When reading in the last place I'd thought I'd find something of value for writing, I stumbled upon a few paragraphs that made me think. Tomlinson and Lynch-Brown's THE ESSENTIALS IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE slammed oral history on the table yesterday. A while back, I took AN INTRO TO HUMANITIES from a team of professors back in the late 90s--just to pick up anything I might have missed by studying a whole lot of hard science for my BS. I'm serious. 100 hours excluding the math. That's all hard science. So, I felt a wee bit intimidated switching to archaeology. 'Tis always better to go into a fight with your boxing gloves on, the pessimist thinks! So, one professor in the great attempting-to-teach-me-all-about-humanities team had specialized in children's literature.
Children's literature, as what we define it, hasn't been around long.

Aesop's Fables were published in 1484. Nothing else was until the first picture book in 1657, ORBIS PICTUS. And still nothing else until what is considered the Golden Age of Children's Books in Great Britain, 1860-1900. The trend clarified, I recall the children's lit prof saying children's literature is a recent addition to what was more or less a historical trend of teaching children how to read the Bible. Yes, Protestants are all about mystically connecting with the One on their own. And children's literature for centuries was essentially stories geared toward keeping a child in line or said child wouldn't get the final prize--salvation. Now, I could ramble off on a tangent about how we would rather pretend children were always nurtured the way we nurture ours today. But I won't pontificate here!
So, what does all this have to do with story and storytelling?

I'm going to quote straight from Tomlinson and Lynch-Brown's THE ESSENTIALS IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE...

"Traditional literature includes several different types of stories, but because they were all shared orally for so long, they have many features in common. For example, plots are generally shorter than in other genres of literature because all but the essential details were ommitted during countless retellings. Action, in turn, is concentrated, which kept audiences alert and interested. Characters in traditional literature tend to have only one outstanding quality, which made them easy to identify. In these stories the audience has no doubt about who is good and who is bad. Settings are unimportant and are described and referred to in the vaguest of terms, such as "In the beginning..." or "Long ago in a land far away...." The language, though full of rhythm and melody, is sparse, since lengthy explanations and descriptions were also pared down or eliminated by countless retellings. Style is characterized by stock beginnings and endings ("Once upon a time" and "They lived happily ever after"), motifs or recurring features (use of the number three, as in three sisters, three wishes), and repetition of refrains or chants ("Mirror, mirror, on the wall..."). Themes most common in these stories are good versus evil, the power of perseverance, and explanations for the ways of the world. One feature that makes these stories particular favorites of young children is that they almost always have a happy ending.

"Folklore is still being created, particularly in some of the developing countries where the oral tradition remains the chief means of communication. In our country, urban legends, jokes, and jump-rope rhymes are all part of the constantly evolving body of folklore. These stories and rhymes are of unknown origin, but they are certainly not ancient,..." Ch. 5, pg. 101

For me, this explanation of the origins of children literature in oral history is a definition of oral history, i.e. story. The professor, teaching Medieval Lit and Renaissance & Reformation English Lit that I recently took for research purposes, asked the class of literature majors and myself why was oral history important. Nobody answered--the typical reaction to one of her questions. And since I always tired of the professor waiting and waiting for an answer, I told her the anthropological reason: Oral history is a powerful tool. Just look at it... Oral history taught the concept of story. It drove the development of languages. It taught children what was expected of them. But the thing that inspired me to post this blog post (last week) is that oral history IS story. We writers write story. And looking at oral history we can see that every story should push the audience to aspire to something because story is a dydactic tool. See how story is a powerful tool? Now, why is Skhye rambling about this?

I once heard a story doctor speak at a local large Houston-area writer's conference. This was early in my writing career and moved me.  He had been a long-time editor for a major publisher and switched to a manuscript-doctoring service for large houses. (Must be nice! LOL) Anyway, he had read all the synopses submitted with contest entries at this conference and reported at his synopsis workshop that nobody had written a synopsis. Synopses are not a list of a series of events. They list/show character growth from a story's beginning to end. He went on to explain a story is just a story. A novel is a story with character growth--a tale that encourages readers to aspire to achieve something. He added that anyone who is told they are a storyteller is being subtly insulted. In other words, hearing "You're a great storyteller." in a rejection letter shouldn't confuse us. The term "storyteller" simply indicates you are telling a story and haven't written a novel that shows a character faces a challenge and grows from said obstacle. Of course, this holds true with shorts and novellas. They are simply shorter.

Character growth is the moving force in your writing.
Character growth is what the reader connects with.
You must have character growth in your work. 
Character growth is the soul of fiction.

A story is just plot, a sequence of events as scenes. To write a novel, these scenes must contain hurdles, burning hoops, your character must face. Choices a character makes are strung together, i.e. connected by what we've been taught to include in our work--goals, motivation, and conflict, to show character growth. The POV you've chosen to tell your story dictates how you handle informing the reader of these goals, motivation, and conflict. So, I'd like to bow out here and see if the two paragraphs I lifted from Tomlinson and Lynch-Brown's THE ESSENTIALS IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE strike a chord with anyone else.

Anyone? Anyone? (I'm having Ferris Bueller's Day Off flashbacks!) ~Skhye