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.

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.

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.