Storytelling

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For the 2001 film, see Storytelling (film)

Storytelling is the ancient art of conveying events in words, images, and sounds. Stories have probably been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment, education, preservation of culture and to instill knowledge and values morals. Crucial elements of storytelling include plot and characters, as well as the narrative point of view. Stories are frequently used to teach, explain, and/or entertain.

The appearance of technology has changed the tools available to storytellers. The earliest forms of storytelling are thought to have been primarily oral combined with gestures and expressions. Rudimentary drawings such as can be seen in the artwork scratched onto the walls of caves may also have been early forms of storytelling. With the invention of writing, stories were recorded, transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world. As technology has developed, stories have been presented in images carved into wood or bamboo, ivory or stone, painted on either canvas or paper, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form.

Traditionally, oral stories were passed from generation to generation, and survived solely by memory. With written media, this has become less important. Conversely, in modern times, the vast entertainment industry is built upon a foundation of sophisticated multimedia storytelling.

The Boyhood of Raleigh by Sir John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1870.
A seafarer tells the young Sir Walter Raleigh and his brother the story of what happened out there at sea.

1 Oral traditions
2 Storytelling as Art Form
3 Engagement
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Oral traditions

People in all times and places have told stories. In the oral tradition, storytelling includes the teller and the audience. The storyteller creates the experience, while the audience perceives the message and creates personal mental images from the words heard and the gestures seen. In this experience, the audience becomes co-creator of the art. Storytellers sometimes dialogue with their audience, adjusting their words to respond to the listeners and to the moment.

Oral storytelling is an improvisational art form, one that is sometimes compared to music. Generally, a storyteller does not memorize a set text, but learns a series of script-like incidents that form a satisfying narrative arc (a plot) with a distinct beginning, middle and end. The teller visualizes the characters and settings, and then improvises the actual wording. Thus no two tellings of an oral story are exactly alike.

Albert Bates Lord examined oral narratives 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. Lord found that a surprisingly large part of the stories consisted of text improvised during the telling process. The words seemingly came from a mental storehouse of phrases and narrative devices accumulated over a lifetime.

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 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 intrinsic nature of stories was described in A Palpable God, (1978) by Reynolds Price (Akkadine Press) 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."

There are many kinds of stories, such as fables, parables, myths, legends. Stories are of many moods, such as humorous, inspirational, didactic or educative, frightening, tragic, romantic.

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. (1) "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. (2) "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.

Stories of wise men are well known, such as Solomon and Nasreddin.

Modern actors, singers, rappers and comedians can at times be storytellers. There is also a distinct kind of contemporary performer called "storyteller" who combines elements of these more mainstream professions together with several others, to create performances that are neither modern nor archaic. These performers may use traditional, original, or historical materials.

Organizational consultants and managers have also discovered the power of storytelling in organizations. A good story of organizational transformation in one organization might motivate similar organizations to change as well; also, the informal stories people tell to each other about organizational norms, policies and change initiatives permeate organizational culture and reflect the meaning people give to organizational interventions.

[edit] Storytelling as Art Form

Though nearly all humans tell stories, many individuals have brought this skill to the level of art. Storytelling Festivals feature the work of these individuals. Elements of the 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.

In the 1970s, a so called "Renaissance" of storytelling began in the U.S. and resulted in many performers becoming professional storytellers. Another result was the creation of the National Association for the Perpetuation and Preservation of Storytelling (NAPPS), now the National Storytelling Network. This professional organization helped to organize resources for tellers and festival planners. As of 2007, there are dozens of storytelling festivals and hundreds of professional storytellers around the world.

[edit] Engagement

Robert Begiebing et al (2004) summarize personal and professional experiences making successful modern films, novels, biographies, articles, museum displays, and poems. Even in these forms, storytellers try to create a sense of engagement or dialog with the audience. As a professor of English, Begiebing hypothesizes that the effective writer provides just enough clues to get the reader's imagination, intellect, and emotional responses involved in figuring out what is going on in the story. The stories that last through the ages "leave plenty up to the reader."

