Storytelling

[citation needed] Storytelling often has a prominent educational and performative role in religious rituals (for example, the Passover Seder[3]), and some archaeologists[which?]

[5][page needed] People have used the carved trunks of living trees and ephemeral media (such as sand and leaves) to record folktales in pictures or with writing.

Groups of originally oral tales can coalesce over time into story cycles (like the Arabian Nights), cluster around mythic heroes (like King Arthur), and develop into the narratives of the deeds of the gods and saints of various religions.

[7] The results can be episodic (like the stories about Anansi), epic (as with Homeric tales), inspirational (note the tradition of vitae) and/or instructive (as in many Buddhist or Christian scriptures).

With the advent of writing and the use of stable, portable media, storytellers recorded, transcribed and continued to share stories 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.

[11] Self-revelatory stories, created for their cathartic and therapeutic effect, are growing in their use and application, as in psychodrama, drama therapy and playback theatre.

This type of game has many genres, such as sci-fi and fantasy, as well as alternate-reality worlds based on the current reality, but with different settings and beings such as werewolves, aliens, daemons, or hidden societies.

Oral stories passed from one generation to the next and storytellers were regarded as healers, leaders, spiritual guides, teachers, cultural secrets keepers and entertainers.

The first he called "formulas": "Rosy-fingered Dawn", "the wine-dark sea" and other specific set phrases had long been known of in Homer and other oral epics.

Lord, however, discovered that across many story traditions, fully 90% of an oral epic is assembled from lines which are repeated verbatim or which use one-for-one word substitutions.

One near-universal theme is repetition, as evidenced in Western folklore with the "rule of three": Three brothers set out, three attempts are made, three riddles are asked.

A theme can be as simple as a specific set sequence describing the arming of a hero, starting with shirt and trousers and ending with headdress and weapons.

[20] These are German terms for which there are no exact English equivalents, however we have approximations: Märchen, loosely translated as "fairy tale(s)" or little stories, take place in a kind of separate "once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular, at an indeterminate time in the past.

Because storytelling requires auditory and visual senses from listeners, one can learn to organize their mental representation of a story, recognize structure of language and express his or her thoughts.

[28] Listening to a storyteller can create lasting personal connections, promote innovative problem solving and foster a shared understanding regarding future ambitions.

[32] For indigenous cultures of the Americas, storytelling is used as an oral form of language associated with practices and values essential to developing one's identity.

[33] For example, the Sto:lo community in Canada focuses on reinforcing children's identity by telling stories about the land to explain their roles.

[43] Narratives can be shared to express the values or morals among family, relatives, or people who are considered part of the close-knit community.

[44] In order to make meaning from these stories, elders in the Sto:lo community for example, emphasize the importance in learning how to listen, since it requires the senses to bring one's heart and mind together.

[44] For instance, a way in which children learn about the metaphors significant for the society they live in, is by listening to their elders and participating in rituals where they respect one another.

Typically, stories are used as an informal learning tool in Indigenous American communities, and can act as an alternative method for reprimanding children's bad behavior.

[65] Noted author and folklore scholar, Elaine Lawless states, "...this process provides new avenues for understanding and identity formation.

Therapeutic storytelling is also used to promote healing through transformative arts, where a facilitator helps a participant write and often present their personal story to an audience.

Such elements include the essential idea of narrative structure with identifiable beginnings, middles, and endings, or exposition-development-climax-resolution-denouement, normally constructed into coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality, which includes retention of the past, attention to present action and protention/future anticipation; a substantial focus on characters and characterization which is "arguably the most important single component of the novel";[69] a given heterogloss of different voices dialogically at play – "the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms and registers";[70] possesses a narrator or narrator-like voice, which by definition "addresses" and "interacts with" reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, conditioning a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, "arguing" for and against various positions; relies substantially on now-standard aesthetic figuration, particularly including the use of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony (see Hayden White, Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often enmeshed in intertextuality, with copious connections, references, allusions, similarities, parallels, etc.

Only recently when a significant number of influential authors began questioning their own roles, the value of stories as such – independent of authorship – was again recognized.

Prior to that, employers usually placed newspaper ads telling a story about the kind of person they wanted, including their character and, in many cases, their ethnicity.

When situations are complex or dense, narrative discourse helps to resolve conflicts, influences corporate decisions and stabilizes the group.

[85] A Nielsen study shows consumers want a more personal connection in the way they gather information since human brains are more engaged by storytelling than by the presentation of facts alone.

[86] Marketing developments incorporating storytelling include the use of the trans-media techniques that originated in the film industry intended to "build a world in which your story can evolve".