Bob Hartman is a much-loved professional storyteller and a best-selling author. His books have sold over a million copies and include the Lion Storyteller Bible and the highly acclaimed The Wolf Who Cried Boy. A former minister, Bob is also the author of the Bible App for Kids available on You Version, which is popular across the UK and around the world.
pc You’re known by many children and parents around the world. How would you describe yourself? What’s been your journey so far? BH I usually tell people I’m an author and a storyteller and pretty much leave it at that. I tell stories and I write them down. I was originally a pastor in a church in Leicestershire, forty years ago, and the congregation were an older demographic. They knew their Bibles pretty well, so you’d tell a Bible story, and they knew them. They knew what was going to happen, and that’s never any good when it comes to drawing an audience.
And so I started telling Bible stories from different angles, using different positions and different characters, with a view to initially engaging them and hoping they’d stick with me to see how it worked out. It was someone in the church who said, ‘Why don’t you write some of these down and see if you can get them published?’ Eventually, that’s what I did.
pc What is it, do you think, about telling stories that engages people’s emotions and attention?
BH I think it’s because ‘story’ is how we communicate with each other. Our lives are stories. When we sit down and talk to one another, we tell each other stories. We don’t tend to quote statistics or go into long theological ramblings with one another. We tend to tell stories because that’s who we are. That’s what draws people into any story. They identify with the character and want to see how conflict resolves itself. It’s just a natural human way of understanding the world and communicating.
pc So how does this work? If you’ve got a very familiar Bible passage in front of you – what’s your process to get the words on a page into a story that captivates people’s imagination?
BH To retell Bible stories, you need to first take the story apart, like you would any narrative. You try and understand who the characters are and what the text initially tells you.
But then you can do some sacred imagining – asking what would it have been like to be in that situation? Try to understand the setting, the context and the story and, most importantly, try and get your head around the conflict – the problem, because that’s what drives the story. Once you’ve taken it apart then, particularly as a preacher, you’re in a position to say to yourself, what part of this conflict, what character in this story, would most meet the needs of the people I’m talking to? Who do they need to relate to? Who do they need to understand? Then you begin putting it back together again on that basis. If I’m doing an interactive story for kids, it’s the same process. It’s just you also try to find ways they can be involved in the story, to bring it to life together.
