When was the last time you made up a story?
I am NOT talking about lies, fabrications, or to use the current term, “alternative truths.” I am not talking about the story you tell your boss about the (non-existent) flat tire you allegedly suffered with on the morning you REALLY were late to work because you were hung over, or because you and your beloved grabbed a spontaneous quickie that, quick as it was, caused you to leave the house late.No, I am talking about fiction that doesn’t purport to be anything but.
Today fictioneering is almost entirely the province of novel writers (and short-story crafters). Very few others attempt to make up tales for pleasure. And that’s a darned shame.
I remember, when I was a kid, my parents had as friends a couple who put their younger children to bed every night with “homemade” stories, some of which featured a pilot named Harry Heli d’Copter. My own mother didn’t stint on storytelling. At least until I learned to read, she gladly read to me from the books with which she had amply supplied me, or she would repeat an old favorite that by now she knew by heart. But she never attempted to–<gasp>–MAKE UP a story herself. That was for WRITERS. So I was entranced and delighted to discover that my parents’ friend Howard was making up these stories of a venturesome pilot for his two youngest children’s bedtime.
But bedtime tales and other tales for children aren’t the only opportunity for ordinary people to “write stories out loud.”
Back in the pre-TV and even pre-electricity days, when cowboys, chiefly, but also others gathered around campfires in the evening for communal entertainment, one of the forms of that entertainment was telling tall tales. Talk about lies! Talk about whoppers! Each tale-teller tried to top the tale told before his, and each one stretched the truth even more unbelievably. But of course, no oral author expected anyone to believe the tales he was telling. The lies were all in good fun.
Those were the days of not only Paul Bunyan and Mike Fink but hundreds of heroes whose exploits never made it into print, never made it beyond the campfire, but certainly entertained the listeners lucky enough to be present. It seemed as if almost everyone was a storyteller back in those days.
And speaking of campfires, what about ghost stories? Perpetrated by kids and adults, often though not always gathered around a campfire, ghost stories often had a can-you-top-this element to them, too, as each storyteller tried to scare her or his listeners even more than the fright inflicted by the story before.
Those with the most fertile imaginations might occasionally go on from ghost stories, tall tales, or made-up bedtime stories to writing their stories on paper. I had three aunts who each had several scrapbooks full of stories and poems they’d written. None of the three ever had anything published, and I don’t know that they even tried, but they produced copious quantities of output from their imaginations, with which they delighted both their own children and at least one niece—me.
Where has the storytelling tradition gone? Why do so few people besides writers and hope-to-be-writers craft stories anymore? Are we so hooked on passive entertainment—the TV, YouTube, and movies—that we don’t even try to make up stories for our friends, our children, ourselves?
If you have small kids at home, make up a story and tell it to them, then challenge them to make up stories of their own. Whether or not you have kids, how about inviting your friends over for an evening of tall tales? See who can tell the most preposterous story.
Let’s bring back the oral storytelling tradition.