Folktales as Root of Personal Storytelling

Limor of Limor's Storytelling Agora asserts that personal stories should start with folktales: "Starting with folktales is important just like starting with classical music or classical dance – it is both the basics and the top," she writes.

Limor offers a couple of interesting exercises for "cystallizing" personal stories as folktales and folktales into personal stories.

I'm not that much into folktales, but Limor is convincing as she describes participants' typical reaction to these exercises:

People noticed the ‘ancient’ story was more powerful. When it goes through the process of crystallization and detachment from a personal perspective, there is more space for others to enter with their own thoughts.
Another thing people noticed was the deficit in details that are ‘personal’ to the specific event in favor of deep symbols. The ‘ancient’ story had descriptions in it and they were important for creating visual images but the symbols stayed the same through the entire process.

I think another point that was evident was our natural feel for deep structures in stories. My way to elicit this natural feel during the above process is to create time limits. You can see them mentioned beside each step.

Above all they could see how folktales we usualy glance through in the hunt for a ‘great’ story are great stories. There is a strong tendancy to use personal stories as if they are more relevant, more engaging for the audience. After you practice the above excercise and it’s next step described underneath several times, any story becomes personal and you can use folktales easily as if you were telling something that happened to you yesterday.

A couple of other things I like about Limor's blog are the Proverb-generated Story exercise and her definition of storytelling.
Both can be found in the extend entry to this post.

Proverb-generated story:

Choose a proverb. Say – ’dead men tell no tales’ – and ask your group to generate stories with the proverb embedded in them. The only rules are:

It has to be a full story - beginning, developed middle section, end.

The proverb cannot be the first sentence.

Limor's definition: So what is storytelling?

Many people will give you many answers but for me the answer is one: storytelling is an artform that exists in the world since the times people started gathering to share more than food and shelter. It is a dynamic oral act of communication where ideas are shared within a group through a messanger who has the ability to combine text, voice and gesture expression in order to recreate a story in the imagination of his/her listeners which is the only place where the story actually exists. Storytelling resonates with the basic human need to create order and balance in the world and it is an act of partnership between story (a being), storyteller and listener. Storytelling feeds on this partnership and does not really happen if all three components are not present in one place, since each act of telling is dependant on the ongoing influence of listener on teller on story and so on again and again from the first beat to the last beat of a story. Story in the case of storytelling is not only text but the combined power of all the components of a storytelling event as it has happened before and will happen in the future. Storytellers are people who can create this event to it's fullest, no less.