INTRODUCTION: STORYTELLING
Fairytales, Myths and Urban Legends 2013
WHY DO WE TELL STORIES?
To entertain
 To preserve memory
 To persuade
 To record history
 To be known
 To reconstruct reality
 To communicate values, beliefs, traditions
 To understand experience
 To inspire empathy
 To uphold the spectacle
 To either hide or expose the truth

WHAT MAKES A GOOD STORY?
Detailed
 Structured – beginning, middle, end
 Sequence of actions
 Suspenseful
 Moment of reflection
 Well placed exaggeration, hyperbole
 Presents questions to be answered
 Evokes feeling or further thought

WHY DO WE TELL STORIES?

Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is
particularly important where the inner life is
frightened, wedged or cornered. Story greases the
hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge,
shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our
trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously
blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland,
that lead to love and learning, that lead us back
to our own real lives…(Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
WHY DO WE TELL STORIES?

Looking inward, story patterns and characters
intertwine with the hard-to perceive forces that
shape our lives. Looking outward, story-threads
join us to a larger cultural fabric…The most
important stories may be those we share with
family and friends, but all help preserve memory,
explain our present, and imagine our future.
Sewn across time, story-threads bind individuals
to families and families to society, defining our
collective values, beliefs, goals and traditions
(call of story)
WHAT MAKES A GOOD STORY?
The Power of the anecdote is so great…No matter
how boring the material is, if it is in story
form…there is suspense in it, it feels like
something’s going to happen. The reason why is
because literally it’s a sequence of events…you
can feel through its form [that it's] inherently
like being on a train that has a destination…and
that you’re going to find something…(Ira Glass)
 Ira Glass on storytelling

WEEKEND HOMEWORK
1-2 pages typed
 Choose an example of storytelling from the world
around you. Summarize the story itself and then
explain why your example is, in fact, a case of
storytelling. Then, explain what your story
reveals about the role of storytelling in our
current society as well as what your story
indicates about broader social values, norms or
practices. To find an example, you might look to
the local news, reality television, a family legend,
a rumor, a work of fiction, a go-to story of your
own, or even something your friend told you on
the way to school.
