How to tell stories to children...

       First is personality. You must name and describe your hero. He is the child himself personalized. Then comes action. There must be a journey, a combat, a plot. Next is mystery, suspense, surprise. Finally the solution. With these simple elements anybody ought to tell a tale. They are the elements of the classics.

       "The climax," says Sara Cone Bryant, "is that which makes the story ; for it, all that precedes has prepared the way. It is the point upon which interest focuses. If a moral lesson is conveyed, it is here that it is enforced. Hence failure here means total failure. The reason why the 'good story' sometimes seems so dull when it is related by an appreciative hearer is that he has missed the point in retelling it."

       Says Wyche: "In telling a story one must be able to see clearly the mental picture in the story, and be able to create the picture anew each time the story is told, in words that are current with his audience. If the story-teller sees clearly the picture, he can make others see it. But the story has something more than imagery. It has emotion, and one must feel deeply the truth in the story. Feeling more than anything else will give one a motive for telling the truth. Frequently a story is told more than anything else to impart feeling. If we cultivate right emotions in the child, his deeds will be righteous."

       "The essential thing in a story is to make something happen." Miss Vostrovsky's study shows that in young children the interest in what was done leads all others, and that they put several times as much emphasis upon action as upon moral qualities, sentiment, feeling, esthetic details, and dress combined, while the thought of the actors received no mention at all. Adolescent boys demand "something doing" in their books, and in adults interest in action has hardly decreased.

       "For these reasons," says Edna Lyman, "let me urge you, when you are looking for stories to tell little children, to apply this threefold test as a kind of touchstone to their quality of fitness: Are they full of action, in close natural sequence? Are their images simple without being humdrum? Are they repetitive? The last quality is not an absolute requisite, but it is very often an attribute of a good child-story."

How to make a story. Storytelling Tutorial

Part 2 is here, and Part 3 here and Part 4 here.