Over the weekend, Jared (who doesn’t use his last name on his blog), writer of the fascinating and popular blog Moon Over Martinborough, told me about a dilemma he’s having. He recently added a podcast to his blog. Here’s the issue:

I’m aware that these podcasts are more ‘books on tape-ish’ than they are “campfire story-ish.” It’s amazing the way a written text changes things. I’m hoping to be able to shift them more towards the campfire/oral storytelling as I get better, but to do that I almost need to ditch the text. Or improvise a bit while referring to the text.

Boy, I can sure relate to this dilemma. Oral presentations rarely sound great when read from written text. I’m not a bad presenter, but I’m neither great at extemporaneous speaking nor telling off-the-cuff stories. I almost always need some sort of written text as a prompt or crutch, even if it’s just a few words or a picture on a slide. (By the way, I don’t think a “books-on-tape” sound is necessarily a bad thing; I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and most readers — many of them actors — do a great job.)

I watched the Golden Globes last night. The best acceptance speeches were those that were obviously planned yet delivered off-the-cuff (Mo’nique, Meryl Streep, Robert Downey Jr.) The worst was the one that was obviously read from a piece of paper. In the middle were those not planned and therefore very stream-of-consciousness and all over the place. Here I’m thinking of Drew Barrymore’s wacky speech. While it was somewhat incomprehensible, it was still endearing because it was real — and very Drew Barrymore.

I think Jared, whose blog is about about his adventures as a an expat American running a New Zealand farm with his partner, is right about ditching the text. My hunch is that the best approach may be write the story just to get it mentally organized and cemented in your brain. But when speaking the story, have — at most — an outline of one-word or short-phrase prompts in front of you. Or is it best not to write the story at all first?

I’d love to hear from oral-performance storytellers about making that transition from, as Jared calls it, “literacy to orality.” What’s the best way to take a written story and speak it so it sounds like a compelling oral story performance?

By the way, I listened to one of Jared’s podcasts, “The Triumph of Evil Cow”, a word-for-word recitation of the written blog entry of the same name, and I thought it was fine. To me, it’s about on par with, for example, spoken stories on This American Life. It’s perhaps a bit long; a listener may be daunted by noting that the story is 9+ minutes. Jared might consider a condensed version of his blog entries for the podcasts. He included a couple of sound effects, such as a crowing rooster, that remind me of sound-rich stories on NPR. He might include a few more of these in the story itself — such as mooing for the evil cow story.