Storytelling Starters ~ Making Connections 2
Saturday, November 12th, 2011
Making Connections moves on this week to another story involving a key and the role of pattern in it. It’s a story in the style of the traditional tale.
Keys – and a tale for telling to children
Traditional tales
Traditional tales are one of the three great categories of stories where storytellers look for stories to tell. For some, their favourite category is personal tales like my last week’s story of a forgotten key. Others believe that storytelling is essentially about creating new stories, maybe even making them up on the spot. That’s something we’ll move to in a couple of weeks.
For most of the working storytellers I know, however, traditional tales form the bedrock of the stories we tell. We may reformulate a story, update it, relocate it or otherwise change it in all kinds of ways. But we like to maintain that, whatever we do, traditional stories are fundamental. They’ve stood the test of time. They occur in all cultures. They contain keys to the problems of life. Myth or legend, fairy story or fable, ballad or morality tale, they are at the heart of storytelling.
For many people – new storytellers especially – this raises one immediate problem. (more…)