Week Five of Young Storytellers
My weekly trips to mentor Touche as he works on his masterpiece, skipped a couple of weeks because the school was on half-term holiday, but we had to get back in the creative saddle again today.
At the end of the last session Touche gave me his script, and during the break I typed it up using Script software. What looked like a lot of content in scrawly 9 year old hand writing, only created 1 1/2 pages, of the required 5 page script.
The thought of the effort I would need to exert to squeeze 3 1/2 more pages out of Touche, didn’t add to my already bad mood. I was having a stressful day at work, and I really wasn’t relishing my mentor duties. My carpool partners gave me and my bad attitude a wide berth, and I sat petulantly in the back of the car plotting my escape from the Young Storytellers mentor program.
At the school, most of the mentee’s were missing in action, but one was already sitting at the table waiting to start. Touche. He had his pad and paper in front of him, and he was holding court in front of a group of mentor’s – waxing lyrical about his trip to Florida during the break. Enthusiasm was bubbling out of every pore.
My bad mood slipped away as I took my seat next to him. I opened my laptop, and we got down to work. Touche wanted to add additional characters and give them interesting names. A feeling of impeding doom started to creep over me. Was this going to be another “egg naming fiasco“?
After the characters were named, I thought Touche would have difficulty doing live editing on his script, and get confused about the storyline and mess it all up. I shouldn’t have worried. Not only did he double his cast successfully. He added relevant content to all three Act’s.
- Act 1 was enhanced with the introduction of a corny comedic action routine, which consequently introduced a smile to my lips for the first time today;
- Act 2 was expanded with interactive dialogue providing relevant roles for the new set of characters; and a plot twist was craftily slipped into beginning of
- Act 3, and the twist was un-twisted towards the end of the Act to round of the story and tie it all together.
Not only did Touche enhance his plot and dialogue with the skills of a professional storyteller, he played to role of a very vocal grammar and spellchecker! “You need a comma there” “That should be an exclamation point as well as a question mark” “Why have you put an apostrophe there? – it shouldn’t have one”, he verbally auto-corrected every spelling and grammar mistake. And when I typed “whilst” instead of “while” he parroted in a robotic monotone “…’whilst’ is the formal version of ‘while’ … so it’s ok you can use that.” I’m beginning to wonder if he has Aspergers.
I realized I had my own living-breathing dictionary/thesaurus hybrid software package. I marveled at his intellect. Smart as well as creative. What a bundle!
The hour slipped by unconsciously, and just and we added “The End” to his script – our prophecy came true, and our time was up.
I have one more week with this creative genius left, and the following week is the Big Show!
Chicken Dance Score: … even though this week should have been a poultry fest… nobody cares about the chicken dance anymore. So let’s call is a 0-0 draw this week!
(c) Featured picture copyright of Adam Sicinski, who is a qualified Life Coach. It accompanies his article about a creative genius mindset. Follow the link – it’s a great read.
