Re-Membering and Interpreting a Story Text
From Stories That Make the World pp. 217-231
You have to like your story. It takes practice and time. Repeat telling the story aloud, first to your self. Later, re-tell the story in front of a friend. As you engage, from beginning to end, seek out and discover the underlying "bones" of the narrative - the key mi'yep and teachings. Knowing the bones of a story helps bring meaning and continuity to the storyline.
One technique I've found useful, particularly for longer narratives, is to sketch out the narrative in your mind or on paper, dividing it up into individual verses that make up separate scenes within the unfolding storyline. A verse is any number of specific morpheme clusters, i.e., a meaning sound cluster, a spoken word, and can be presented as a single line of text. A scene designates a clustering of verses in which there are specific characters and their actions and qualities taking place in a given locale, i.e., the action of these characters takes place in a particular place, with the next scene taking place at a different location, with continuing and possibly added characters, the action likely also changes. With this overarching verse template, the sequences of key components and bones are more easily remembered.
Keep in mind, when you are re-telling the story, it is critical to keep all the bones and their critical scenes in place, not adding some, or leaving some out. But you also are responsible for bring "life" back to the dead words on a page, and to best do so, use your own vernacular voice and words. You are barrowing the story from another, but you also have to make the story your own re-telling - baaeechichiwaau.
A story will never come alive, will never engage participants, if it is memorized.
See the example of "The Couple Befriended by the Moon" pp. 219 - 231 for an application of this "re-member" technique.