Reimagining the world through storytelling

Emma Drage, a Senior Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press, writes about the benefits of storytelling and creative writing on children’s understanding, confidence, and well-being.

“As an editor, the authors I work with are masters in the art of storytelling and have spent years developing the skills needed to become a published writer, but working on your storytelling skills can have a lot of benefits, whether or not you aspire to write professionally. The National Literacy Trust has found that writing for pleasure can have many benefits for children, including social connection, creativity, and self-expression, and can even boost happiness and promote mental well-being.

Storytelling can be great fun. It’s an opportunity to create your own world, populate it with characters and decide what you would like to happen to them. One of the wonderful things about storytelling is that there are no limits to what you can do; the possibilities are as endless as your imagination! The freedom of creative writing can be empowering, enjoyable, and even relaxing.

Storytelling also helps us to develop many skills that are useful in the classroom and beyond. The act of writing a story helps to teach us how to present our ideas in a clear and convincing way, to express feelings and emotions, to engage an audience and to keep their interest. Storytelling also improves empathy: when we create characters in a story and imagine their point of view, we are developing our ability to walk in someone else’s shoes and to envision different perspectives and ways of understanding the world we live in.

Storytelling is also a wonderful tool for developing confidence and self-esteem. Outside of my day job as a children’s book editor, I’m lucky enough to mentor young writers through a children’s creative writing charity. There I see first-hand the benefits that storytelling has on young people’s confidence. I think that many of us are intimidated by a blank page and getting started is often the most challenging part of telling a story. Learning to overcome this and to see your story take shape is a brilliant confidence boost. It’s wonderful to see how proud the young writers are of completing a story. Once you’ve finished writing a story, it can be really helpful to test your work on an audience. The act of sharing a story you’ve written is also an excellent way of improving your confidence. It can be daunting, but doing so in a supportive environment can feel very empowering and is a great way to connect with others.

We might think of storytelling first and foremost as a way to escape our everyday lives and to open up doors to new worlds, but, in fact, it can be a way of processing and even changing our real lives. Entering into the realm of the imaginary can help us to make sense of ourselves and the world, and to see our everyday lives differently. The act of arranging words on paper can enable us to process our thoughts, feelings and experiences, and to make new meanings out of them. Because of this, being able to harness the power of storytelling can have a real-life impact. Psychologist Dr Pippa Grange uses storytelling as a tool to enable people to make changes, famously having used it to transform the culture and performance of the men’s England football team by helping them to write and live out a new story. Once you can see the world you encounter every day in a different light, new possibilities open up. To change the world, you first need to reimagine it!”

Emma Drage is a Senior Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press and writing mentor at Hoxton-based charity, Ministry of Stories.

Enjoy the wonderful stories created by the Time to Write 2024 creative writing competition winners as illustrated books on the Time to Write website.