storytelling: a moodboard

The strange thing about Moth stories is that none of the tricks we use to make ourselves loved or respected by others work in the ways you would imagine they ought to. The tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, they mostly fail. The practiced jokes and the witty one-liners all crash and burn up on a Moth stage.

Honesty matters.

human. We kind of think the voice is the narrator. It certainly helps if the stories are riveting, but a great voice renders the dullest event remarkable.

When the storytelling in a culture goes bad the result is decadence

We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.

Listen! This is how stories used to begin. It is the opening word of Beowulf , the oldest piece of English literature. We don’t know who wrote it, but it almost certainly began as an oral tradition, and it reveals something about storytelling that has never left us. It begins with a call, with a bard asking a crowd to give freely a resource that