Are stories for children, or for grown ups?

"How wonderful, a storyteller! Children must be delighted when you tell them stories!"

It's always fun to explain that I mostly tell stories to adult audiences.  For many it seems obvious that stories, tales, riddles or even.... imagination, are the realm of childhood, clothes we shed to become adults, and only revisit when having become parents ourselves we use them as tools to help our own children discover the world.

An often discussed topic then is, how to choose a tale that will appeal more to adults, than children, how we alter our telling for different audiences.

To answer this, let's turn to the masters:

St.Exupery, in the little prince, has a famous chapter devoted to telling stories from the point of view of children, and that of "grown-ups":

• From chapter 4 of the Little Prince:

If I have told you these details about the asteroid, and made a note of its number for you, it is on account of the grown-ups and their ways. 

When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. 
They never say to you:
                                            "What does his voice sound like? 
                                              What games does he love best? 
                                              Does he collect butterflies?" 

Instead, they demand: 
                                                     "How old is he? 
                                                       How many brothers has he? 
                                                       How much does he weigh? 
                                                       How much money does his father make?" 

Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.

If you were to say to the grown-ups: 
   
"I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof," 

they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. 
You would have to say to them: 

"I saw a house that cost $20,000." Then they would exclaim: "Oh, what a pretty house that is!"

Just so, you might say to them: 

"The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists." 

And what good would it do to tell them that? They would shrug their shoulders, and treat you like a child. But if you said to them: 

"The planet he came from is Asteroid B-612," then they would be convinced, and leave you in peace from their questions.

They are like that. One must not hold it against them. Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people.

But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference. I should have liked to begin this story in the fasion of the fairy-tales. I should have like to say: "Once upon a time there was a little prince who lived on a planet that was scarcely any bigger than himself, and who had need of a sheep..."
To those who understand life, that would have given a much greater air of truth to my story.
                                                                   (....)

Here there are three groups of people, children, grown-ups, and a more general ageless group, called: 
                                                "those who understand life".

                        When telling stories, just tell them to "those who understand life".  

Stories are the antidote to the fact-laden world we are drowning in.  They are paper boats floating down a rushing river.  However, when drowning in this river of facts and information if one of these folded paper boats floats your way, how likely is it that you will question whether paper boats are for grown ups?
The grown ups will wait for a proper rescue boat to come their way...the rest of us, will grab our spy glass, don our origami hats, and sail away on the sea of stories!

Telling with your heart

There are two ways to tell a tale: you can tell with your head, or you can tell with your core.
It feels obvious that one way is bound to be better than the other, let's see why...

What does it mean to tell a story with your head?  

This is actually what we are trained to do: we listen to a story, focusing on the facts, then we concentrate on not forgetting any element of the story.  We try to remember everything as we tell it to someone else.
This form of telling focuses on:    facts    and   memory
When telling in this way the teller might find it useful to have a few notes close by, in case memory was to fail him or her, and the teller usually feels that he has succeeded if s/he has managed to tell the whole bit without forgetting anything.
The only major differences between telling with your head/mind, and reading a story is that you can get more eye contact, and achieve more fluent delivery.

If we think of a story as a light, your head is a mirror, it tries to reflect the story as faithfully as possible. When telling with our heads, we hope that our listeners will have the same experience we had when we first read or heard the story.

Telling with your heart/core is very different:

Unlike the mirror of your mind, your core is a stained glass window of the kind one finds in cathedrals.  In France these are called 'rosaces'.  Notre Dame has a huge round intricate 'rosace' of colorful glass over 9 meters in diameters, and when in the darkened cathedral, all of a sudden the sun hits it, and the light shines through, everything is transformed.  The light is filtered, the cathedral magically comes to life and the visitors grab their cameras.
This, to me, symbolizes perfectly what happens when a story is told from the heart:

The story is slightly different, like the light, it goes through the filter of your perception and comes out tinted by your core, the cathedral which is your heart lights up, and the listeners are bewitched.

How do we do it?

Instead of focusing on facts and memory, the storyteller must focus on sensation, the more personal it gets, the more the story will light him up.
Not content to imagine "what it must feel like" to be in bed with a wolf dressed as one's grandmother, the storyteller literally feels this moment, so strongly that it imprints itself in his or her memory.

A tale told from our core is so deeply experienced that looking back the storyteller has a hard time differentiating it from reality.  He'll find himself wondering: "did this really happen to me?"

And in a way it did!

Storytelling from your core is so powerful that it is healing both for the teller and for the listener.

Next time you tell a story, let it shine through the stained glass window of your heart, experience it with all your senses, and watch then how while lighting every last dark corners of your self, your listeners mouths drop in awe of the marvelous light.