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Jym talks about the
QUESTIONS
he gets asked most frequently

As I travel around the country, I almost always include some time for questions as a part of my presentations. I couldn't begin to count the number of different areas to which people have asked me to respond ... some funny, some sad, some even embarrassing. Yet for all the different questions, there are those that come up quite frequently. I decided it would be fun to include a few here in case you missed a chance to hear one of the answers in person.

THE QUESTIONS

One of the areas that seems to fascinate some listeners is the process by which a story is learned. Often I am asked,
+How do you remember all those stories? The answer really has two parts.

First, I never try to learn a story word-for-word out of a book or off a manuscript I've written. Instead I work on putting the STORY in my mind, not the individual WORDS of the story. I want the story to sound like the way we talk, not the way we write. So I think about what comes first, what comes next, what comes next -- until the story is firmly in my mind. Only then do I start to fine tune the words themselves.

That's where the second part comes in: practice. If you want to be good at anything, you have to practice. Once I have the story in my mind, I go over it again and again until it feels comfortable and the individual words start to fall into place. But because I haven't started by memorizing the words, there is much less concern about forgetting the story while I'm telling it. I know the story very well by now. If I forget a particular word or phrase, I just use a different one. The audience will never know. Also, it is through this process that (over time) the story will gradually change and actually become a better one.

One last thought. This process isn't magic. You can do it too! Find a story. Read it a few times. Put away the book and tell the story to yourself. Practice it awhile, and soon you'll be ready to try sharing it with someone else.

+How do you make those sounds?
In some of my stories, I use the sounds of animals or creaking doors or pebbles dropping in a bucket of water to aid the listeners' imaginations that they might see and hear in their minds what is happening in the story. Perhaps that's why I am asked this question so often.

My problem is that I'm not sure I have a very good answer. I certainly work hard on my stories and try to always improve the words and actions that are a part of them. With the sounds, however, I rarely give them much thought. When I'm working on a story and I need a sound, it just seem to fall out of me. There are exceptions, but most of the sounds I make require very little preparation before I choose to use them in a performance. So HOW I make them is something I couldn't even begin to explain.

There is another side to this question that I have to mention. Often an audience will join me in making some of the sounds in a story. I'm always impressed at what I hear. Many of my listeners are much better at it than I am. So if you want to make some of the sounds for yourself, just loosen up a bit and try. You might be surprised at what falls out.

+How tall are you?
Not all of the questions I get relate directly to my stories; and if you've never seen me tell stories in person, you might wonder why this should be such a frequent one. Because I get asked this question so often, I usually give an answer that requires a bit of thought. I could just tell people how many feet or inches I am, but that would be too easy. Instead I prefer to explain that I am exactly two meters tall.

If you come from a part of the world that uses the metric system (almost everywhere but the U.S.), you already have a picture in your mind. Otherwise, you may not be any closer than when we started. IMPORTANT HINT: Meters are longer than yards, so I am NOT six feet tall. To find the answer, all you need to do is compare a meter stick and a yard stick or look up the length of a meter in the dictionary and multiply times two. EXTRA HINT: Don't round off the number, or your answer will be too short when you multiply times two.