You know you're a storyteller if ...

Fifteen ways to know if you're a storyteller:

1. You can retell a 30-second joke as a 20-minute story.
2. When someone tells you a story, you tell them a story.
3. When someone asks you a question, you tell them a story.
4. Your children complain, "We've heard that story a hundred times!"
5. You can differentiate between epic, fable, fairytale, folk tale, legend, memoir, myth, parable, saga, tall tale, and yarn.
6. You have wondered why "fairy tale" is two words but "folktale" is one.
7. You can't read a collection of stories without noting which ones you might like to retell.
8. You know what "tale type 333" means.
9. You have missed a highway exit because you were telling yourself a story.
10. You don't let what actually happened get in the way of a good story.
11. You like folk music because folk singers introduce their songs by telling a story.
12. You don't have to Google "398.2" to know what you'll find there.
13. When things go horribly wrong you think, "If I live through this it will
    
    
    make a good story some day."
14. Your children have stopped telling you what happened for fear you will make an embarrassing story out of it.
15. You are right now trying to think of another way to know if you are a storyteller. What is it?

A version of this article appeared in Storytelling Magazine, 27:5 (October/ November/ December), 7. (2015).

The Words We Use: Storytelling, Folktale, Legend, Myth ...

I just scanned all of the books published in the English language since 1800 and counted the number of times the word “stories” appeared in these books. “Stories” has been on the upsurge since 1968 and peaked in 2003! Here's a graph showing the results, year by year:

Note: Apparently the Ngram Viewer graphs are not visible in Internet Explorer. Try Firefox or Chrome.



Of course, you can see that I scanned a number of other words and phrases as well: storytelling, storyteller, folktales, fairy tales, fables, epics, sagas, myths, legends, and tall tales. Since they occur much less frequently than stories, their results are squished. So here's another graph, without stories, so you can see the other results in more detail.


The results are clear: fables are “out,” myths are “in” (peaking in 1997).  Legends peaked in 1879 but are still hanging in there. Sagas, epics, and fairy tales have had a long and fairly consistent history. As for tall tales – well, who would believe anything I said about tall tales anyway. (After all, I'm writing this on April Fool's Day.)

There appear to be some interesting trends since about 1920 with storyteller and storytelling, so let's take a closer look.


There appears to be steady, slow growth in the appearance of these words between 1930 and 1970 when their use started an upsurge. In 1978 storytelling overtook storyteller and continued to grow at a faster rate. Storyteller peaked in 1996 and has declined since. Storytelling peaked in 2003 and declined slightly since. I wonder if the difference in the use of storytelling and storyteller has significance.

To tell you the truth, I might have misled you by saying “I just scanned all of the books published in the English language since 1800 … ” The truth is, I used the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Indeed, you can quickly perform this analysis for any words or phrases you choose – in English (American, British, or All) Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, or Italian.
For more information about the underlying data and how to perform this analysis visit the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Please let me know if you find some interesting results.