It started, I guess, 150,000 years ago and it started in 3^rd grade when I drew a jungle full of made-up animals and it started in 1999 with my first poetry class and it started just now, a minute ago, when I started this blog post, but the point is that the check has been in the mail a long, long time.

My plan is ambitious. Too ambitious, really. To spend some time going through every method and mode of storytelling available to humans.

For each section (which will proceed from Storytelling 101 to Storytelling 102 and so on), I’ll try to include:

• Theory
• Salient or excellent examples
• Some examples of how that specific technology is happening on (and interacting with) the web
• Some of my own efforts.

I’ll also probably include a lot of summaries of books or sections of books (as a writer, books are my primary method of interacting with both history and ideas) about that subject.

The hardest part of planning the blog for the future is trying to break the whole thing down into bite-sized chunks and still get some kind of comprehensive sense of the diversity of human storytelling.

Things I’d like to cover:

• What’s a story?
• Oral history
• Writing
• Visual art
• Music
• Dance
• Theater
• Photography
• Radio
• Cinema
• Digital storytelling

It’s broad. Too broad. But whatever. It’s my blog. And it’s not like there aren’t enough unfinished blog projects on the Internet already.

The first section—which I already started, thank you very much—is trying to take on that first topic listed above, “What’s a story?”

In a move that is probably symptomatic of the current pop storytelling lit ouvre, the books are all at least partly concerned with neuroscience.

Here’s the breakdown of what I’ll cover in this first section:

Chapter 1—What’s a story?

I. A Survey of the Literature
     1. The Storytelling Animal 1 2 3 4 5
     2.Wired for Story by Lisa Cron
     3. On the Origins of Stories by Brian Boy
     4. The Naked Brain by Richard Restak
III. Storytelling Blogs
IV. Storytelling Podcasts (live only)
V. My stories
     1. Ignite
     2. The Moth
VI. Lesson Plan and Bibliography

 This first one is, maybe, the most boring because it’s basically ALL theory. I’m making stories for the site using 50+ Ways to Tell a Story as a guide, but otherwise, it’s all theory, so.

But I think it’s important. One thing that frustrates me about discussions about storytelling is whoever is speaking about the subject defines a story (basically, usually) as the kind of thing that they usually make. Live storytellers do that, digital storytellers do that. But what makes those two things like each other and also like Child with Hand Grenade and Taxi Driver and Burns and Allen and Nike of Samothrace?

I don’t even know if this conversation would have been as urgent before the Internet, but with Web 2.0 and the explosion of digital story-making and story-publishing applications, it seems more and more important.

We are growing incredibly sophisticated, I think, in our ability to digest media, but our sophistication is maybe outpacing our storytelling abilities. Another way to say the same thing: we want to tell stories in all kinds of ways, and while we know how to recognize good work we don’t always know why it’s good or how to make something ourselves.

This blog (for now) is a quixotic effort to inventory the entirety of human expression and make some miniscule contributions to that conversation. No biggie. 

No matter what, though, check out my glogster on the history of human expression.