INTRODUCTION: STORYTELLINGFairytales, 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.