from Wikipedia...

Storytelling is the ancient art of conveying events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories have probably been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment, education, preservation of culture and to instill knowledge and values/morals. Crucial elements of storytelling include plot and characters, as well as the narrative point of view. Stories are frequently used to teach, explain, and/or entertain. Less frequently, but occasionally with major consequences, they have been used to mislead. There can be much truth in a story of fiction, and much falsehood in a story that uses facts.

Storytelling has existed as long as humanity has had language. It's the world of myth, of history, of the imagination...it explains life. Every culture has its stories, legends, and every culture has its storytellers, often revered figures with the magic of the tale in their voices and minds.

The appearance of technology has changed the tools available to storytellers. The earliest forms of storytelling are thought to have been primarily oral combined with gestures and expressions. Rudimentary drawings such as can be seen in the artwork scratched onto the walls of caves may also have been early forms of storytelling. Ephemeral media such as sand, leaves, and the carved trunks of living trees have also been used to record stories in pictures or with writing. With the advent of writing and the use of stable, portable media stories were recorded, transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed, or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form. Complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status.

Traditionally, oral stories were passed from generation to generation, and survived solely by memory. With written media, this has become less important. Conversely, in modern times, the vast entertainment industry is built upon a foundation of sophisticated multimedia storytelling.

maybe not so unbelievable after all??  :o

i find storytelling is best facilitated through the use of big ass words!

In school I was big on “narratology,” a way of studying stories that basically says the same basic kinds of stories are told throughout history with minor variations, and that the study of these basic kinds of stories can tell us a lot about the workings of the human mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narratology

"Due to the origins of the term, it has a strong association with the structuralist quest for a system of formal description that can usefully be applied to any narrative (the analogy being with the grammars by reference to which sentences are parsed in some forms of linguistics). This aim has not, however, characterised all work that is today described as narratological, Percy Lubbock's groundbreaking work on point of view, The Craft of Fiction (1921), is a case in point. Jonathan Culler argues that the many strands of (what he regards as) narratology are all united by a recognition "that the theory of narrative requires a distinction between... 'story' - a sequence of actions or events, conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse - and... 'discourse', the discursive presentation or narration of events", but admits that this is only implicit in the work of many of the authors he is grouping together in this way. The distinction was originally proposed by the Russian Formalists, who used the terms fabula and sjuzhet, but a succession of other pairs has preserved what is essentially the same dichotomy (e.g., histoire/discours, histoire/récit, story/plot).'