‘Where the Heck Are We?  How Details of Setting and Sense of Place Can Help (or Hurt) a Story

Remember when Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, mutters to Toto: “Toto, somehow I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore?”  Dorothy was actually identifying one of the most important attributes of a good story…a strong sense of place.

Writer’s Digest lists 12 elements of setting for writers to consider.  To wit:

1. Locale. This relates to broad categories such as a country, state, region, city, and town, as well as to more specific locales, such as a neighborhood, street, house or school. Other locales can include shorelines, islands, farms, rural areas, etc.
2. Time of year. The time of year is richly evocative and influential in fiction. Time of year includes the seasons, but also encompasses holidays, such as Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Halloween. Significant dates can also be used, such as the anniversary of a death of a character or real person, or the anniversary of a battle, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor.
3. Time of day. Scenes need to play out during various times or periods during a day or night, such as dawn or dusk. Readers have clear associations with different periods of the day, making an easy way to create a visual orientation in a scene.
4. Elapsed time. The minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months a story encompasses must be somehow accounted for or the reader will feel confused and the story will suffer from a lack of authenticity. While scenes unfold moment by moment, there is also time to account for between scenes, when a flashback is inserted, and when a character travels a long distance.
5. Mood and atmosphere. Characters and events are influenced by weather, temperature, lighting, and other tangible factors, which in turn influence the emotional timbre, mood, and atmosphere of a scene.
6. Climate. Climate is linked to the geography and topography of a place, and, as in our real world, can influence events and people. Ocean currents, prevailing winds and air masses, latitude, altitude, mountains, land masses, and large bodies of water all influence climate. It’s especially important when you write about a real setting to understand climatic influences. Harsh climates can make for grim lives, while tropical climates can create more carefree lifestyles.
7. Geography. This refers to specific aspects of water, landforms, ecosystems, and topography in your setting. Geography also includes climate, soil, plants, trees, rocks and minerals, and soils. Geography can create obvious influences in a story like a mountain a character must climb, a swift-running river he must cross, or a boreal forest he must traverse to reach safety. No matter where a story is set, whether it’s a mountain village in the Swiss Alps or an opulent resort on the Florida coast, the natural world with all its geographic variations and influences must permeate the story.
8. Man-made geography. There are few corners of the planet that have not been influenced by the hand of humankind. It is in our man-made influences that our creativity and the destructiveness of civilization can be seen. Readers want visual evidence in a story world, and man-made geography is easily included to provide it. With this in mind, make certain that your stories contain proof of the many footprints that people have left in its setting. Use the influences of humankind on geography to lend authenticity to stories set in a real or famous locale. These landmarks include dams, bridges, ports, towns and cities, monuments, burial grounds, cemeteries, and famous buildings. Consider too the influences of mankind using the land, and the effects of mines, deforestation, agriculture, irrigation, vineyards, cattle grazing, and coffee plantations.
9. Eras of historical importance. Important events, wars, or historical periods linked to the plot and theme might include the Civil war, World War II, medieval times, the Bubonic Plague, the gold rush in the 1800s, or the era of slavery in the South.
10. Social/political/cultural environment. Cultural, political, and social influences can range widely and affect characters in many ways. The social era of a story often influences characters’ values, social and family roles, and sensibilities.
11. Population. Some places are densely populated, such as Hong Kong, while others are lonely places with only a few hardy souls. Your stories need a specific, yet varied population that accurately reflects the place.
12. Ancestral influences. In many regions of the United States, the ancestral influences of European countries such as Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland are prominent. The cities and bayous of Louisiana are populated with distinctive groups influenced by their Native American, French-Canadian, and African American forebears. Ancestral influences can be depicted in cuisine, dialogue, values, attitudes, and general outlook.

Anybody writing science fiction has to spend some time thinking about details of setting, since much sf is set in times and places (and planets) other than this one.  For example, my Farpool series is set largely on a marine (oceanic) world called Seome.  I had to draw maps, invent a language, a whole new history and culture to tell these stories. 

