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Breaking down barriers and exploring local heritage with young people
What is a story?
There are different kinds of stories:
• A Story About Someone (Character Stories; Memorial Stories)
• A Story About an Event (Adventure Stories; Accomplishment Stories)
• A Story About a Place
• The Story About What I Do
• Other Personal Stories (Recovery Stories, Love Stories)
• Discovery Stories
Every good story follows a narrative arc, with a catchy start, development, and conclusion.
Remember that telling a story means: transmitting a message. It implies a receiver - an audience that will watch it.
It has a context: Where? When?
Here are a few examples of different types of stories.
A Story About Someone Important
Character Stories: How we love, are inspired by, want to recognize, and find meaning in our relationships
The video is in Italian, you can insert automatic subtitles in youtube.
Memorial Stories: Honouring and remembering people who have passed
A Story About an Event in My Life
Adventure Stories: travel, journeys
Accomplishment Stories: achieving a goal, like graduating from school, landing a major contract or being on the winning team in a sporting event.
A Story About a Place in My Life
A story about your current home, an ancestral home, a town, a park, a mountain or forest you love, a restaurant, store, or gathering place.
A Story About What I Do
For many people with professional careers, their life story is shaped by their job.
Other Personal Stories
Recovery Stories: Sharing the experience of overcoming a great challenge in life
Love Stories: Romance, partnership, familial love ...
Discovery Stories: The process of learning something new
Don't Just Sit There...
One of the hardest, but most important thing to do, is get started. Because many of these stories ask us to reveal things about ourselves that make us feel vulnerable, putting together a story can be a procrastinator's paradise. Just get up, start answering questions on a tape recorder, write things down, gather up the photos, review your videos, and bounce your ideas off of your friends and family.
Life is full of stories, but you may not have a lifetime to capture them as movies, so, go for it!
You can find more details about what makes a good story, including some story prompts to get you thinking,
in the PDF file, below - part of our Digital Storytelling Toolkit, produced by melting pro.
Return to the Toolkit menu, or continue to the next page (Steps into Storytelling).