, or of good and evil, or of our deepest hopes and fears) than words by themselves could ever relate.

And this is precisely what story is all about. It is a personal telling that uncovers the “heart of the matter” for those who can hear. It makes your sharing a human act much higher than just talking, and it makes your storytelling an art form, while mere blabbing is not. Coming to meet and know a life story gives you the opportunity to meditate on its reality and then to contemplate your personal communion with it measure for measure.

The telling of a story will necessarily be filled with unconscious, intuitive sayings packed with the uncanny power of the magic of every creative act. Imaginations are set aflame, heartfelt feelings are engaged, and your story telling becomes in that moment a matter of life answering life.

Even though you are beginning the art of story telling, you have the ability to fill your story with vitality. When you tell a story, rather than merely recite the cold facts, you recreate a human experience that has vibrant existence. Your storytelling will have meaningfulness because it will help reveal to others the life around them. Revelation is brand new news—even if that means newly seeing something that has been there around us a long time without us coming to know it really. The primary problem to overcome by you as you move to take the first steps toward the development of vitality in your story telling is how to move away from the strong habit of conceptualization—surface-thinking—which your schooling has laid on you.
You are in the habit of looking at a “tree” as a noun, as an abstraction. Such a mental assumption of sameness (a tree is a tree is a tree) obscures you from the innate gift you possess of discovering the uniqueness of individuality that is the life spark of spiritual experience and the blossoming of your inner life where music is felt and art appreciated and the communion of love can go on and on with profound meaningfulness.

The act of telling a story requires first the developing in your daily life a habit of being aware of your immediate and direct experiencing of the individual persons and things right there for you.
To experience human life in such an existential manner you must stop being a somebody and become a nobody.

You see, your long habit of being a somebody tends to keep you focused on yourself—on your cortex thinking—and so causes you to not really experience and then to know what is there before you with all its existential reality. Experiencing yourself as a “nobody” is an altogether different act than the self-centered experiencing you are used to when you consciously are a somebody. Your true self is this nobody who is the soul’s “I” that is able to truly experience with humility and is open outward enough to meet a “thou” there—perhaps to connect, deep-to-deep, becoming a one.

In the existential mathematics of communion 1+1=1—a new one—a personal relationship in which it is no longer you and me but now you/me. So long as you remain a stranger to your inner self—to this “nobody” that you are in the fire of knowing another—you will not be able to experience the intuitive, creative genius you were born to be from the very beginning of you.

Such existential experiencing was yours when you were a baby and a little child—before your schooling caused you to be almost completely distracted by your thoughts and hindered you from experiencing your experiences. Traditional schooling does not reward intuition or creativity or any other jazzy human act. Too interested in the products, in the developing of academic skills, pedagogues are too impatient with what goes on in the beginnings of personal experiences where the authentic seeing of your truest self reigns. They would have you skip over the beginnings and put your energies on the finished work—not respecting the primacy of the sacred ground that personal experience is for all people.

Story rewards your sharing with the experience of the ineffable—that given reality of another which can never be put into words but can be captured in the life of the telling. Sharing such a given by your storytelling causes a communion to take place between you and the listeners sitting right there before you. It is your return to innocent experiencing, to a primeval connecting with others. Story telling allows you to possess, and then share, human life in a timeless way. You and your story become a living oneness for those listening. The profoundly personal sharing that is story telling is actually the giving of wisdom and endures from generation to generation as the wellspring of human compassion.

So how do you begin to become a storyteller who has a story to tell?

Well, first of all you must find a story—one that moves you. If you cannot recall one from your own life, go to the public library and choose a book that has collected the stories of a people—for example: Polish Folktales or Stories From Ireland or Native American Legends—you will find them in the 398.2 section if your library uses the Dewey Decimal system.

Take your time reading one such collection until you come upon a story that hits you deep.

Read and reread it and then reflect on the whole story.

Do not commit it to rote memory, which would be too shallow a knowing, but rather learn it by heart. Re-live the story with your imagination. Focus on the actions taking place (the verbs).

If you mediate this way upon the whole story, it will become yours.

Stay with the story this way for a good while, letting it unfold within your heart/mind/soul. Soon the kernel of its wisdom will begin to become revealed to you. If you then take hold of that golden kernel and contemplate its human truth, it will enter your life as a true understanding worthy of sharing with others—and you will never forget it for you now own it as your story.

When you tell it to others, let yourself be free enough to allow your feelings find expression through the tone of your voice, your gestures, your facial expressions. In your telling, focus on the verbs—the action words. That is where the life of the story comes to life, so punch out every verb. So, it is not: “Mary had a little lamb…” but “Mary had a little lamb…” The story about this girl and her pet is found in the having.
Finally, you must realize that storytelling is not another skill you must be taught, just as dreaming is not a human act that you must be taught. You are born a dreamer and you are born a storyteller. The problem is you have been distracted from the communal sharing of your dreams at the breakfast table every morning—and from the natural spinning of a good tale to those sitting around you.

Now simply go do it.

Dr. Paul Clement Czaja has been involved in the Montessori movement for more than 48 years. He received his masters’ degree in philosophy and his doctorate in education from Fordham University. Dr. Czaja was on the founding faculty and was then was headmaster at the Whitby School in Greenwich, CT. Since then, he has been involved nationally and internationally in Montessori teacher training and has worked as an educator and administrator with Montessori public schools as well as independent schools. Presently he is a Montessori Mentor at the Island Village Montessori Charter School in Venice, FL, helping develop a middle school as well as their Montessori Live distance-training program. He may be reached at czaja36@yahoo.com.