Setting a Date for Performance

This is the next suggestion entry on how to arrange, create, and perform your story about Brain Injury. This is part of series I’m working at that share suggestions that come from my experience and research about how to create a storytelling piece about your recovery experience. I hope it helps — please comment and share!

            Picking up the topic after encouraging keeping a journal, once you’ve made the decision to move beyond keeping a private journal and you want to share your story in a storytelling performance, you need to decide when you’re going to do it, and that’s what this blog entry is about — setting a schedule.

            First, let me acknowledge that I hate deadlines — what I love is the idea of having faith in the artistic process and a trusting that, when my work is finished, I will inherently feel a sense of peace and completion.  This is the ideal, and it is also the reason it took nearly 8 years of writing for me to complete my first book.  What’s more, my book wasn’t actually finished until I was presenting at a conference and I forced myself to have the book released on the same day.  If I hadn’t imposed that deadline my book might still be floating in the fog of the nearly completed.

            I’ve come to the realization that deadlines are important because they insist a project reaches completion.  When creating, it is scary to show your work, especially when it reveals a difficult, potentially embarrassing personal journey.  That’s why I think it is necessary for storytellers to impose a deadline — a moment when the performer says, “Whatever I have ready, that’s what I’m showing to the world.” 

            I also think that a deadline date should be set fairly early in the process — once you decide you’re going to share your story, you can take a few days to journal or start some early research, but then give yourself a date when the performance will happen, and try to stick to it.

            Mind, it should not be a high pressure deadline — it’s going to be self-imposed, so give yourself all the time you need and more.  My suggestion, think about how long the process might take you, then try to double that length of time.  If you don’t have an idea of how long it might take, plan at least 6 months, and that’s only if you will be able to dedicate a significant part of your daily life to the work — remember you’re researching, writing, and rehearsing the piece, and all of that is going to take a lot of time.  I was fortunate when I created my storytelling because I was doing the work as part of my graduate studies, so my impending graduation date imposed a deadline.  Still, I was working on the project for the entire second year of graduate studies and was still scrambling about the night before the performance.

            One way to encourage completion is reserving a performance space — some hall or theater that requires a financial commitment.  For better or worse, money is one hell of a motivator to get a project done.  In my experience I rented the International Storytelling Theater in Jonesborough, Tennessee — near where I attended graduate university — six months prior to the performance.  I put money on the date of the show, and as a graduate student, money can be a rare commodity, but with that fee, the date was set well before I was even close to being ready with a finished work.  This meant I was going to show something for the final performance, come hell or high water.

            Creating a deadline means you’re going to complete what you start, and that’s important in this process for several reasons: 

            First, it gives you the satisfaction of claiming ownership of a rather monumental project.  This is important when going through the rehabilitation process because it can seem like there are countless unmet goals, things you started but let drift away due to a lack of support, focus, motivation, or due to any of the trials inherent to the healing process of a survivor.  Finishing this storytelling project means you have completed a task that most people have never done. 

            Second, you will likely go to some dark places while researching and composing this piece, and it is important to have a forum where you can share what you discover.  The performance at the end of this long creative journey is a celebration of truths you have discovered. 

            Finally, sharing allows the story to move from a tragedy that’s held inside to a set of events that happened, and now you can look on what as an observer.  To briefly explain what I mean — by composing and presenting what at first seems to be a personal tragedy (the story of BI), a survivor is able to remove immediacy from emotional memories and stand back as a witness of the events, thereby gaining more control over the reaction to memories.  This is not removing the pain or difficulty from what happened, but creating a mindset that allows the survivor, as a narrator, to witness the events as something that happened in the past.  I’m going to expand on this idea in a later blog entry, but I want to recognize it here as a reason why a Storytelling Rehabilitation project should insist on completion. 

            And I think I’ve made it very clear why setting a finishing date is important, but I want to throw in a caveat here at the end — give yourself a timeline, stick to it come what may, but if you need to change the date, that’s okay.  Life happens, and there may be reasons outside of your control that mean the timeline needs to change — perhaps you shift rehabilitation locations, employment difficulties come up, you discover that you didn’t give yourself enough time to write — whatever it is, try to stick with the first plan, but don’t beat yourself up if you need to adjust.  Simply sigh, take a deep breath, and find a new date that better fits your needs and availability.  Remember, this is a big project, and it’s reasonable that you may mis-estimate the timeline at the beginning.  That’s okay, remember that you are in control.  The goal is to share the story with other people, but you are sharing the work you have done.  If you need to change the date once, twice, it should not hinder the final performance, just try not to make a habit of it.  As the storyteller, your goal is to create a work you are proud to share — the deadline is useful as a tool to encourage completion.

            Thank you for reading.  Please share any thoughts in the comments and more thoughts will be coming soon!