And with my newest title coming out later this year, I even have the marine creatures of Seome planning on emigrating to Earth’s oceans through a wormhole called the Farpool, after they learn their own sun is dying.  So the setting and time changes from Seome to 22^nd century Earth.

There are several ways of getting details of setting into your story.

You can work the details into the story.  In my novel, The Farpool, I have both human visitors Chase and Angie do a lot of traveling around Seome, which gives me the opportunity to describe the world and its many features, as seen through the eyes of human teenagers.

You can also simply append a section to the end of the story, in effect an appendix.  I also did this in The Farpool, calling it Angie’s Echopod Journal…sort of vocal diary recorded by one of the humans.  This gives me the chance to direct the reader’s attention to matters that the human protagonists find important, or unique. 

I’ve used both techniques in this novel.

The challenge of my newest story in this series, The Farpool: Marauders of Seome, is that the setting changes, from Seome to Earth and from some time in the future to multiple timestreams on Earth, including World War II and the 22^nd century.  This will definitely be a story-telling challenge.  I’ll probably append an appendix to this story as well.  I haven’t yet decided on whether to include any sort of diary. But the human side of this story has its own challenges, ranging from a biologically modified human Chase Meyer to a U-boat captain and a German navy officer from WWII. 

Using setting properly (in such a way that the nuts and bolts don’t show) can enhance any story, from atmospherics to provoking the proverbial sense of wonder, something that science fiction writers do all the time.  The key is to keep the setting descriptions embedded in the context of the story and not to dump an encyclopedia of facts and maps on the reader. 

Some writers spend so much time on their setting and world-building that they feel it essential to drop all this into the story.  Sometimes, the setting is the story, like Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama.  But most of the time, a good, believable setting is just one part of the greater story, like plot and character and it should be woven together into a seamless whole. 

Spend time on your setting details but don’t do it at the expense of telling a good story. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on June 5, 2017.  In this post, we’ll visit a topic that many writers often ignore: character motivation.  Why does Johnny Protagonist really want to rob that bank in spite of all the risks?

See you then.

Phil B.

Sketching Characters for “In Plutonian Seas”

Whether you’re writing a novel or a short story, somewhere along the line, you’ll have to sit down and think about your characters.  How much detail do I go into?  Should I do a complete biography?  Should I throw everything I’ve developed into the story?

The answers depend on you, the writer.  Basically, I let the story and the situation dictate what to include from my character background.  Because I’m anal and over-prepare for everything, I often do a full chronological biography for major characters.  What it comes down to is this: you want to know your characters (main characters) well enough to be able to describe what they would do and say in any plot situation.  If it takes a full written bio ahead of time to do that, then do that.  Some writers prefer to wing it and let their characters surprise them.  Whatever works.

Here’s an excerpt from the bio of the main character in my upcoming sf short story “In Plutonian Seas.”  The fellow’s name is Joe Skellen.

A Short Biography:  (story takes place in 2144 AD)

