![]() The immediacy of the first person narration adds to the emotional impact of the live performer, and the description becomes the entertainment. “Remember old Silas and how he used to…” And everyone who knows old Silas gets a great deal of enjoyment out of a shared (or new) perspective on the character. Storytellers also relate to their audience by starting with a shared idea or character. “When I was a young’un we had to walk to school barefoot through two feet of snow, uphill both ways.” And the storyteller goes on, telling his or her rapt audience about a life that is so different from nowadays that they are fascinated. Many of the tales we hear from the old folks are not stories at all, in the literary sense, but setting descriptions. But often the storyteller is not recounting a narrative. While all written stories need this structure, storytellers actually tell two types of “stories.” The first is the traditional tale where the usual forms apply. Which couldn’t be farther from the truth. All of them need a story arc with rising tension, a climax and a denouement. ![]() Most people will say that a story is a story, and all of them need a beginning, a middle and an end. Watch out for this slippage often it doesn’t work. Since the ability to tell a story is one of the key items in every writer’s toolbox, we all tend to slip into storyteller tricks. ![]() Storytellers who want to write their stories down run into so many problems because some elements of the storyteller’s art just don’t translate to written form. While creating these transformations, I have gained a new appreciation for the difference between a work told by a storyteller to a live audience and something written by an author for the reading public. Lately I’ve been working on a project recording people’s personal stories and editing them for publication. ![]()
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