Storytelling

Storytelling is the shared human practice of telling tales, often involving improvisation, performance, or added flair. Every society has its own stories, used for entertainment, teaching, preserving culture, or conveying moral lessons. Key ingredients of a story include its plot, characters, and the perspective from which it is told.

Long before writing existed, storytelling was tied to the development of mythologies. The earliest tales were spoken, accompanied by gestures and expressions. Storytelling played a major role in religious education and ritual, such as during the Passover Seder. Some researchers think ancient rock art, like that made by Aboriginal Australians, was a form of storytelling. Those Aboriginal artists painted symbols on cave walls that also appeared in their stories, helping the storyteller remember the narrative. The full telling then combined spoken word, music, rock art, and dance, giving meaning to human existence through memory and performance. People have also used carved tree trunks and temporary materials like sand and leaves to record folktales in pictures or writing. Complex tattoos could tell stories about family history, social ties, and status.

Many folktales from different cultures share similar themes and motifs, hinting at basic psychological similarities among people. Other tales, especially fairy tales, seem to have traveled from one place to another, suggesting they had broad appeal. Groups of originally oral tales can merge over time into story cycles, like the *Arabian Nights*, gather around legendary heroes such as King Arthur, or develop into religious narratives about gods and saints. These stories can be episodic, like those about Anansi; epic, like Homer’s tales; inspirational, as in the tradition of saints’ lives; or instructive, like many Buddhist or Christian scriptures.

With the invention of writing and durable, portable materials, storytellers could record and share stories across vast regions. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, or printed onto wood, bamboo, ivory, bone, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm leaves, animal skins, bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas, and other textiles. They have also been recorded on film and stored digitally. Despite the rise of written and televised media, oral storytelling continues, created on the spot by both amateur and professional tellers, and passed down through memory from generation to generation.

Modern storytelling covers a wide range. Beyond traditional forms like fairy tales, folktales, myths, legends, and fables, it now includes history, personal stories, political commentary, and evolving cultural norms. It is widely used for education. New media offer fresh ways to record, express, and consume stories. Tools for group communication allow people to reshape individual tales into shared ones. Games and digital platforms, such as those used in interactive fiction, can place the user as a character in a larger world. Documentaries, including interactive web documentaries, use narrative techniques to present information. Self-revealing stories, created for emotional release and therapy, are increasingly used in practices like psychodrama, drama therapy, and playback theatre. Storytelling also serves as a tool for psychological and social change in transformative arts.

Some argue that various modern narrative forms qualify as storytelling. These include digital storytelling, online role-playing games, and traditional dice-and-paper role-playing games. In the latter, the storyteller controls the world and non-player characters, moving the plot forward as players interact. The game advances mainly through spoken dialogue, with dice rolls deciding random events in the fictional universe. These games cover many genres, such as sci-fi, fantasy, and alternate-reality worlds with werewolves, aliens, demons, or hidden societies. Such oral-based role-playing games were very popular among youth in many countries during the 1990s, before being largely replaced by computer and console-based MMORPGs. Despite this, dice-and-paper RPGs still have a dedicated following.

Oral storytelling traditions exist in many civilizations and predate printed and online media. Stories were used to explain natural events, and bards told creation tales, building pantheons of gods and myths. Oral stories were passed from generation to generation, and storytellers were seen as healers, leaders, spiritual guides, teachers, keepers of cultural secrets, and entertainers. These oral narratives took forms including songs, poetry, chants, and dance.