Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment, education, preservation of culture and in order to instill moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot and characters, as well as the narrative point of view.
The earliest forms of storytelling are thought to have been primarily oral combined with gestures and expressions. Rudimentary drawings scratched onto the walls of caves may be forms of early storytelling for many of the ancient cultures. The Australian Aborginal people painted symbols from the stories on cave walls as a means of helping the storyteller remember the story. The story was then told using a combination of oral narrative, music, rock art and dance. Ephemeral media such as sand, leaves, and the carved trunks of living trees have also been used to record stories in pictures or with writing.
The evolution of technology has changed the tools available to storytellers. With the advent of writing, the use of actual digit symbols to represent language, and the use of stable, portable media stories were recorded, transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed, or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form. Complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status.
Traditionally, oral stories were committed to memory and then passed from generation to generation. However, in the most recent past, written and televised media has largely surpassed this method communicating local, family and cultural histories.
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Albert Bates Lord examined oral narratives (see also oral storytelling) from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral bards collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and the texts of epics such as The Odyssey and Beowulf.[1] Lord found that a large part of the stories consisted of text improvised during the telling process.
Lord identified two types of story vocabulary. The first he called 'formulas': "rosy-fingered dawn," "the wine-dark sea," certain set phrases had long been known of in Homer and other oral epics. But no one realized before Lord how common these formulas were. He discovered that across many story traditions that fully 90% of an oral epic is assembled from lines repeated verbatim or with one-for-one word substitutions. Oral stories are built out of phrases stockpiled from a lifetime of hearing and telling stories.
The other type of story vocabulary is theme. A theme is a set sequence of story actions that structure the tale. Just as the teller of tales proceeds line-by-line using formulas, so he proceeds from event-to-event using themes. One almost universal theme is repetition, as evidenced in Western folklore with the 'rule of three': three brothers set out, three attempts are made, three riddles are asked. A theme can be as simple as a specific set sequence describing the arming of a hero, starting with shirt and trousers and ending with headdress and weapons. A theme can be large enough to be a plot component. For example: a hero proposes a journey to a dangerous place / he disguises himself / his disguise fools everybody / except for a common person of little account (a crone, a tavern maid or a woodcutter) / who immediately recognizes him / the commoner becomes the hero's ally, showing unexpected resources of skill or initiative. A theme does not belong to a specific story, but may be found with minor variation in many different stories. Themes may be no more than handy prefabricated parts for constructing a tale. Or they may represent universal truths - ritual-based, religious truths as James Frazer saw in The Golden Bough, or archetypal, psychological truths as Joseph Campbell describes in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
The story was described by Reynolds Price, when he wrote:
A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."[2]
Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups: "Märchen" and "Sagen". These are German terms for which there are no exact English equivalents; the first one is both singular and plural.
"Märchen," loosely translated as "fairy tale(s)" (though fairies are rare in them) take place in a kind of separate "once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular. They are clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents, and peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise. Indeed, there is very little affect, generally; bloodcurdling events may take place, but with little call for emotional response from the listener.
"Sagen," best translated as "legends," are supposed to have actually happened, very often at a particular time and place, and they draw much of their power from this fact. When the supernatural intrudes (as it often does), it does so in an emotionally fraught manner. Ghost and lover's leap stories belong in this category, as do many UFO-stories, and stories of supernatural beings and events.
Another extremely important examination of orality in human life is Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Ong studies the distinguishing characteristics of oral traditions, and how oral and written cultures interact and condition one another, and ultimately influence human epistemology.
The art of narrative is by definition a highly aesthetic enterprise, and there are a number of aesthetic elements that typically interact in well-developed stories. Such elements include the essential idea of narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings, middles and ends or exposition-development-climax-resolution-denouement, normally constructed into coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality that includes retention of the past, attention to present action, and protention/future anticipation; a substantial focus on characters and characterization which is “arguably the most important single component of the novel” (David Lodge The Art of Fiction 67); a given hetergloss of different voices dialogically at play—“the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms and registers” (Lodge The Art of Fiction 97); possesses a narrator or narrator-like voice, which by definition “addresses” and “interacts with” reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, conditioning a plotted narrative, and other at other times much more visible, “arguing” for and against various positions; relies substantially on now-standard aesthetic figuration, particularly including the use of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony (see Hayden White, Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often enmeshed in intertextuality, with copious connections, references, allusions, similarities, parallels, etc. to other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward bildingsroman, a description of identity development with an effort to evince becoming in character and community.
Storytelling Festivals feature the work of several storytellers. Elements of the oral storytelling art form include visualization (the seeing of images in the mind's eye), and vocal and bodily gestures. In many ways, the art of storytelling draws upon other art forms such as acting, oral interpretation, and performance studies.
Several storytelling organizations started in the US during the 1970s. National Association for the Perpetuation and Preservation of Storytelling (NAPPS), now the National Storytelling Network and the International Storytelling Center. NSN is a professional organization that helps to organize resources for tellers and festival planners. The ISC runs the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN.[3] Australia followed their American counterparts with the establishment of storytelling guilds in the late 1970s. Australian storytelling today has individuals and groups across the country.
