Fictional "personal" stories

Roy said that at another event (not Carapace) where both true and fictional stories are welcome, he is a little bothered by people telling tall tales as if they were true personal stories:

And sometimes they will tell a story

in the

Moth personal storytelling style, but

I know,

you can tell that they just

made this stuff up and are

talking about something like that.

I get kind of a little miffed at that,

but considering that that,

I understand where they’re coming from,

so I let it slide.

Even though this event does not create the expectation that stories will be true, the way tellers are performing sometimes suggests stories are true when they are not.

Roy is not the only person to feel uncomfortable with fictional stories presented as true personal stories. I interviewed Betty Ann Wylie (one of the founding members of Southern Order of Storytellers) in 2015, as part of another project. Here is something she said:

Sometimes I do tell a personal stories. I tell --

But they may be a folktale that I have in,

turned into a personal story.

The story of the walking catfish.

Um, now you see,

at this point in my life,

I've told that so many times,

my Aunt Julia,

Daddy's little sister,

Aunt Julia is one of the women

who went fishin' a lot with us when I was a child.

And I used to tell that this happened to me,

but I decided,

on the advice of Donald Davis,

a very, very experienced personal tale teller,

that if you tell the story as if it happened to you,

and it did not,

and it's a story that could not have happened to anybody,

you lose --

your audience will lose faith in you.

They won't believe anything you tell 'em,

even if you are tellin' them a true experience.

So, he would tell about Uncle Frank.

"Uncle Frank told me such and such."

Then, if they realize by the end of the story

that this couldn't possibly have happened to anybody,

he was just as taken in by Uncle Frank,

so he's not tricking the children,

the audience, it's,

you know, just Uncle Frank

who told him this and he believed it.

So, I have Aunt Julia now,

catchin' the fish

that she teaches to walk and to live out of the water.

Telling fictional stories as if they happened to you creates a trust issue between the storyteller and audience.

Roy remembered that on his first night, when he was still learning about Carapace, he found some of the stories difficult to believe:

well, let’s go for instance,

that story,

that first story that I was

talking about with the open marriage thing.

I kind of,

my first reaction,

not knowing the people beforehand,

now I know them well.

But not knowing them then,

I kind of went,

hmm is this really?

Do people really do this?

Do people really?

And certainly,

and also the

story about the coffee table-

parents and the coffee table,

you know, I,

the way she told it, I

kind of went, whoa!

But, you know,

I took it at face value

that they were true.

And it turned out,

I guess they were.

Believing an outrageous story and then later discovering it isn’t true could make an audience member feel especially foolish. Knowing that the stories are supposed to be true makes audience member feel more comfortable believing them.