Storytellers

A very excellent friend of mine has been encouraging me to tell stories for about as long as I've known her. (Little known fact: I rarely shut up.) Recently she sent me a link to a storytelling show, like a slam poetry open mic night but with less rhythm required! I squee'd with excitement at the notion of being able to tell my tale and flail about before a crowd who gathered specifically to hear what folk like me have to say.
But there's a problem.

I don't tell stories.

Now, that isn't to say that I don't have anything to tell! But I tend to think of storytellers as these sorcerers of settings, czars of character creation, magicians of metaphor and what have you. These wizards can pull fully formed stories from their memories at will and cast them like beautiful spells at their target audience.

Gandalf: He's about the tell the shit out of it.

I'm less like a wizard and more like a dam. A terribly ineffective dam.

I try to hold back, really I do, but I'm just full to brimming with the least appropriate things to say. I just spew out what I'm thinking. I don't organize it, I don't "paint a picture", and I wander off into other topics, often getting lost in my own rant. But I just can't help myself.

I can reign myself in here. I can rant about something completely absurd (like my phobia that I'm actually retarded and no one is telling me) and then select all and push delete (don't worry, you didn't want to be subjected to that rant) and reorganize my thoughts. But I can't do that on stage. And that's only part of the problem.

I have a million tales. Not quite stories, no. But a metric asston of half sentence and plot twists. Sometimes my life is absurd! It makes exceptional jabberfodder. But what do I tell? How do I tell it? How do I choose one or two little clusters of who I am and what I've done and display them out of context? I assume a storyteller would know this sort of thing.

Life is short. One of these days I'm going to be dead and I'm not going to have the chance to ramble incessantly at a crowd of horrified onlookers. Maybe I could stand there, look at the people, and know what to say. Maybe I could just walk out there, open my mouth and release the floodgates. Which sounds like a metaphor for "projectile vomit" which would be a wicked bummer. But it'd make for one hell of a story later.