1. Joe Skellen was born on 1 May 2106, second child and only son to Art and Marcy Skellen, of Wichita, KS.  Joe has one sibling, older sister Taylor, who (at the time of the story) is a pediatrician in Dallas, TX. Father Art was an aerospace engineer with Concord Aviation Services, Wichita.
2. Earliest childhood memory: being locked in a closet by Taylor over some dispute, and nearly suffocating among the musty clothes and jackets.  Joe has a now semi-well controlled fear of confined spaces.  This occurred in March 2111 at the Skellen home in Wichita.
3. Joe followed Taylor to Midland High School in Sept 2118.  As a boy, Joe had always loved sports, especially water sports.  By the time of entering Midland, he was already an accomplished swimmer and quickly joined the MHS swim team, specializing in back and breast stroke. 
4. When he was 14 (year 2120), the Skellen family took a trip to Cancun, MX, where father Art and Joe engaged in learning some basic scuba lessons.  Joe took to scuba diving, snorkeling and related activities and thereafter, trips to various Gulf beaches and vacation spots were usually accompanied by diving trips.
5. By the time he was 17 (yr 2123), Joe had earned a certificate as an open-water diver and also PADI certification.  He worked various summer jobs (grocery store bagger, construction site laborer, lumber yard helper) to pay for trips once a month through a local Wichita diving club to diving sites along the Texas Gulf Coast. 
6. Joe had many friends at MHS.  His best friend became a fellow swimmer and diver.  His name was Cory Haley.  They had many classes together, both did well in Math and Physics and had a particular distaste for Mr. Winans’ and his Geometry class. Cory often accompanied Joe and his father Art on trips to the Gulf.
7. On one trip, in July 2124, Joe and Cory encountered dive instructor Rufus Purdue at a club near Matagordo Island on the Texas Gulf coast.  Rufus, with permission from Mr. Skellen, chaperoned Joe and Cory on their first wreck dive, off the coast.  The wreck was a late 19^th century coal lighter, called the Caracas Queen.  Joe immediately became hooked on wreck diving and exploring. 
8. Joe graduated MHS in 2124.  Dad Art wanted Joe to go to college and Joe did spend about a year at Texas-Austin, through spring 2125.  But college was not for Joe.  He had trouble focusing on delayed gratification and planning for the future.  All he wanted to do was swim and dive.  In this Cory Haley and Joe had similar desires.
9. Joe left UT and returned to Wichita for awhile, much to his parents’ displeasure.  For a year, he worked in construction, as an apprentice carpenter and plumber.  He never made journeyman however and found he was too filled with nervous energy to settle down to a trade. 
10. It was during his time as a carpenter and plumber (mostly for Hewitt Mitchell Industries) that he met Kristen Kearns, also working as an electrician on many jobs with Joe.  Joe took an immediate liking to Kristen.

 You can see that I’ve described Joe’s background in some chronological detail.  This gives me the ability, as plot situations dictate, to insert ready-made events and experiences into my description of Skellen when I need to.  Or better yet: be able to describe what Skellen would do in a given situation, or remember something that reminds him of the current situation.  This just adds realism to my depiction of this person.

It’s just a way of being consistent and staying on top of things.  You don’t want your major characters to be blond beach bums in Chapter 1 and dark-haired detectives in Chapter 10.  Readers notice that and they tend not to like it.

My theory is that readers read stories to be entertained and to vicariously experience through your story things, places and events they couldn’t experience otherwise.  To make that happen, your characters have to sound and act real, which means they have to be real to you.  If Joe Skellen is as real to me as my next-door neighbor, when I write what happens to him, he should seem as real to you.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 29, 2017.  In this post, I’ll return to another aspect of story-telling that is sometimes overlooked, though not often by sf writers: setting and a sense of place and how it can help or hurt a story.

See you then.

Phil B.

“Excerpt from Colliding Galaxies”

In mid-May, my short fiction collection Colliding Galaxies will be coming out, available at smashwords.com and fine ebook retailers everywhere.

Herewith, an excerpt from one of the stories:

The Cold, Hard Facts

Introduction

All Detective Lieutenant Stan Benecky ever wanted to be was a street cop. But time and technology have begun to pass him by and like a dinosaur in a land of unicorns, he stumbles around, hanging on for dear life, trying to make some sense of what has happened to his job.  He can’t resign: there’s pride, a messy and probably expensive divorce, a reputation to protect.  When a high profile athlete is murdered before the Big Game, Benecky tries to put up a brave front, but he’s like an ant trying to understand calculus.  But Benecky does have one thing in his favor—he’s resourceful, even a little cunning.  He knows how to use the latest forensic tech to invade police work—sniffing out dead victim’s dying memories—to re-live his greatest moments as a beat cop.  It seems like a vicarious, even harmless addiction for an aging troglodyte, until one day, he finds the scrolling memories of a vic a little too realistic for comfort….

