That's the question I asked participants at a workshop I ran on Saturday at the Quaker Meeting House.
The short answer is that it's never anything else! Yet for a 3-hour workshop, we had to explore the question in a bit more depth than that.
So we brainstormed definitions of storytelling.
We brainstormed definitions of good.
And we decided that the workshop would have an "End product", a resource of some sort which we decided would be a leaflet, available to people everywhere who would do good with their storytelling!
We talked a great deal about ways we could bring storytelling into our communities, we had some discussion about the role of storytelling in faith and vice versa, and I learned rather a lot from all the different perspectives we had in the room. None of our definitions of good came from me - that was all the work of participants!
We also practiced storytelling skills with the Voices Game (in which we say our names in different voices) and the Banal Stories Game (in which each participant is given something essentially boring to talk about in a way that makes it interesting and entertaining!), and a good old-fashioned story-building exercise.
I also introduced some tips to help with repertoire-building, which I consider the most difficult part of storytelling!
One of the things that initially disappointed me about this workshop is that I didn't get through all the things I had on my plan. But actually, this gave us the opportunity to explore the most important areas in a lot more depth. I think that's what I mostly learned: sometimes depth is more important than breadth.
At the end, we decided on the content of our leaflet, and we're staying in touch to work on its design!
Now, running adult workshops for storytellers at all levels is a big part of where I'm hoping my storytelling adventures will take me. So if you have an idea for a theme or topic relating to storytelling, on which you'd like to see a workshop, please let me know!
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