Storytelling has been around since the beginning of drawings and has helped humans bond and share experiences. It has taught us to dream and imagine as well as to survive and prosper. I would argue that storytelling has been the most important human invention. As parents, we unknowingly teach our children every day through storytelling. As adults, we share our emotions and fondest memories through stories told at a friendly BBQ, for example. Today, although the storytelling mechanisms have evolved, it's important to remember and embrace the power of written words.
The goal of the Little Writers Guild project is to encourage our children to write, draw and share their imagination. It's our mission that through this platform, young writers can inspire one another in a welcoming community of boundless storytellers.
A Quick Look at the History of Storytelling
Before we jump in to storytelling, I think it's important to take a quick look at how writing got started.
In a Princeton publication, “The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre” by Jack Zipes, he stated that humans have been telling stories since we had the ability to speak, and potentially by forms of sign language even before that.
The Chauvet cave in France is the oldest representation of storytelling found thus far, dating to 36,000 years ago. The cave paintings are believed to tell the story of a volcanic eruption, according to several articles on the topic. Later forms of visual storytelling can be found in Egyptian hieroglyphics from around 3,000 B.C., which mixed pictographic symbols and sounds in order to tell a story.
Then, in around 3000 B.C., it all changed when a clever group known as the Sumerians invented writing with the cuneiform system. This meant that stories could finally be written down. No longer were they reliant on the limitations of human memory or bad cave artists. Nevertheless, the information remained privy to a select few because the method for recording words was extraordinarily time consuming and therefore not easy to reproduce.
In around 800 B.C., Homer wrote the epics poems the Iliad and the Odyssey which are widely considered to be the two founding works of Western literature. The Iliad, a 15,693 line poem, taught us today about the Trojan war and old Greece through a story. The Odyssey, with 12,110 lines of text, was a sort of sequel to the Iliad.
Jumping forward to today, we can look back and see how storytelling has evolved to include new mediums that help us reach a bigger audience for our stories. Storytelling has never been easier than today. We have evolved from chipping rock that communicated trouble ahead for a few "readers" to tweeting 128 characters in a blink of an eye that can reach millions of people.
Now that we have a brief introduction to storytelling, it's time for you to share your stories with the rest of us.