***

Forensic Nanopathology –the practice of using nanoscale mechanisms and techniques in postmortem investigations of sudden, unexpected death.

--excerpt from The Law Officer’s Professional Compendium of Standards and Definitions, United States Department of Justice and Rehabilitation, October 2048

“Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.”

Aldous Huxley

1.

 

“The Scene of the Crime”

It was hard to drop into Tootsie’s Bar after a long day watch in Forensics and have a beer and swap lies with your partner, when your partner was all of eighty-four nanometers tall.  That was the problem Detective Lieutenant Stan Benecky, of Greater Atlanta PD’s ANAD Squad, had with the whole deal.  In the good old days, when Benecky was a street cop working Robbery or Vice or Counter-Twist, even when he had been detailed to Cyber Crimes back in ’46, you could still hold your head up at Tootsie’s, catch some of the ribbing of the regulars and give it back just as well.

Now Stan Benecky was just a lonesome washed-up gumshoe, talking to himself over beer and peanuts, while the rest of the Department went head over heels about autonomous nanoscale assemblers and containment systems and quantum strategies.  Benecky liked to get his hands on stuff—how the hell could you get your hands on a device…an organism…a mechanism…thingy that was smaller than a virus and million times more powerful?

Benecky had spent a lot of time at Tootsie’s lately, thinking.  Dreaming, really. Retirement.  Some rustic cottage on the beach, a nice fast boat twenty feet off the back porch, a well-stocked fridge and a few full immersion flim fantasies to plug into, when he wanted to.  See, that was the problem, and Cooter, the bartender, wasn’t the only one that saw it.  Stan Benecky wasn’t cut out for the new stuff.  ANAD or not, quantum processors be damned, and hang all the fullerene effectors and electron bond disrupters.  Benecky wanted to see the blood and feel the corpse and cuff the perps just like cops had always done.

Then came the day Rafeeq Khan died and Lieutenant Stan Benecky thought this might well be his last chance.

The call came in when Benecky was knocking down a few “walking dogs” and sodas at the Varsity.  He swallowed what he could and answered the call.  It was Captain Sheffield, Violent Crimes, and Captain Emmitt, Forensic Services.

Get your squad together and get up North.  The Rafeeq Khan mansion in Roswell.  The kid’s deader than dirt, shot up with some kind of automatic weapon, and there’s going to be a hell of a stink when the Chief and the Mayor hear this.

Rafeeq Khan, you see, was the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since Clark Gable.

Khan was a native son, born right in the projects Eastside, who’d made good in the megaball wars and become the highest paid professional athlete in the history of the universe.  With megaball’s World Bowl less than two days away, and Khan the prime-time prince of the playing field for the favored L.A. Barons, about a billion fans and sports press and hangers-on had their eyes on the “Flash’ day and night, scrutinizing every little nose pick the kid attempted.

Now Rafeeq was dead, murdered the Captain said, and the Department wanted Benecky and his ANAD team on the scene immediately.

The squad had been formed a couple of years ago, long before Benecky was exiled to the unit.  It ran like a machine, just fine without him.  By just about anybody’s reckoning, Forensics-ANAD had worked several hundred cases by the time the Lieutenant had showed up.

Benecky wiped his mouth free of mustard and hand waved his two human assistants to the van.  His mind was reeling with imaginary headlines.  With Khan dead and the big game less than forty-eight hours away, everything he did was going to be under the biggest microscope the world had even seen.  Microscope, hell, he muttered to himself.  More like a quantum flux imager.

For the next few days, Stan Benecky figured he’d know all too well what it was like for ANAD…living life in the glare of something that could see right down into the blurry guts of atoms themselves.

For once, he might have something to share with his infinitesimal partner.

 

Khan’s place was a veritable Babylon of ostentation, with fountains and turrets and columns.  The place was surrounded by cops, and the ever-present fans, sniffing something was up, had already begun to clot the driveway and roads around the mansion.

