I love Stories

 

I've always loved stories, from Old  Grandfather Frog talking to Sammy Jay and Jimmy the Skunk to Beverly Gray, the five children who spent the Summer at Buckhorn and lots more.

My mother was a great story teller while I had my bath. She read bedtime stories to me too. Sometimes we did double stories, where one of us would start, the other would pick it up and then we would alternate. We had a series where I was a philanthropic snake and she was the person who find people for me to help.

I was also a great reader and I made up stories in my head. I wrote stories as well.

As an adult I still love stories, fiction, non fiction. I will listen to strangers' stories with whatever emotion is called for. The same with friends, relatives and acquaintances. 

I love movies with good people stories. 

Hallmark's Christmas movies are now appearing on many French and Swiss channels. A day doesn't go by where you can't find one. I watch maybe one or two a year because it is the same story with different faces. I can almost predict the plot twists. I wonder if the screen writers have a manual that says at moment 24 introduce a problem and at moment 32 ... you get the idea.

I want to know why a character does this or that.

I want to check out the environment a character is in.

I was so lucky this year to be able to spend two days at the Edinburgh Storytelling Festival. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=edinburgh+storytelling+festival&atb=v338-1&ia=web I could have happily been there the entire month but the four events we went to were wonderful.

My favorites were the Hearth Nights, with four storytellers in front of a rug with a fake fire to their left.  Stories could be personal, mythical, magical or embody the soul of Scotland.  

The hearth reminded me of my childhood with a story log when we would tell stories until a log became embers.

I have no idea why stories are so important to me. 

Maybe because other people's lives enrich my own, not that my life is lacking. There is still only so much anyone can do in one lifetime. Other lives feed my greediness for more than I can consume.

Maybe because as a writer I'm always looking for a new story to write, although if I lived to be a 1,000, I couldn't write everything that has tiptoed through my head.