For twenty years, I’ve taught mythology and folklore courses at the University of Oklahoma. My students read traditional myths and legends, and then they write their own stories inspired by the reading. When people retell old stories in new ways, you never know what will happen; no two stories ever turn out the same. There are an infinite number of possibilities, and the more stories you write, the more ideas you’ll come up with.

In this book, I’ve collected some stories and storytelling ideas drawn from these collections:
Tiny Tales from Aesop
Tiny Tales from India
Tiny Tales of Nasruddin

These “Tiny Tales” books are available free online (epub, PDF, etc.), and they are Creative-Commons-licensed so you can create your own textbook;
more about that below. You will find all three books in all the different formats here:
100Words.LauraGibbs.net

For each story included in this Guide, I’ve suggested a storytelling idea based on changes to the plot or characters, or a change in style. These are just suggestions. There are always other possibilities… endless possibilities: there’s no limit to creativity.

Because the stories are very short, there’s lots of room to expand. Each “tiny tale” is just 100 words long, so you might expand the story to 200 words, or 500, or 999. Perhaps 567 or maybe 234. The specific number isn’t important; the goal is just to have a length in mind so you can find your focus and know when to say the story is done.

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Tiny Tales Teaching Guide Copyright © 2020 by Laura Gibbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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