Benecky pulled into the circular drive.  With him came Sergeant Marianne “Deeno” D’Nunzio, the squad’s interface controller and Sergeant Hoyt Wade, the CQE.  That stood for containment and quantum engineering, sort of a glorified valet and butler to the ANAD device.  Benecky was OIC, Officer in Charge.  The trio went in, Sergeant Wade wheeling the mobile containment device.  TinyTown, they called it.

Sheffield and Emmitt were in the media room on the top floor of Babylon. There sprawled on the tile floor in a spreading pool of blood lay the Flash himself, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, gaping chest and stomach wounds still oozing red.  A dull black TEK-12 lay next to his feet.

Crime scenes talked, if you knew how to listen, and this one screamed Violent Demise, loud and clear.  The ANAD squad had shelves and shelves of records, detailing the minutiae of death in all its gruesome glory.  Ever since he had come to the squad, Benecky had found a strange kind of fascination with all the ways people thought up to dismember and dispatch themselves.  

Benecky watched for a moment as the forensic bots scuttled around the crime scene, documenting everything, photographing samples, measuring ballistic angles.  A lattice of laser light marked off the crime scene.  Data poured into Emmitt’s eyepiece, scrolling down the lens over her right eye.

She indicated the TEK-12.  “Bots detected something weird.  According to the first path reports, Fareeq Khan died at or around 1:00 this morning, give or take a few dozen minutes.”  She tapped her eyepiece.  “I’ve got hypostasis starting about that time—normal discoloration, along with normal desiccation of tissue.”

Benecky bent down to examine the corpse.  A stitch of bullet wounds stretched in a line across his chest and rib cage.  Rigor mortis was still evident, though Khan’s arms had begun to loosen as muscle decomposition set in.  “Appears to be a distance wound, Captain.  Clean margins, no fouling or stippling.  I’d say an entrance wound, from the abrasion around the holes.”

“Bots agree,” said Emmitt.  “But there’s a problem…with the time of death.  Ballistics bots say the TEK 12 wasn’t discharged until around 3:00 this morning.  Easily an hour or two after the time of death.”

Benecky looked up, nearly backing into one of the mechs as it scanned the marble floor for fiber and trace evidence, crunching its DNA matching routines on the fly.

“You’re saying he wasn’t killed by the weapon.”

“Exactly.”  Emmitt indicated the ANAD squad.  “Something or someone else killed Rafeeq Khan.  Something that hasn’t turned up yet.  That’s why you’re here.  We have to do an ANAD insertion.  These bots can’t find anything outside.”

Benecky nodded.  “Sure thing, Captain.  Sergeant—“ he called to Wade.  “Prep for deploy right away.”  Wade wrestled the TinyTown cylinder through the herd of bots and parked next to Khan’s head.  Benecky helped D’Nunzio set up the Interface Control panel, wondering for the hundredth time about this business of in situ autopsy.  The Department’s lawyers had yet to agree on the legal niceties of invading the dead with a trillion programmable replicants.  Somehow, it seemed a bit improper, but that was for the big guys to sort out.  Benecky had a job to do and he buckled down to it.

If Emmitt wanted a nanographic probe of Rafeeq Khan’s private parts, who was he to say no?

“While you’re prepping, here’s the case details,” said Captain Sheffield.  ‘Shef’ was a dinosaur out of Violent Crimes, nearly thirty years with the force.  Hibernating bears had nicer personalities.

“Witnesses say Khan came by the mansion a little after ten o’clock last night.  You know how it goes…a small harem of female admirers along with him.  Big game’s two days away and the Flash can’t afford to miss curfew tonight.  So he’s out stirring up the honey pot, hitting every disco and club in town and decides to head home with his catch.  Timeline is important here.”

“Witnesses deposed already?”

“Most of them.  We got several on tape, bots did the genetics already, and they’re being treated as suspects too.  Carl Cutler, for one.  Agent for the Flash.  He’s the one that reported the incident.  Lisa LaVelle, principal squeeze for the man.  She came by later, but before twelve midnight.  That’s important.”

