Storytelling

Stories come to us from all kinds of places. Most are told by our parents or other relatives. Some come from books, and some come from memory. When my children would ask for a “Story without a book”, the ones I told most often were ones I remembered from my own childhood. Later, I wrote them down so I could pass them on to them to learn for their children.

Many stories for children owe their success to repetition. Repetition, and simple stories with simple plots or doggerel entrance children. They are learning about their world every waking minute, and repetition makes that easier.

Adults often find repetition monotonous and boring. Consider re-runs on TV. But when a parent reads a story to his or her child, it's not boring at all, because, deep down, we are passing on a time-honored tradition, Storytelling.

For thousands of years before writing was invented, the duty of passing down history and lore about a people and their place in the world, usually fell to one man: The Storyteller.

These were no ordinary stories. They were of creation and destruction, of great battles and victorious heroes, of journeys taken and fantastic miracles witnessed or related, told again and again.

Over the centuries, as storytellers became more sophisticated, they refined their stories to fit with contemporary society. Court Jesters were often storytellers, and sometimes those stories had a point. Although they were often labeled fools, it has been said that the jester was the only man who could tell a king an unpleasant truth and not suffer consequences. It's where the phrase “Speaking truth to power” originated.

As literacy became more common, stories were at last written down and standardized. More people could read a single story than a storyteller could reach in a lifetime. Publishing stories became big business. Books, newspapers, magazines, gazettes, tabloids, were all printed for the express purpose of telling stories. Some were true, some were not. The same thing goes on today.

Lately though, newspapers seem to be shrinking. Fewer papers are being bought and read, and some have folded. Trying to cut costs, some newspapers have narrowed the paper they are printed on. They have hired fewer reporters and subscribed to syndicated content providers, simply reprinting stories submitted elsewhere. Think of that e-mail you got that had been forwarded so many times, you had to scroll through a dozen pages of e-mail addresses to find the message.

E-mail is another reason for the decline in printed media. But a story spread by e-mail can go around the world at the speed of light and be read by more people than any book or newspaper. Whether that's a good thing is a subject for another day.

Over the last dozen years or so, storytelling has been going through a renaissance. Men and women have taken up the art in an effort to reconnect people with our shared past and oral tradition. Their costumes are as varied as their stories. There are storytellers who dress like hippies, or fairy queens, or harlequins, but they all share a love for telling stories for children and grownups, too.

If you can make up stories that are entertaining and fun, then you are lucky, indeed. But if you can't, there are plenty of printed stories you can use. However, if you are a parent, you should learn one story, one short simple tale with a little action and a little repetition,and some humor, so when your child says, “Read a story without a book,” you'll be ready. And your child will be amazed.