Creating (or Selecting) Your Story in 3 Easy Steps
Here we take a brief look at The Legendary Connection’s “Stories Worth Telling Framework”.
The framework is described in greater detail, with a wealth of examples, in our book
Creating Stories Worth Telling Your Kids.
There are about as many ways to tell stories as there are stories themselves. If you ask any two practitioners of storytelling what process they use, it will likely always differ. And these two storytellers will also use completely different analogies to describe their processes. Storytellers love literary devices.
At The Legendary Connection, we tend to think of telling stories with your family as a fire or flame. This conjures images of campfires, hearths, and bedtime candlesticks where so many stories have been shared throughout history. It also communicates that sharing stories within families is a tradition that can ignite skills, interests, and memories in the children you love that will burn long after the tales have finished being told.
In this blog post we will summarize the three steps we recommend for creating (or selecting) the stories you want to tell. This addresses the left (dark blue) side of the Stories Worth Telling Framework shown below.
Before you light a fire, you need to gather the materials that you plan to set ablaze and assemble them into a basic structure. You also need a spark to get that fire going. The same is true in telling stories.
The Spark
The spark is the single most important component for creating and telling stories as a family. It’s the inspiration that provides a direction for the rest of the narrative. It’s the idea that gets you excited to tell a story and defines which type of story you’ll tell.
You’re spark will typically also be one of your main story elements. We’ll cover story elements in a little more detail during Step 2. For now, it’s enough to know that the four foundational story elements are character, setting, conflict, and plot.
The Spark will help to determine the type of story you are going to tell. It may come from daily life events, inanimate objects, or existing literature. You may pull an idea from a story you heard as a child, something your co-worker told you yesterday, or from the plot of your child’s favorite cartoon. The sources for that first flicker of inspiration are limitless.
Tip: Many of the resources that we provide at The Legendary Connection are story prompts and summaries in our Stories Worth Telling and Tales Worth Telling Collections.
We want to give you ideas of places to pull from and build a narrative so that your story time with the children you love is as stress-free as possible… Find all of them as downloadable e-books in The Legendary Connection Store or available for print on Amazon.
The Fuel
The fuel for your story is the other story elements that you will gather around your spark. These other story elements will help you flesh out the narrative, adding list and dimension.
As stated previously, the story elements are the ones you learned in elementary school. Every story needs at least one character, a setting, and a plot. Most stories also have a conflict. This last element is not required, since reciting a series of events may be exciting enough for small children.
By mixing and matching these elements you can generate a seemingly endless source of new content. You can find ideas for any of these elements from real-life, stories you have heard before, or create them from scratch.
The Structure
Even from a young age, we are incredibly accustomed to hearing story elements incorporated into a formulaic story structure. Why? Because stories have shapes relative to the rise and fall of intensity.
When we reflected on the stories we tell our families, we realized we could distill them into a repeatable four-part structure. The four parts are Introduction, Catalyst, Action, and Conclusion.
These predictable phases occur in almost every story we have ever told or heard. Using them to sequence the introduction and elaboration of your story elements is a handy mental short-cut to keep you on track as the storyteller and manage expectations for the listener.
Together, we pull these three steps together in our “Stories Worth Telling Template”. We use this template to plan the stories we want to tell, whether we are creating our own or organizing thoughts for stories we already know. The template, with explanations of how to use it across different types of stories is available in our book Creating Stories Worth Telling Your Kids.
