Storytelling and Story of three words
The 'A story of 3 words' has been going on for a long time, and I wanted to make a suggestion about effective storytelling.
I just finished an improv class and we did some storytelling activities and a variant of this where each person only adds one word. Our teacher gave us some good pointers on storytelling and this activity.
When you think of a story like Jack and the Beanstalk. You have one central character, Jack. He encounters many strange things, magical beans, a beanstalk, goose that lays golden eggs, and a giant to name a few. But the story always returns to Jack and what he is doing.
The first few times we tried the exercise, it didn't follow a story format. A character was introduced, and then another character was introduced and the story left the first behind. My teacher would stop us and ask, "Who is our character?" and "What are they doing?" She wanted us to listen to the story and add to it, while keeping to the central plotlines. After a while, we started getting good and were able to create interesting stories. We were able to interject some surprises, but also able to tie it all together.
As I read the story that we are creating, I think we are all over the place. Sometimes it seems like it is more a word association game or trying to trump the last person with something more unusual. Here are the last dozen or so entries.
To the trains
djah say brains?
no said trains
....Planes and Automobiles
brains and robots???
Oh! Artificial Intelligence
From Frankenstein to
The White House
created a monster
But she lost
Bob's apples when...
falling from trees
Twas knocked unconscious
Til nearly nine
minutes past noon.
awoke whistlin Dixie
in hotair balloon
with a baboon
eating his apple...
reading treasure map
looking for X
marks the spot
where the buried
homemade banana bread
was fermenting nicely
When along came
Mabel, with 100
ripe red tomatoes.
I would like to challenge everyone to become storytellers and try to craft a central storyline that everyone can contribute but also makes sense to read when put together. Does anyone think this is possible?
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