As of 2009, there are dozens of storytelling festivals and hundreds of professional storytellers around the world, and an international celebration of the art on World storytelling day. The internet storytelling forum, STORYTELL,sponsored by the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman's University in Denton, has over 500 subscribers worldwide.
In oral traditions, stories are kept alive by being re-told again and again. The material of any given story during this process naturally undergoes several changes and adaptations. When and where oral tradition was pushed back in favour of print media, the literary idea of the author as originator of a story's authoritative version changed people's perception of stories themselves. In the following centuries, stories tended to be seen as the work of individuals rather than a collective. Only recently, when a significant number of influential authors began questioning their own role, the value of stories as such - independent of authorship - was again recognized. Literary critics such as Roland Barthes even proclaimed the Death of the Author.
Quotes regarding Storytelling.
Storytelling is a narrative act or skill of presenting stories. This juxtaposition of two words is the term used for the action of telling a story with words, images and sounds. In our days, the transmission is more writen than spoken. The collect is fixed on a support in order to save it from forget for studying[1] and practicing.
Before love, Storytelling is the first social need of a baby. In Philosophical Investigations, Lutwig Wittgenstein said people tell stories because it pays[2].
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Professional storytelling is the interaction of three categories of people : a scenarist also called plot designer, a narrator also called producer, and characters for roles game played by actors.
Here is a list of participants in this Learning Group
Most stories are told in the third person (it, he, she or they). But the story can also use the first person (i or we) or the second person (you), especially in dialogs.
Here are some practical advices :
Reginald Revans compares storytelling to a questioning program[4] improvable through action learning. The feedback between two langages is a way to improve continuously a story.
There is no Prerequisites. Narrative's intertainment is a mean to educate about beauty, moral, humour and improvisation.
Most stories will be written with no more than 20 lines of text. For some, even 10 or less will suffice. A professional script is generally divised in acts of 15 minuts and scenes of 5 minuts[6]. A typical elevator speech moment follows generally four steps in less than 2 minutes : polite names introduction ; facts related to the context; emotions generating opinion and laughters sharing humour at conclusion[7]. According to Debra Fine, storytelling requires small talks in any context.
Learning-by-doing refers to the capability of people to improve their stories through practice, self-perfection and minor innovations.
Concerning words frequency, the first letters of alphabet could be vowels. The consonants are less used for attraction. Zipf studied words frequency in James Joyce's book Ulysse. He observed that the first word was used 8 000 times ; the tenth word 800 times ; the hundredth 80 times ; and the Thousandth 8 times. That should mean the ten thousandth worth 0.8 is a neologism. According to Mandelbrot, the optimal fractal of a word could be 4.3 letters in French and four letter in english. Storytelling can be described in the marketing of four questions : price (What is storytelling for action?) ; sentiment (Who is the right people for storytelling?) ; volume (Where is the right place for storytelling?) ; time (When is the right moment for storytelling?).
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Look up storytelling in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
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Search Wikimedia Commons for images, sounds and other media related to: File:Godwin's law.ogg |
   | The National Storytelling Network - National Storytelling Network |
| | The story that we tell ourselves - TOPAZ Magazine | The breath of life |
| | Narrative and Stories in Adult Teaching and Learning - Narrative and Stories in Adult Teaching and Learning. ERIC Digest. |
| | Persausion Through Storytelling - The Story Factor: Influence, Inspiration and Persuasion through Storytelling |
| | Organisational Storytelling - One Thousand and One |
| | Best web links on storytelling - Tim Sheppard's Storytelling Resources for Storytellers |
| | Storytelling: Its Wide-Ranging Impact in the Classroom - Storytelling: Its Wide-Ranging Impact in the Classroom. ERIC Digest |
| | ''The Art of the Story-teller'' - The Art of the Story-teller. |
| | How storytelling will save the world - How Storytelling will Save the World. | The Art of Storytelling with Children Show |
| | Storytelling and Spirituality in Judaism - Storytelling and Spirituality in Judaism |
| | Dianne de Las Casas' Story Collection - Dianne's Story Collection |
| | Christian Stories Online - cool christian stories, christian online stories, christian stories, submit your christian stories |
| | Storytellers of Canada - Storytellers of Canada/Conteurs du Canada-a national organisation of storytellers. We continue to develop storytelling as a distinct, reconised art form. We facilitate communication among storytellers and about storytelling |
| | Storytelling in business - Dutopia - adding experience | reaching goals - Experience economy, the added value of storytelling |
| | Storyteller.net for Articles, Stories and Resources - Storyteller.net: Storytelling, Storytellers, Stories, Story, Storytelling Techniques, Hear a Story, Read Stories, Audio Stories, Find Tellers, How to Tell A Story - Welcome |
| | Children's Storytelling Community - My Baby Monsters: children's stories and imagination... my story, your story, everybody's story (Kid's collaborative storytelling) |
| | '''Organizational Storytelling''' - MAKINGSTORIES.net - Terrence Gargiulo - 781-894-4381 |
| | How storytelling will save the world - Home site for Storyteller Eric James Wolf - Brother Wolf Storytelling. |
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