Mark Goldman, a storyteller and promoter in Phoenix, puts out an interesting email newsletter called News from Storyteller Mark. The last issue included the interesting and useful “tip for story creation” below. He was inspired by an article by Sherry Norfolk called A Story About the Power of Story on the National Storytelling Network blog.

Here’s a tip for story creation:

Dig out a photograph you have. Could be old, new, of you or a friend, or a place you visited. Or it could have nothing to do with you.

1. Write down who and what you see in the picture, everything.
2. Write down who or what may be there, but is not visible in the picture.
3. Describe What is happening RIGHT NOW in the picture.
4. Describe what happened BEFORE the image in the picture.
5. Describe what happened AFTER the image in the picture.
Somewhere in step 3, 4 or 5, SOMETHING NEEDS TO HAVE CHANGED.
You should now have a beginning, middle and end…a story.

If you are looking for storytelling events in the state, check out AZStoryevents.com, another website Mark manages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012 at 6:44 am and is filed under Arts. Tags for this post: Mark Goldman, National Storytelling Network, Sherry Norfolk, stories, storytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.