Storytelling is an inheritance as old as Man. It goes back to our birth in Africa, to the evenings when dusk drew across the bush and our ancestors huddled close round the fire. Hemmed in by the deepening darkness and the sounds of the night – a leopard coughing high in the kloofs above their campsite, the sudden snort of a buck – they craved distraction before they could sleep; they needed to settle the dust of the day’s events. “Tell us a story,” they would beg. “Tell us….”
Just as there were some who excelled at hunting, so there were the articulate few who spun the most imaginative stories; but, while hunting was something far older than man, storytelling, the imagination it required, the organization, the sense of timing, and the ability to remember, was something quite new and uniquely human.
So the first storytellers told of the animals that watched from the darkness, they told of the origins of the tribe, they sought to explain the place of man under the great night sky. They became far more than mere raconteurs, they forged the basis of culture, of philosophy and religion. Future storytellers sat at their feet, absorbing their ideas, later to embellish them as they grew up and passed them on.
Storytelling holds great power, the power to sway people. Storytelling can capture those that listen as surely as any other trap. As audiences grew so storytellers wielded greater and greater influence. Storytellers, after all, are the people who articulate collective experience, who act as the intermediary between the physical world and their audiences. They became priests, philosophers, orators, politicians, newspaper editors, television programme makers, bloggers. But today’s fiction writers, sitting at their computers, are the ancient storytellers’ most direct descendants.
Jon’s first stories were told in the darkness of an English school dormitory. They were his own stories, fashioned from his experiences in the mysterious land he came from. He told them, and he took his listeners back to Africa.
Photo courtesy heath.windliff (CC) on Flickr
Just as there were some who excelled at hunting, so there were the articulate few who spun the most imaginative stories; but, while hunting was something far older than man, storytelling, the imagination it required, the organization, the sense of timing, and the ability to remember, was something quite new and uniquely human.
So the first storytellers told of the animals that watched from the darkness, they told of the origins of the tribe, they sought to explain the place of man under the great night sky. They became far more than mere raconteurs, they forged the basis of culture, of philosophy and religion. Future storytellers sat at their feet, absorbing their ideas, later to embellish them as they grew up and passed them on.
Storytelling holds great power, the power to sway people. Storytelling can capture those that listen as surely as any other trap. As audiences grew so storytellers wielded greater and greater influence. Storytellers, after all, are the people who articulate collective experience, who act as the intermediary between the physical world and their audiences. They became priests, philosophers, orators, politicians, newspaper editors, television programme makers, bloggers. But today’s fiction writers, sitting at their computers, are the ancient storytellers’ most direct descendants.
Jon’s first stories were told in the darkness of an English school dormitory. They were his own stories, fashioned from his experiences in the mysterious land he came from. He told them, and he took his listeners back to Africa.
Photo courtesy heath.windliff (CC) on Flickr