Storytelling
Training Exercises and Resources

This exercise helps to test the creativity of delegates on their ability to make stories based on a series of images. Each delegate sees a series of images and needs to make an interesting story that will connects them all together.

This exercise helps with creative storytelling and impromptu delivery. It can also be used as an icebreaker to help delegates learn about each other. The choice of objects dictates what kinds of areas would be covered. Choose the object based on the background of delegates as well as their age. You can also use it for an exercise on creative writing or public speaking.

This is entertaining exercise on getting delegates to quickly think of a story to tell based on a visual prompt. The options allow you to bias the exercise based on what you want delegates to practice on. They can then get feedback on their storytelling.

This entertaining exercise helps delegates practice their acting in front of an audience. Each person will be required to deliver a speech about a given topic. You can vary the exercise by expecting a specific style of speech or just leave it completely uncontrolled. It is ideal for training on acting, storytelling and public speaking.

Modern tools can provide a great insight on how certain terms have been used in the past. With the advent of search engines and in particular the ever more useful tools released by Google we can examine the index of millions of books and observe the popularity of certain terms in literature.

This exercise is meant to be an exploratory activity where delegates sit behind computers and use the tool to test out the use of various terms. The tool is known as Google Books Ngram Viewer which is the result of indexing thousands of books.

Initially, you will give delegates specific terms to research and later you can let them use the tool freely to see what insights they can come up with.

This exercise is useful for courses on marketing, branding, writing, languages and art.

In this exercise delegates practice designing a story. Story design can be quite challenging so this exercise helps to break it up to a simpler task by giving delegates a helpful starting point. You can use this exercise in conjunction with other story telling exercises to train delegates on various skills required to make a story from scratch.

This exercise may lead to spoiling a number of movies for some delegates who might not have seen the movies yet. Since this exercise works best if everyone has seen a given movie under consideration, and to avoid the spoiling issue, you can consider using a rule that any chosen movie must have been seen by everyone.

In this creative writing exercise, delegates get to write a short piece about an interaction between a teacher and a student where the teacher learns something from the student. This is of course contrary to the role of a teacher but it is actually more common than one might think. It requires thinking beyond the direct lesson to see what a teacher can learn while teaching a student.

Use this exercise to get the delegates design a story based on a single image. The choice of these images can greatly influence the exercise, so use this much like a template to craft a training exercise based on your specific needs.

Imagine a person who talks about himself all the time. The conversation is full of “I”, “me”, “my” and they constantly talk about what happens in their lives. Such people don’t tend to last long as friends. Usually, the people we most like are those who are caring and selfless rather than those who are self-centred. To such people nothing seems to be as important or interesting as themselves.

Unfortunately, we all might suffer from a degree of self-centred view from time to time and would need to keep an eye on it. This exercise helps delegates see what it means to shift focus to others even when you want to talk about your own views. It is a clever and subtle way to shift attention to others without overtly forcing them to change.

This exercise also helps delegates see how important it is to let events speak for themselves. It focuses the mind to cover facts more than subjective emotions and let a listener decide for himself on what to interpret. The exercise is ideal for creative writing as it provides a structured approach to storytelling.

This is a creative design exercise, allowing participants to work together as a team in achieving an objective. As part of this exercise, delegates will get to choose a number of political cartoons and have an attempt at designing one. The design is just a pretext to get people talk to each other and share what they like or dislike. The cartoons provide an opportunity to laugh about serious stuff so the exercise is light hearted but can have significant value as people can easily end up discussing values, current affairs, ethical and political issues and of course politics.

Note that the emphasis of this exercise is in the descriptive design of a cartoon as opposed to the actual drawing or art. Most people are not skilled in drawing and forcing them to draw in this exercise might make them feel uncomfortable. This is why the drawing part is ignored (though of course you can optionally add it if it suits your training needs). However, there is no reason why people cannot come up with an idea for a political cartoon which this exercise captures.