History museum expert Barbara Franco describes how good storytelling techniques can improve a museum exhibit. She illustrates the point when she says "good labels raise questions and get people thinking." The voice telling the story makes a great difference. First-person encourages the reader, audience, or visitor to the museum to listen and relate to a person, the speaker, not just to the recitation of facts.

An example of a first-person story is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. There is also a "third person" perspective in which the main character is seen from the outside and the inside at the same time, heightening the reader's involvement in the story.

Mixes of viewpoints and voices assist in telling extremely complex stories. Franco says it this way. "Audience research has shown that visitors are more willing to deal with difficult topics in exhibitions if they are given multiple viewpoints and are able to hear different sides."

"Addressing the unfamiliar is one way to foster critical engagement," says Joshua Brown, filmmaker and historian. A good storyteller gives the listener or reader a sense of making order out of chaos. So the good storyteller must give the reader a good dose of feeling the chaos, and there has to follow enough order made out of the chaos to give the reader the satisfaction of a good story.

However, the stories that appeal to generation after generation are the stories that are never resolvable - just as life is never resolvable; the complexity of life remains. Life is non-linear, says filmmaker David Grubin. If life were linear, we would always live in the present moment, but we don't. At any moment, we live in the past, partly in the present, and much in the future. Life is non-linear. And the best films convey that non-linearity of life in flashbacks and premonitions. Grubin tells his own experience of trying to capture on film what it was like to be Sigmund Freud. And Grubin's solution was to tell the childhood of Freud toward the end of the film when Freud is rehashing for himself the difficulties he had in creating psychoanalysis. And in that moment of complexity in his life, Freud reflects on the similar difficulties he had in his childhood in getting people to accept him.

In Grubin's estimation, Kurosawa similarly looked for non-linear storytelling techniques when he approached the problem of telling in Rashomon the very complex story of conflicting interests. Four different people are involved in a murder. They have different self-interests, and they have different stories of what happened. It is all one film, but it is four different stories with similar people and similar props in each of the four stories. And Kurosawa does not give a clue to what really happened--as opposed to the four conflicting stories. And the non-linearity of the storytelling adds to the popular appeal of the film.

[edit] References

Begiebing, R., J. Brown, B. Franco, D. Grubin, R. Rosen & N. Trethewey. (2004). Interchange: Genres of history. Journal of American History 91 (Sept. 2004), 572-593.

Binder, Mark, EVERYTHING BEDTIME STORY BOOK. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 1999.

Brown, J. S., S. Denning, K. Groh & L. Prusak. Storytelling in Organizations : Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Managemen. Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004

Bruner, J. ACTUAL MINDS, POSSIBLE WORLDS. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Bruner, J. MAKING STORIES. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002.

Gargiulo, Terrence L. Stories at Work: Using Stories to Improve Communication and Build Relationships. Praeger, 2006

Gargiulo, Terrence L. The Strategic Use of Stories in Organizational Communication and Learnin. M.E. Sharpe, 2005

Leitch, T. M. WHAT STORIES ARE: NARRATIVE THEORY AND INTERPRETATION. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1986.

Lord, Albert Bates. THE SINGER OF TALES. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. Regan Books, 1997.

Mitchoff, K. H. (2005, February) Ignite the story within: a librarian makes a case for using storytelling to increase literacy. School Library Journal. ERIC Document EJ710440.

Randall, W. "Restorying a Life: Adult Education and Transformative Learning." In AGING AND BIOGRAPHY: EXPLORATIONS IN ADULT DEVELOPMENT, edited by J. E. Birren et al., pp. 224-247. New York: Springer Publishing, 1996.

Reis, Pamela Tamarkin (2001). Genesis as Rashomon: The creation as told by God and man. Bible Review 17 (3).

Wiessner, C. A.Stories of Change: Narrative in Emancipatory Adult Education Ed. D. dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2001.