Stories are fun at any time of year, but Christmas in particular lends itself to storytelling, having a get together, watching films, reading books.

This quote above shows how stories are a powerful way of teaching because they allow the audience to connect emotionally. Sterne draws a parallel with heat – indicating that stories can inflame passions, and questions why the ‘heart’ cannot be convinced with cold facts, but tends to need the frame of a story in order to be convinced.

This reminded me of an excellent book. Made to stick examines at how to make ideas memorable and comes up with a set of rules that each idea needs to abide by in order to make it stick in people’s minds. One of the key  rules, of course, is to use a story to represent the message.

Following on from this, I wondered how storytelling online differs from traditional methods. This article by Rob Mills at Carsonified talks about how to make storytelling  work on the web and was a useful way to consider the different elements that you would online.

I liked Rob’s conclusion that the web offers opportunities for new ways of storytelling that are not necessarily linear and it presents a range of creative challenges.

Ok, and now my contribution. Well, it’s not it’s not strictly a story – but jokes counts as stories right?

There were two monkeys in the bath.

One went  ‘Ooh ooh ahh ahh’ and the other said ‘Add some more hot water then!’

Credit goes to Jimmy Carr for that gem- he did a fabulous show at the Apollo!

So off to Xmas – I wish you all a very happy Xmas with lots of storytelling and cracker jokes!