How will the craft of storytelling change in the future?

By Limor Shiponi

The question was posted on Quora, inviting a wealth of answers. Here’s mine (invited to vote up if you think it’s worth being more visible):

The simple answer is – it won’t, since it has no reason to. If people are suggesting there needs to be a change, first check why they are making such a suggestion and if the root of their suggestion is actually connected to a need within the art, or the people practicing it. Reading most of the answers here, these suggestions are related to various techniques used to deliver, share and craft a story, but they don’t derive from the core of storytelling.

The word ‘craft’ sends the question down a misleading road. So does the division between ‘story’ and ‘telling’ when related to ‘storytelling’. Storytelling is a single word, not a combination of two. Therefore, if you really understand what storytelling is, you’ll realize the storyteller holds only a third of a dynamic partnership, sharing it with an uttered story-text and a listener. In this partnership and during a storytelling event, everything changes constantly, in real time. What the question and the answers relate to as ‘craft’ is in the hands of all partners which practice mutual influence constantly. One story-text is not like another for every event, even if you’re telling the same text; the storyteller is constantly influences by both text and listener – in real time – which effects the way he storytells on the spot; the listener is not passive in any way and we don’t use a craft to influence only him – the story and the storyteller are constantly influenced by the listeners, the storyteller being one of them himself.

I know that in a world busy with “owning” every bit of information and skill the above ideas are difficult to accept, but not if you realize that storytelling emerged in the oral culture where it reached the level of high practice. We’re just enjoying the fact people who lived way before we do have brought it there. Sustaining for so many thousands of years, still highly effective as it will be in the future, storytelling for what it really is has no need for change in ‘craft’. It’s at top performance. The only change required is having more outstanding storytellers than there are right now.