Stories touch hearts. Stories endure in minds. Stories make narratives palatable. Stories make information fun and lasting. Stories express profound messages in ordinary and easy language. Stories are the elixir of knowledge. They are the infallible weapons of mass dissemination of wisdom. Stories make learning fun, favorable and friendly.
No wonder grandparents impart the ageless wisdom to their grandchildren through stories. No wonder good teachers weave their teachings around stories. No wonder scriptures are rife with stories of interest for all. No wonder storytelling is considered an art. An art of creating worlds out of words. An art of serving great knowledge and delivering great messages so that they are easy to fathom and remember.
Creating a story is hence an immense art. A great story is a great work of creation that can change lives. The story of ant and the dove must have made countless people truthful in their relationships and faithful in honoring those. The story of the lying shepherd must have made zillions of minds hesitate from telling a lie. Stories of Ram, Sita, Krishna, Buddha, Christ, Lao-Tse, Akbar & Birbal and countless others have been enriching people's lives since times immemorial and shall continue to do till the human quest for knowledge endures.
How do they write stories? How a dozen paragraphs of simple words outlive multitudes of generations? How does it enter the minds storytellers or writers that they create a group of words and sentences that are indelible from people's minds? This can be asked of any poet, lyricist, novelist, motivational writer, researcher or any other creator of written magic. But this is piece is about stories.
Stories have a central plot, the main message, central character and the characters around that central character to help it play out its role. The character, context, the items in the surroundings, the relevance of the items, meaning behind each item and character, sequence of events etc make up a story. It also depends upon when the story is written. Since these are acts of creativity, a story of same intention or message written at one time profoundly differs from the same written at other times. This is probably how a written piece can tell a lot about the context or the mood of the writer at the time of the writing.
I found an amazing TEDx Talk about the act of writing story by an amazing speaker. He actually creates a context and a story withing the speech. He shows how plots, sub plots, characters, contexts, items, surroundings and sequence of events can be used to create a compelling piece.
Reading stories is fun. Writing them, with proper understanding of the art form, must be many times more gratifying. Give it a shot. A journey of thousand miles starts with a single step and initial steps can be tentative, unsteady and faltering. But that is how everything starts. Endurance and perseverance makes everything steady. But start one has to.
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