A Twitter thread that unravelled….
As always I daydream as much as I dream during the night. I was thinking about stories and how they started in Tamil. Here is a beautiful representation in popular culture from a Tamil movie.
And in response, people from across the world told me how stories start in their own cultures and languages including popular culture.
Teachers, storytellers and writers across the world got excited by this flurry of wonderful phrases that triggered our imaginations and set us off into a new journey.
So I gathered all the bits of the thread as much as possible for all you story geeks to use. Click here to download the pdf.
Classroom / workshop resources based on story starters now available to download. Click here!
Want to know how I use story starters in my books? Read this post to find out more.
The Guardian featured this twitter thread on their website and since then it has sparked more interest. Here is a link provided by storyteller Tim Sheppard on more story openings.
Simply superb… chasing or we can say going back to roots of the big story tree to know all about the beginning of stroy… good great.
Thanks for your compilation.
This has evoked considerable interest on the Storytell listserv (the community has been going for over 20 years and has around 800 storytellers from around the world: more about it at http://tellatale.eu/resources_storytell.html).
Listserv member Tim Jennings compiled two lists a few years ago. The openings are at http://folktale.net/openers.html
and endings at http://folktale.net/endings.html
Most are traditional, though I confess that one of mine “Once upon a time when the grass was greener, the trees grew taller, and the sun shone more brightly than it does today…” did simply pop into my head when I was on stage one evening!
How wonderful that you took the time to gather these story starters from around the world Chitra.
It is just further proof that we are different but so similar in the ways of sharing our words with our family, friends and other generations.
Oral histories are so precious to pass on and so important
that people all over the world use their voices
to share their love of words.
We are all human beings who love to listen to a good story.
Thanks!