Story Power
A straightforward guide to creating a great story that keeps your audience riveted.
The art of telling stories has been around as long as humans. And in today’s noisy, techy, automated world, storytelling is not only prevalent?it’s vital. Whether you're interested in enlivening verbal communication, building your business brand, making presentations, sharing family wisdom, or performing on stage, Story Power shows you how to make use of a good story.
Telling stories is the most effective verbal communication?if you know how to use it. Story Power provides techniques for creating and framing personal stories alongside effective tips for telling them in any setting. Plus, this book models stories with unique storytelling examples, exercises, and prompts, as well as storytelling techniques for delivery in a spontaneous, authentic style.
Story Power is an engaging, lively guide to the art of telling stories from author and librarian Kate Farrell, a seasoned storyteller and founder of the Word Weaving Storytelling Project. In Story Power, more than twenty skillful contributors with a range of diverse voices share their secrets to creating, crafting, and telling tales.
In this book discover:How to share your own coming-of-age stories and family folkloreThe importance of a personal branding story and storytelling marketingSeven Steps to Storytelling, along with helpful tools, organizers, and media options
With a foreword by New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Susan Wittig Albert
Praise for Story Power
“You can read a lot of books that tell you how to tell a story. Unlike them, Story Power illustrates the art, with twenty-one diverse voices and fascinating tales that entertain as you learn how to create and craft personal stories of all types.” —Nina Amir, bestselling author of How to Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual, and Creative Visualization for Writers
“Mining her own experiences, Farrell offers small narrative gems alongside craft tips, commentary, and writing samples from an impressive list of acclaimed writers. Learn travel writing from Lisa Alpine, for example, or keys to crafting adventure stories from Mary Mackey, or personal branding from Marissa Moss . . . . Engaging and accessible, Story Power will help you jump-start and sustain your writing practice.” —Mary Volmer, author of Reliance, Illinois
Kate Farrell, Susan Wittig Albert
Kate Farrell, MLS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Studies, UC Berkeley. She has been a language arts classroom teacher (pre-school and grades kindergarten through 12th), author, librarian, university lecturer, and storyteller in Northern California since 1966. She founded the Word Weaving Storytelling Project, in collaboration with the California State Department of Education funded by grants from Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco, 1979-1991, to train educators at all levels, and published numerous educational materials.
She is author of Word Weaving: A Storytelling Workbook, 1980; co-author of a monograph, Effects of Storytelling: An Ancient Art for Modern Classrooms, 1982; author of Word Weaving: A Teaching Sourcebook, 1984; producer and co-author of a training videotape, “Word Weaving: The Art of Storytelling,” 1983, distributed by the University of California, Berkeley; and author of the professional book, Storytelling: A Guide for Teachers, Scholastic, 1991. She is also senior author of Storytelling in Our Multicultural World, an oral language development program for early childhood education, published by Zaner-Bloser Educational Publishers, 1994.
Farrell has edited and appeared in numerous anthologies of personal narratives. She is author of the fabulist novella, Strange Beauty, and a collection of short stories, Woman Wonder Tales. http://katefarrell.net/
She currently offers storytelling workshops to writers in CWC branches and Mechanics Institute Library and the San Francisco Public Library and hosts a weekly storytelling blog: http://www.storytellingforeveryone.net/
Susan Wittig Albert is the award-winning,
New York Times bestselling author of
Loving Eleanor (2016), about the intimate friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok; and
A Wilder Rose (2014), about Rose Wilder Lane and the writing of the Little House books. Her award-winning fiction also includes mysteries in the China Bayles series, the Darling Dahlias, the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter, and a series of Victorian-Edwardian mysteries she has written with her husband, Bill Albert, under the pseudonym of Robin Paige. She has written two memoirs:
An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days and
Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, published by the University of Texas Press. Susan Albert is founder of the Story Circle Network, an international not-for-profit membership organization made up of thousands of women who want to document their lives and explore their personal stories through journaling, memoir, autobiography, personal essays, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and mixed-media, based in Austin, Texas. Susan Wittig Albert is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and lives in the rugged Texas Hill Country, in the small town of Bertram, just northwest of Austin.
