There were many time as a young’un I would sit and listen to family tell stories (‘spin yarns’ as we would call them) about other members of the family, and of course, these family members were already dead and gone. Now, these stories were harmless enough, but they revealed a lot about the family history that was never known except to a certain few members in each generation. None of these stories were ever written down. They were said to be passed down orally to the children that would sit and listen to what was being said. Back then, children were to be seen and not heard.  The magic that played out in oral tradition versus that of the written version was the interaction between the speaker with his/her props and the listener.  With the speaker, he/she could demonstrate, pantomime, use inflection and facial gestures to build up a story. These items around them could be as simple as pine needles converted into a cricket cage, or corn shucks turned into a doll to reveal a story. However, writers do not have that luxury today. We must find alternatives to demonstrate the imagery that will provoke the senses.  As writers, we want our readers to feel as if they are falling in love for the first time, or to rise up and fight, or take justice into their own hands in order to defend a fair maiden’s honor. So, how do we, as authors, do this?
Well, we provide our readers with a background or you might say a history so they know what has already transpired. Then, we pull them in, slowly, to the ongoing action. We know as writers that there are multifaceted genres. Readers identify with some sort of functionality that the character portrays. I have always said that if we could make a reader hate a character then we were successful as authors because we had used the correct tools of the trade to provoke emotions, even if they were negative one. The use of the ‘adjective’ in my opinion gets short changed in fiction along with the ‘action’ verb. I do not like the passive voice unless I am leading the reader to something that I do not want to reveal in the story line. I love present tense and action verbs. This is where the author brings the reader into the story and he/she becomes the active participant. The reader cannot put the book down. The heartbeat begins to beat faster and faster as the readers’ hurries through the words, waiting, waiting, the suspense is killing them, until you finally hear a sigh of relief or gasp of air, then you know, the reader has gotten their answer. Yes it true, oral tradition can remind people of the stories of yesteryear, but the words written down on paper will be here for future generations so, when we ole-timers die out, the words will still be here to remind them, that the history of storytelling will not be lost. Hillbilly Tales from the Smoky Mountains - And Other Homespun Remed...