A Day for the Oldest Art
World Storytelling Day celebrates oral storytelling, the spoken kind that came long before writing. Stories are the oldest technology humans have for passing wisdom from one generation to the next.Share on X
World Storytelling Day is March 20, timed to the spring equinox. It started in Sweden in 1991 as a national event called “Alla berättares dag,” which means All Storytellers Day. The original Swedish network faded, but the idea would not die. It spread through Scandinavia, then through Australia and Mexico, and by 2003 it had become a global celebration. On this one day, people all over the world tell and listen to stories, in as many languages and places as possible, all at once.
The thing I want to point out is right there in the definition. World Storytelling Day celebrates oral storytelling, the spoken kind. Not novels, not essays, the ancient art of one person telling another person a story out loud. That is the oldest form of storytelling there is, older than writing by tens of thousands of years, and it is still how most stories actually get told. A bedtime story, a friend recounting an embarrassing moment, a grandparent passing down family history, those are all oral storytelling. We do it constantly, most of us without even noticing.
I notice, because I do it on purpose, all the time.
I Tell Stories Constantly
I tell stories all the time. When I talk to people, I tell them stories. I probably bore half of them. But I cannot help it, because telling stories is just how I understand the world.Share on X
I absolutely love to tell stories. When I am talking with people, I tell stories, constantly, one after another. I probably bore some of them, because I tell so many. But I cannot really help it. It is just how I communicate and how I make sense of things.
That love started early. I began writing stories back in grade school, and I have continued all my life. They were usually fairly short. For a long time I did not show them to anyone, they were just something I did. Then I moved to Florida, and something opened up. I started writing stories in serious volume, lots and lots of them.
These days a big collection of that work lives on my fiction site, Master of Worlds. I have written more than forty stories there, plus a pile of flash fiction, the very short stuff, plus quite a few books. You can browse all the stories, dig into the flash fiction, page through the fiction books, or follow the serialized work as it unfolds. It is decades of telling stories, finally written down in one place.
Story Is More Than Writing. Story Is Your Life.
Story is not just something you write. It is your life. Your background, your experiences, the things that happened to you. That is the raw material of everything worth reading.Share on X
Here is the part that took me years to fully understand. Storytelling is more than writing. Story is your life.
I do not mean that as a slogan. I mean it literally, and I see it in my work every single day. When I help someone build their LinkedIn profile, what I am really doing is helping them tell a story about themselves, the story of who they are and where they are going. When I help someone write a book as a ghostwriter, almost always I am helping them write their story. Not just facts and chapters, but the story of them. What is their background? What is their life actually like? How does all of that fit into the book they want to write?
This is true no matter what kind of book it is. If it is a coaching book, the question I keep asking is what personal stories does this coach have, what details from their own life make them different from every other coach offering similar advice. If it is an executive book, same thing, what is the lived experience underneath the expertise. And even pure fiction has the author’s story in it somewhere, woven into the characters, the obsessions, the things the writer cannot stop returning to.
That personal story is not a nice extra. It is the differentiator. It is the single thing that makes a book yours instead of generic, the reason someone would read your book on a subject instead of the hundred other books on the same subject. Strip the story of the person out of a book and you are left with information, which anyone can get anywhere. Leave it in, and you have something only that one person could have written.
What the Spoken Tradition Taught Us
There is a reason this day honors the oral tradition specifically, and it is not just nostalgia. Almost everything we know about how stories work, we learned from telling them out loud, long before anyone wrote them down.
Think about where the basic tools of storytelling came from. Phrases like “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” exist because spoken stories needed clear signals for where the tale begins and ends. Repetition, the hero who faces three trials, the phrase that comes back again and again, exists because a teller working from memory needed structure to hold the story together and a listener needed it to follow along. Archetypal characters, the clever youngest child, the wise old woman, the trickster, exist because they are instantly recognizable to an audience hearing the story for the first time. These were not literary decisions. They were survival tools for stories that lived only in the air, passed mouth to mouth across generations.
Every one of those tools still works on the page today. When you feel a modern novel building toward a satisfying ending, or notice a pattern repeating with meaning, you are feeling techniques that were perfected around fires thousands of years ago. Writing did not invent storytelling. It just gave us a way to keep it. That is worth remembering on a day built around the spoken word.
What This Means for Writers
If you take one thing from World Storytelling Day, take this: you are already a storyteller, and your own life is your best material.
You do not need permission or a stage to tell stories. You tell them every day, to friends, to family, to coworkers. The skill worth building is learning to tell them on purpose, with shape and timing, and then learning to get them onto the page. Start by noticing the stories you already tell out loud, the ones people lean in for. Those are the ones worth writing down.
And when you write anything meant to represent you, a book, a profile, a bio, an article, do not scrub your story out of it in the name of sounding professional. Your background, your specific experiences, the things that happened to you and what you made of them, that is exactly what makes your work worth reading. The facts are commodity. The story is yours alone.
So on March 20, tell someone a story out loud, the old way, the way humans have done it for fifty thousand years. Then think about which of your stories belong in writing, where they will outlast the telling. That is the whole craft, really. Everything else is just getting better at it.