Storytelling Exercise

This exercise began by splitting into groups of three or four. We then had to tell our group a story of something that had happened to us. After listening to each, we would pick one and if it wasn't ours, memorize the key events and try and tell the story as if it were ours.
The aim of the exercise was to re tell the same story, three different versions, to the whole group, if you were lying, you had to make the story appear as if it was yours and if you owned the story, make it appear less truthful than the others. The whole class would then vote on who they thought the story belonged to.
My story was chosen of when I was chased by a giraffe whilst quad biking in South Africa, there were many parts to the story, lots of little details that I chose to leave out to appear as if I was making it up or choose different details to the others so the story seemed different. I couldn't help but laugh whilst telling the story because the memory is so amusing!
Throughout the exercise, we learnt that we automatically link things to our lives in some way so we can relate, with characters, events that we have to act out we may link an emotion we've had with our own memory to trigger that emotional response on stage etc. We learnt that we should embrace what we have experienced and our personalities and take them to characters, we will never be able to not bring parts of ourselves to characters, so to find ways to utilize that and use in ways that will be beneficial.
I also learnt to relax when telling the story, to not fret about the details you want to add in, the more you relax, the easier those details will be included because you do them naturally.
It also got me to focus on details, even though I was trying to appear as if the story was a lie for me, adding particular details to enrich the story makes it far more exciting to listen to as an audience member. When watching other people, it was the details, a nickname, a reaction, a particular phrase that made it so much more engaging to listen to!