Storytelling
is the ancient art of conveying events in words, images,
and sounds. Stories have probably been shared in every culture
and in every land as a means of entertainment, education,
preservation of culture and to instill knowledge and values/morals.
Crucial elements of storytelling include plot and characters,
as well as the narrative point of view.
Stories are frequently used to teach, explain,
and/or entertain. Less frequently, but occasionally with
major consequences, they have been used to mislead. There
can be much truth in a story of fiction, and much falsehood
in a story that uses facts.
The appearance of technology has changed
the tools available to storytellers. The earliest forms
of storytelling are thought to have been primarily oral
combined with gestures and expressions. Rudimentary drawings
such as can be seen in the artwork scratched onto the walls
of caves may also have been early forms of storytelling.
Ephemeral media such as sand, leaves, and the carved trunks
of living trees have also been used to record stories in
pictures or with writing. With the invention of writing
and the use of stable, portable media stories were recorded,
transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world.
Stories have been carved, scratched, painted,
printed, or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones,
pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment),
bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded
on film and stored electronically in digital form. Complex
forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information
about genealogy, affiliation and social status.
Traditionally, oral stories were passed
from generation to generation, and survived solely by memory.
With written media, this has become less important. Conversely,
in modern times, the vast entertainment industry is built
upon a foundation of sophisticated multimedia storytelling.
People in all times and places have told stories. In the
oral tradition, storytelling includes the teller and the
audience. The storyteller creates the experience, while
the audience perceives the message and creates personal
mental images from the words heard and the gestures seen.
In this experience, the audience becomes co-creator of the
art. Storytellers sometimes dialogue with their audience,
adjusting their words to respond to the listeners and to
the moment.
Oral storytelling is an improvisational
art form, one that is sometimes compared to music. Generally,
a storyteller does not memorize a set text, but learns a
series of script-like incidents that form a satisfying narrative
arc (a plot) with a distinct beginning, middle and end.
The teller visualizes the characters and settings, and then
improvises the actual wording. Thus no two relatings of
an oral story are exactly alike. Albert Bates Lord examined
oral narratives from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral
bards collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and the texts
of epics such as The Odyssey and Beowulf. Lord found that
a surprisingly large part of the stories consisted of text
improvised during the telling process.
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