“Hell hath no fury, Captain—“

“Yeah, we thought of that.  But she’s not the only suspect.  Turns out the Flash also spent some time last evening with—get this: Rupert Jones.”

Benecky blinked.  “Rupert Jones?  The Seagulls’ coach?”

“The one.  Think that might jazz up a few sports reporters tomorrow morning?  Once they find out the Barons’ ace megaballer spent a few hours with the opposition coach.”

Benecky helped Wade initialize the IC panel.  “Mr. Khan keeps interesting company.”

“They’re all witnesses and suspects, until we can prove otherwise.  This case is deader than that corpse, until we definitively establish the cause of death.”

“ANAD’s ready in all respects, Lieutenant,” Wade said.

Benecky glanced inquiringly over at Emmitt.  The Forensic Services chief nodded.  “Secure all forensics for the time being,” she called to the SI techs running the scan.  Then she turned back to Benecky:  “Permission to launch.”

It was a whole new way of case investigation and it gave Benecky the willies, he didn’t mind telling you.  They were making up tactics as they went along.  Somewhere miles behind them, the Department lawyers and the DA were huffing and puffing to keep up.

It was enough to give any normal cop the creeps.

“Okay, Sergeant,” he said.  Benecky patted down the incision D’Nunzio had just made in the corpse’s chest.  “Subject’s prepped and ready.”

Wade handed him the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment cylinder.  Inside, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler ticked over, ready to be released.

“Steady even suction, Lieutenant,” Wade told him.  He knew Benecky often got a case of the shakes about now.  Why don’t you just let the pros handle this?  “ANAD’s ready to fly.”

“Vascular grid?”

“Tracking now, sir.  We’ll be able to follow the master just fine.  I’ll replicate once we’re through the capillary walls.”

“Watch for capillary flow,” D’Nunzio warned.  “When the capillaries narrow, your speed will increase.  And viscosity will stay up.”

“Yeah, like slogging through molasses. ANAD’s inerted and stable…ready for insertion.”

Benecky held the injector as steady as he could.  When it was done, he would be more than happy to back out and let the techs handle the matter.  D’Nunzio and Wade ate this stuff up.  Benecky would have been happier writing parking tickets, or maybe collaring rapists.

The insert went smoothly enough.  A slug of plasma forced the replicant into Khan’s capillary network as high pressure.  Deeno got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system.  A few minutes’ run on its propulsors brought ANAD to a dense mat of capillary tissue.  The sounder image settled down on the IC display.

“Ready for transit, Lieutenant.  Cytometric probing now.  I can force those cell membranes any time.”

Benecky used ANAD’s acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam, probing for weak spots.  “There, Deeno…right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that’s a lipid duct, I’d bet a hundred bucks.  Try there.”

She stole a glance at Wade.  The man’s learning, keep your shirt on.  Deeno steered ANAD into the vascular cleft in the membrane.  She twisted her right hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot herself forward.  Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance.  She tweaked the picowatt propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid.

“Aortic cavity, Lieutenant.  Just past the Islet of Duchin, I’d say.  Looks like we’re in.  Where are we going today?”

***

So that’s the excerpt.  Colliding Galaxies should out and available around Memorial Day, 2017.  There are nine separate stories, all unrelated short science fiction, with an author’s intro to each and an overall introduction to the whole collection, which was previously posted to The Word Shed a few months ago.

I hope you enjoy it.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 22.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

“Where Do Stories Come From?

In previous posts, we’ve looked at several aspects of the storytelling process, such as how stories affect the way we think and get along (think ‘oxytocin’), why we have this narrative impulse and what it does for us in an evolutionary sense.

In this post, I want to go further back into the mists of ancient times and find out where stories really come from. 

At the website TheWrap.com, author Mark Travis talks about the purpose of stories this way:

“But, where do stories come from?

