„Little red riding hood. Let’s start the story in a different way: It was dark inside the wolf.” – Margaret Atwood for MasterClass
Me looking into how to teach reading in order to learn more about how to teach movement – and sensing, and feeling, and thinking – was a blissful ride so far. There’s plenty of quality research on how-to acquire literacy skills.
I can’t say the same about story writing. Googling „How to write down a story” is just as poor of an experience as reading the News Feed on Facebook, or stepping out of an airport in a developing country, or any other place where people scream for attention in order to sell you something. And not always to the best of your interest.
Most „resources” about story writing, the best ranking ones on Google that is, assume that you don’t have a story yet, and need to develop all its elements from scratch. But what if you already have your story, just too many questions on how to write it down? Sure, it’s possible to adapt to any kind instructions, but where are the proper resources, the research, the delightful teachings of seasoned essayists?
Out in the wild (children’s playground or shopping mall), one of the first rules my mom taught me after I’ve learned to walk was this: „Whenever you lose me you walk back to the last place we’ve seen each other, and you stay there and you wait for me.” To go back to the last place where I wasn’t lost and take it from there, how’s that for a story? One of the first storybooks my grandparents owned, and one of the first storybooks I’ve ever read, was a collection of stories by the brothers Grimm. Maybe I should track back all the way to the brothers Grimm and see what I can learn from them. Let me google that…
„The rise of Romanticism during the 18th century had revived interest in traditional folk stories, which to the Grimms and their colleagues represented a pure form of national literature and culture. The Brothers Grimm established a methodology for collecting and recording folk stories that became the basis for folklore studies. Between the first edition of 1812–1815 and the seventh (and final) edition of 1857, they revised their collection many times, so that it grew from 156 stories to more than 200” – Wikipedia, the Brothers Grimm
Holla die Waldfee! This path looks promising.