Short Stories: August 26, 2020 Issue [#10331] |
This week: Tell Me A Story Edited by: NaNoNette More Newsletters By This Editor
1. About this Newsletter 2. A Word from our Sponsor 3. Letter from the Editor 4. Editor's Picks 5. A Word from Writing.Com 6. Ask & Answer 7. Removal instructions
Hello writers and readers of short stories, I am NaNoNette and I will be your guest editor for this issue. |
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Tell Me A Story
Written short stories came from stories that were told around camp fires, in homes, and to audiences who wanted to hear the latest gossip of the world told in stories. At some point, most cultures started writing their stories down to preserve them.
The German brothers Grimm never wrote a single story that they came up with. All of the so-called Grimm's Fairy Tales are tales as old as the spoken word told to children to teach them how to deal with the world. Many of the subjects in those stories feel crude or scary to modern parents. A friend of mine once asked, "Why is always the number three or the number 100 in fairy tales?"
Because those numbers are important. Three is an easy number to comprehend. Children have that many fingers on a hand, and then some extra. This means those tales were teaching very basic counting skills. The three goats gruff. The three bears. The three pigs and the big bad wolf. It's always three.
At the same time, those fairy tales were also scary and told of great peril to children. If you really think about it, those were the same stories we tell children now, just in other words.
The big bad wolf is the older version of the newer slogan "Stranger Danger." Don't follow a stranger to where he wants to take you or he might end up hurting you.
Before these stories were written down, they were told to children. Parents and caretakers of children often come up with their own stories to tell their children. I remember a time when my mother and I lived with other people. These other people were young adults in their early twenties. I was the first "child" person they came in contact with that was not a younger sibling. They took turns telling me stories at night to help me go to sleep.
On the day that it was my mother's turn to tell me a story, she said, "I don't really know how to tell stories." I said she should just tell me anything at all that came to her mind. That whole time was about 40 years ago, so I don't remember the whole story she told me. But hers is the only story that I remember tidbits of. It involved smart monkeys that threw coconuts off palm trees to eat the coconut's insides.
Even when you think you story is no good, you never know who will remember it the longest. Give it a try and force yourself to write a short story that you would want to tell someone. |
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Replies to my last Short Stories newsletter: "Songs Tell Stories"
dragonwoman wrote: I wrote a story called "Beach Baby" based on the lyrics of a song by the Beach Boys.
brom21 wrote: The songs that stuck in your head seem to be ones with quirky, brief chorus's. Remember that song Who Let the Dogs Out? I know people who had that bouncing around in their noggins for weeks. Then there is the Blue song. lol.
s wrote: Songs that tell a story? I wrote a column on that a couple of years ago:
https://www.weekendnotes.com/songs-that-tell-a-story/
Enjoy!
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