Telling stories

I write stories, and tell them through what I write, but my stories are fiction and are usually long and with many characters and different twists and turns in the plots… But telling a story implies something shorter, something spoken, something completed within a lesson, within the time it takes to drink a pint or share a coffee with someone, a story told before bedtime, or in a reminiscence with a favourite older person… or younger person…

I tell stories here, on my blog, stories from my parents’ childhoods, stories from my childhood, things I’ve done, things I’ve found out about others way back in the past. I suppose I have a framework for doing it because it’s something I’ve always done, and had done for me – my parents, my aunties and uncles, friends… But some people have stories to tell and they are stuck as how to do it.

I’ve mentioned that I belong to U3A, and as well as attending classes (French conversation and Saxish) I teach creative writing. One of the other groups is a family history group, and it struck me that lots of people research their family tree; they know lots of stories about their family, but they don’t know how to put the two together, how to tell the stories they know and add them to the tree they’ve created… and in the end they lose the family stories because there seems no place for them to go.

I have an idea of starting another U3A group… a cross between creative writing and family history; so the research would be done elsewhere, in the other group or individually, but people would come  and we’d work together to produce the stories of their family… Does it sound like an idea?