Thomas Fiffer reflects on the transformative power of storytelling.
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Editor’s Note: As I prepare to tell a story live in front of an audience tonight, I am reminded of another time I rendered words for listeners. There is no experience that matches the power of storytelling, in which we place our experience in the crucible, add the heat of emotional reflection, and pour liquid gold on the stage.
Last night, I rendered.
In every meaning of the word.
I stood on stage and told a story.
A story I had seen unfold only hours before.
My time in the lights was just three minutes, but I gave to the audience what had been given to me:
A moment of connection.
A smile.
A sigh.
And an epiphany.
The roots of render lie in the Old French rendre, which means to repeat.
So to tell a story, to repeat what was told or shown to you, is to render it.
But rendering is more than just repeating. To render is to give. The Latin antecedent, reddere, means to “give back, return, restore,” as in “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” – Mark 12:17.
The story that was given to me on my afternoon subway ride was a gift—a stretch of delightful dialogue between man and woman, the twinkling of bright blue eyes, the feathering of long red hair, the choreography of courtship. A gift that flowed through me and that I, in turn, gave back to my audience. A gift that, I believe, helped restore my listeners’ faith in love.
But render has another meaning, in both cooking and metallurgy: to extract by melting, as in to render suet or lard from fat, or to burn away the dross and render gold. And it is this type of rendering that constitutes the true craft of the storyteller. To eliminate the incidental, eschew the unnecessary, and burn away the waste – to render the golden essence of an essentially human tale.
And to be able to render a story in this way, the storyteller must have spent her own time in the crucible, must have felt the heat himself, must have walked the fine lines between warmth and burning, between cool comfort and icy chill, and must have developed the ability to distinguish the dross from the gold.
We are all given material.
Every single day.
It sits in front of us, visits us where we live.
The stories we see will infiltrate our hearts if we allow them to, arouse our passions, stir our sensibilities, inform our outlook, shift our focus, and push us to a new perspective.
They will change us, if we let them.
And they will change others, even the change the world, when we find the courage to share.
Originally published on Tom Aplomb.
Photo—Dan Brown/Flickr