Choosing performance order
At the July Stories on the Square, Gwinnett, I made the following observation:
A couple of names were already on the list when I signed up. One name was on line 1. Another name was several lines down, as if the volunteer hoped others would sign up to go before him. I signed up on the line right before the second name, leaving room before my name as well.
Storytellers at SotS are not called up at random, like at Carapace. There is a signup list and tellers are called up in that order. But the volunteers don’t always want to go up in the order they signed up. Some people (including me, apparently) sign up early but prefer to go later. As far as I know, SotS always get to all the tellers, so the uncertainty of whether or not they’ll actually get to tell is gone. Also, tellers are exerting some control over when they tell their story. A storyteller doesn’t want to be second, so he writes his name on line 5, leaving lines 2-4 blank. This might not work. Everyone else could decide to write their names after line 5. But there is also a chance it will work, as it did in this case.
The order of tellers ... how the person who went before me might affect the way I tell, how I might affect the person who comes after me ... seems like a metaphor for true personal storytelling itself. It's all about time. The story you tell tonight will be different from the "same" story you tell in a year, a month, a week, because you will have had experiences that changed you in the meantime, that affected the way you feel about the story. Storyteller order in a given night is almost a model for how we feel about the stories we tell in the "order" we deliver them during our life histories. The context will change so much.
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