The thing about storytellers is, the telling’s the thing.
Everyone loves a different part of a story. For some people, it is the narrative structure, tracing the arc of presentation to building tension to climax to denoument. For some people, it is the people, their characterizations and mannerisms. For some people, it is the scenery and the setting that makes the story compelling. And apparently, for a lot of people, it’s about sex. I can only guess that’s why most of the free contemporary ebooks on amazon are stories I’ll never read to my son.
But for storytellers. It is the act of telling the story that they find enjoyable. A storyteller can tell the same story to the same person 5 times in a row and enjoy it every single time, unlike the person listening to the story for the 5th time in a row. I think it is important for both parties to realize this.
The telling’s the thing. For the storyteller, it’s more about how the story is told than the story itself. While the listener may hear the exact same story told 5 times in a row, the storyteller is actually tweaking the story each and every time it is told. A little more dramatic cadence for these sentences. Take out the ‘and then’ for that part, it’s extraneous. Pause for half a second longer at this point. They are artists for which the story is a canvas whose paint never dries, forever allowing itself to stretch, squeeze, and twist into new variations. The stories evolve over time. Sometimes the canvas tears, the endings change. It’s not about consistency. It’s not about accuracy, it’s about the telling of the story. The telling’s the thing.
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