The Story of the Storyteller Part 1

There is a great difference between a writer and a storyteller.

Let me explain.

When my children were young with or without a book I would sit beside their bed and tell them a bedtime story.  Sometimes it was one about my own life.  Sometimes it was completely made up and fanciful. Sometimes it was a wonderful story written by someone else.  As they got older sometimes it was something I was writing.  It was always the lure of telling the story that caused me to sit there with them drawing them into a world far removed from their own.  It also was the draw of hearing it myself.

I love stories so much that I collect books.  We have a library of over five thousand books and my family knows that the hardest thing to give up for me are my books.  It's a world of stories to read and to tell by reading them out loud to someone else.  I would by far prefer to read than to ever sit in front of a T.V., and even much prefered over that is to work on my own story.

Even now, that is what I am doing.  One of my twitter follows/ers made a statement about storytellers, and it sparked a story in me--  The story of the storyteller.  That's me.  It started when I was born perhaps????  At least as long as I have known, the need to tell the story and hear the story has been there.  It's a part of who I am.  My father encouraged it by reading fairy tales and fantastical stories from worlds I had never seen every night to me.  They became a link to the reading world, and gave me great desire to learn to read well ( I am dyslexic and did not learn to completely understand reading until I was in seventh grade.).  After I began reading something amazing happened- I remember the very day it happened.

I was standing in the lunch area at the high school I attended and I heard a girl reading a poem she had written and I realized everything written had a person behind it that was telling me a story.  So I wrote my first poem-  I was thirteen, and it had to have been within days of my grandmother's death-- my grandmother was more like my mother.

She was the reason I lived.  Her death nearly destroyed me, but it also caused me to write just for expression of my own story that I could not tell people yet.

Realizing I could write the stories inside of me changed my world!  When I would read a book, and I didn't like the way it was written I would try to write it different--  The way I saw the story going.  When I would hear a situation I would write it from my perspective.  When something happened I would journal it and that would help me make sense of it.  In a year's time writing had given me access to my soul!  The stories had always been there.  It was just that being a ghostly shy child there was no one I would dare tell them to. Writing gave expression to that which until then was stuck inside of me with no way out.  Then at fourteen my writing changed.

Another piece of the puzzle came together.  None of my scribblings were ever connected.  They were not a cohesive flowing complete story.  As I ferociously read everything I could get my hands on, I realized each was it's own story.   Even if it was a collection of stories still they all fit together to make one complete whole.  I decided that was how I wanted to write.  I wanted people to read my stories, and wanted them to think about the story. But it had to go together into one package.

It was out of these thoughts that The Heart of the Family began.  It wasn't at all what it has become, and if anyone had read it then no one would have been able to stand it!  But it was in this time that every experience somehow went into my written story.  It was in this time I developed my filter-- if you will-- so that every event that happened to me or around me somehow morphed into something my characters would do or would happen to them.  I would put it together in my mind as I watched.  It slowed my reaction times, and made me think of what would happen if I reacted this way or that-- or how would the outcome be if this person had done this thing over here different or had walked another way instead.  In my writing I began to experiment with these variables and my characters became alive!  To my closest friends I would talk about them as if they were real!  I wonder how many people thought I was off my rocker?  How many of you reading this think that now?  To this day my characters are still a real part of my life, and everything goes through my filter and into my stories in some form or another.

Lately-- like since June-- I've had this new medium, though too.  That is this blog.  It's more like my journaling when I first started writing as a kid, and I love retouching this type of story writing.  In this I can take the topic of storytelling and turn it into a story about it.  As in this post.  Being a writer is awesome, but what it does is give flight to the stories that a very part of my soul!

There is a second part that I am going to begin right after I finish with this.  There are those that are writers and only writers, and there are storytellers that are only storytellers.  I have one of each in my family.  Then there are picture writers-- artists.  I have one of those too.  That is all a part of the second part of this though!  Keep Reading!