Liz Warren | Storyteller

If you’re like me, before you can craft a personal story, you kind of need a story idea. But what if you’re short on ideas? The good news is you have plenty of ideas –you just need to spark your memory to find them!  Below are a couple of activities and templates that can help…

Orality is why we are all pursuing the arts of storytelling. I never got to have a storyteller tell stories to my kindergarten and first grade classes. Or second, or third-grade class, or, come to think of it, any class at all. I realize that I first heard stories at home. But almost all of…

On September 10th, 2019, my husband forced me to get out of the house to attend a workshop. It was a workshop held by a nonprofit for its sponsors. My husband had become a Sponsor by providing photography and videography for this nonprofit, so we were invited. At that point in my life, I couldn’t…

School was a struggle for me. Science, history, literature, geography – you name the subject I struggled. The only subject I did well in was math. I loved theorems. They were logical and there was structure to it. So, when I signed up for fact-based storytelling, I was having flashbacks to history class in school…

I had a dream last night about the Welsh cauldron goddess, Cerridwen, and her two sons. It reminded me of this poem I wrote several years ago about the son who became Taliesin, the greatest of the Welsh bards. Gwion Tells Cerridwen had a daughter A beauty from the start But her son was so…

“Everyone wants to know that their life has meaning.” Andrew Stanton Immediately after the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, the horror of the images and the stories that emerged were either devastating or inspiring. There wasn’t time to mourn immediately, there was too much need. The world rushed to offer help…

Stories for millennia have imparted something special to their listeners. Some call this wisdom, some call it history, while others call it archetypes. Archetypes are small pieces of information that our brain absorbs through the use of symbols. This is done by listening to a story and visually painting images that create scenarios that inform…

When I worked in corporate learning, the rule of thumb was that each 23 minute module took an average of 67 hours to develop (td.org) when you factor in research, interview, development, editing, reviews and production. A Facebook livestream group revealed that each 30 to 45 minute episode takes a month to prepare (brianhonigman.com). So…

How do you go about finding a story to craft and tell that is both right for you as a storyteller and ethical for you as a person in this time and place? Selecting the story is the first and most important step in telling a story. The bottom line is this: Choose stories that you…

Stories are things we make. Most of us don’t have stories. We have memories and experiences that we shape into stories. It’s similar to how home-made baked goods don’t just spontaneously appear on our kitchen counters. We have to assemble the ingredients, follow a recipe, and bake them ourselves.  Same with stories. The questions below…