It’s the summer holidays – just the right time for some storytelling games. On your own, you can deliberately set out to develop all kinds of alternative scenarios to situations in traditional stories or that are happening in your own lifstorytelling games are fun in pairs or in groups.

Storytelling games develop imagination, relish quirky ideas, treasure inventiveness of language. They’re most fun in pairs or in groups.

This week I came across an excellently ridiculous story that came out of a session I ran way back in 2001. The session was with one of my friend Debbie Guneratne’s Small Tales Storytelling Clubs. I found my note of what happened while sorting through my shelves of old diaries, storytelling journals and books of stories I’ve written. The aim of my sorting was to be throwing stuff away. I can’t say I did much chucking. But I loved the reading and reflecting, particularly in regard to my journals.

The date was Saturday, 17th March 2001. First we played my Empty World game in which, as the game goes on (there’s lots of rhythm and repetition), each participant chooses an item whose name begins with the same first letter as their own first name. Afterwards, I had the idea of suggesting that we try to make links between the items that had been put into our Empty World. On this occasion, these were as follows:

Gorge (from George); apple tree (Alexander); leprechaun (Liam); lion (Lily); dragon (Debbie); map (Mary); microwave (Matthew); rabbit (Rachel).

What arose as we tried linking these items felt a bit tentative at first as we haphazardly tried out ideas. But we so enjoyed the suggesting. As the story took hold, we liked it more and more and it started to take real narrative form. The last sentence of what resulted began as a throw-away line from Lily somewhere in the course of the thinking and came brilliantly back into play as the punch line.

The story:

In a deserted part of the world, there is a gorge. In the valley of the gorge grows an apple tree and in the apple tree lives a leprechaun. The leprechaun lives on the apples that grow on the tree and is heavily camouflaged to look like part of the tree.

Another creature, a lion, also likes to eat the apples. He comes to the top of the gorge and, each time he does this and leans down for an apple, he hears a sound like his own roar. It’s actually the sound that the leprechaun makes. But the lion ignores the roaring, takes hold of an apple and eats it. The leprechaun cannot escape. Above him on the edge of the gorge is the lion. Below, round the roots of the apple tree, is a dragon performing its ancestral duty of guarding.

The leprechaun is not only trapped. He longs to vary his diet. His yearning continues until he realises that the bark of the tree is a kind of map. Part is a map of the area, part is a map of the stars.

As the leprechaun learns to read the star-map, he sees there are shapes in the stars. Soon he is wishing to bring some of these shapes down to earth to his tree and of the two he most wishes to have, one is in the shape of a microwave and the other is in the shape of a rabbit. Hey presto, as he wishes to have them, there they are in the tree.

So the leprechaun opens the microwave, puts the rabbit inside and what comes out is Hot Cross Bunny.

Try the game out.

Vary how you play it to suit your situation. I’m pretty sure you’ll have fun and afterwards you can retell whatever story gets created. My journal tells me I took the step of retelling Hot Cross Bunny to my husband the very afternoon following the session when it was created. We were walking along Piccadilly from Green Park station. It was bitterly cold and dreadfully wet. I suppose that telling the story occurred to me as a way of cheering us up. He laughed and laughed and referred to it again at various times during the rest of the day. I wonder if he’ll remember it now. I’ll have to see!

PS: One of my god-daughters, now about to have her third child, often refers to me as Mary Games. We used to play storytelling games together – she was a brilliantly inventive story-maker – and that must be why she gave me the name.

PPS: Another storytelling game can involve linking a set of objects. Try it with the items in my photo.

Tags: Debbie Guneratne, Empty World, linking, Mary Games, Small Tales, storytelling journals

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 27th, 2013 at 11:42 am and is filed under Creating, Personal experience, Props and Resources, Storytelling games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.