“We tell stories every day – mostly to ourselves. We tell ourselves stories to make a point, to imagine a possible future, to remind ourselves, to reprimand ourselves, to comfort ourselves. Inside each and every one of us is a complex system of storytelling that is active, rich in content, and, I believe, very necessary to the health and wellbeing of each of us.

“This is where stories start, where they are conceived, gestate and are eventually born. Consequently, the story’s first teller is our self and the first listener is our self.

“A story is a series of events we either create or remember or imagine which we tell ourselves because we want or need to hear them. Perhaps we create stories because we want or need to know something, or learn something, or answer a question. Perhaps it is the listener within us that demands the story and the teller within us that does its best to accommodate.”

In other words, there is some primordial need to tell and hear stories, something essential to our mental health.  It seems to be as fundamental as air, water, food and sleep. 

I can imagine the beginnings of stories this way: a bunch of Australopithecines are gathered around a campfire, grunting and gesturing to each other, maybe re-living a recent hunt.  It seems reasonable that storytelling developed in concert with language.  Language started out as our primitive cousins grunting and gesturing to each other.  Gradually rules and conventions developed.  One series of sounds meant ‘move right to cut off the woolly mammoth we’re chasing.’  Another sound meant ‘close in for the kill.’

Then, after the successful hunt, the hunters co-opted the same sounds to re-live their hunt and devise better ways to do it in the future.  Maybe they even used the same sounds to imagine future hunts and hunts that might have been.  This is possibly how stories began. 

Another website, Storytellingday.net, has this to say:

“The storytelling history is quite ancient, lost in the mist of time. Nobody knows when the first story was actually told. Did it happen in the gloomy recess of a cave around a flickering fire told by a primitive hunter? Well, we may never know. But it is believed that (the) origin of storytelling may have come across as an excuse for failure. Perhaps stories were used long time ago to calm the fears or doubts of a family. As families grouped with other families and formed clans, the storyteller, who was good at telling heroic events or other important events of the tribe began to reach a position of respect and power. People found them interesting and began to listen to them. The priest, the judge and the ruler were perhaps the earliest to use this art effectively in the history of storytelling. Storytelling days were considered important.

“Before man learned to write, he had to rely on his memory to learn anything. For this he had to be a good listener. A good story teller was always respected. He could easily find an audience, eager to devour every exciting bit of information in their stories. These stories were also shared with others in faraway lands, when people traveled. The stories traveled with them. And when they returned home, they brought with them exciting new tales of exotic places and people.

“The oldest surviving tale in the storytelling history is the epic, Gilgamesh, relating to the deeds of a famous Sumerian king. The earliest known record in the origin of storytelling can be found in the Egypt, when the sons of Cheops entertained their father with stories.

“The history of storytelling reveals that the stories came in all varieties. Myths, legends of all kinds, fairy tales, trickster stories, fables, ghost tales, hero stories, and epic adventures, these stories were told, retold. Passing down from generations, these stories reflect the wisdom and knowledge of early people. There are stories often used to explain important but often confusing events and disasters in nature at those early times. For example - fire, storms, thunder, floods, tidal waves, lightning etc; It was common for people to believe in the stories of gods, which bound them to a common heritage and beliefs.

“In fact, it is believed by most historians and psychologists that storytelling is one of the many things that define and bind our humanity. Humans are perhaps the only animals that create and tell stories.”



To tell and listen to stories is to be human.  No other creature, that we know of, tells stories, though they do communicate in various ways.  Who knows: maybe when bees do their ‘waggle dance,’ they’re actually not just communicating the best route to a food source, but a little story about their adventures in getting there and back.  Unless we learn to speak ‘bee,’ we may never know.

We’ll explore the roots of storytelling and the elements of a good story more in upcoming posts. 


 In the next post to The Word Shed, I’ll excerpt one of the stories in my upcoming collection Colliding Galaxies, due out in mid-May 2017.



See you May 15.



Phil B.