The Roots of Storytelling

Published July 28, 2026

by Carol Berg

There are certain questions people frequently ask writers. We’ve all heard them: What’s your writing day like? Plotter or pantser?

Some, mostly people who don’t read speculative or paranormal fiction, ask me why I write fantasy. You talk about mysteries all the time, they might say. Why not those?

Maybe someday.

Or they’ll say, “I doubt I would ever read your work. My children love Harry Potter, but I prefer reading about things that are real.”

Uh. Mm. I bite my tongue. Too many responses to that statement!

I enjoy writing fantasy because my first love is grand adventures. And grand fantasy adventures can encompass every type of story I like to read: historical fiction, mythology, biography, romantic adventure, romantic suspense, and definitely murder mysteries. It is delightful to make my stories read as “legitimately” as all those other genres by creating characters who feel like real people, in worlds that feel as if they could really exist, with conflicts and adventures and friendships that feel possible, even in a place where nature provides magic or enchantments to make things more interesting, more dangerous, or more complex.

Another common question: When did you decide to be a writer? And then I tell about my friend teasing me into a “letter game” that got me to actually put fictional words on a page. And I enjoyed it so much I couldn’t stop.

One question I’ve never been asked is, “When did you decide to become a storyteller?”

Because the art and craft of writing is one thing, and telling a story is something else entirely. Which leads to the other part of this particular exploration.

A few nights ago when the moon was full, bright enough to cast shadows, and I stood at my bedroom window looking out on the foothills of the Rockies, I realized that my need to find stories went back a lot farther than my friend and the letter game, back to when I was a kid. It wasn’t something that happened during the day. That was time for school and playing outside, dinner and dishes, and always reading – my favorite pastime. No, this other thing happened at night.

Nighttime had a magical feel to it back then.  In a Texas summer when the weather was blistery hot, my sisters and I would lie out on quilts in the back yard after dark to catch the breeze and watch the stars, hoping to see shooting stars. I wondered what it was like “up there.” Planes would go over and I’d wonder who was riding on them, where they were going, and why. We even saw Sputnik go over—no, not scary, but full of wondering. Might there ever be schools for kids who would grow up piloting spaceships…?

Autumn brought Halloween, the night we could take off down the street on our own, wading through the dry leaves.  We’d scare ourselves with ghost and goblin sightings as we raced between porch lights.

In the spring, it would rain at night, and I’d raise the bedroom window as far as I could. I’d breathe in the rain smell (petrichor!) or the scent of grass or gardenias or roses, and I’d feel the breeze and think about how it would be to live out there in the wet with nowhere to go. Rain changed things. Rain was like a magical curtain. I felt adventurous on those nights, because the house was dark and everyone else asleep. Who was out there?

Winter nights were the best. Those nights were so bright and so quiet, and our street was so deserted that I could imagine fae creatures who came out only when the rest of the world was sleeping. Maybe they were people who had the power to keep themselves warm on such cold nights. Everything changed in winter moonlight. I was sure that if I were to venture beyond our big oak trees and shrubs out into the neighbor’s back yard it would be an entirely different place than I saw in the sunlight.

Years later, when I first read Susan Cooper’s “The Dark is Rising,” I understood immediately what Will Stanton felt when he opened his front door and looked out on a world entirely changed.

By far the most exciting of those winter nights came at Christmas time, when I was half scared that I would SEE fantastical creatures (because I had several years’ solid evidence that they came) and I was half scared I wouldn’t. So I pulled up the quilts and cracked open the window so I could smell the cold air. . .and listen. I imagined I heard sleigh bells. I imagined I heard whispers. I imagined I heard footsteps on the roof. I imagined…

That was the true beginning, of course.

Over the years, life went in different directions—school, family jobs—but still certain things sparked an urgency inside me. Things like trees. Dense evergreens or multicolored oaks along a meadow or sparse across a desolate hillside. Or aspens gold with autumn, sheltering a path. Cool green seams in the rocky face of a mountains set up a longing inside my chest.

And weather. Lowering clouds or driving snow or a thin autumn day in Colorado after the leaves have blown and the haze says a change is coming. Sun sparkling on frost covered tree limbs. Moonlit nights so bright that trees and fences cast shadows. The way the dust rolls up in the desert air.

 There were also those Etruscan artifacts in the Penn Archeology Museum, hinting at a sophisticated people who were inundated by the Roman Empire. And there were phrases that hung around in my head like the last lighthouse or you can’t go home again or who is on the other side of the mirror? What does that mean? What do I do with those things?

The view of Billy Elliot grown up (at the end of the film by the same name) leaping onto the stage is very brief. But the filmmaker had it right. The true climax is the expression on Billy’s father’s face as he looks on a wonder we can’t see.

Each of these sparks speaks of one thing…story. What’s happening, who’s out there just beyond the place I can see? What makes a hard-bitten miner’s face express such joy and awe? There’s a story in there somewhere, and I want to know what happens!

Storytelling is not the process of setting fictional words on paper or outlining a plot with rising and falling action. Storytelling is wondering. It is asking how would it be if…?  It is opening the window and looking for people who are not oneself and who inhabit places that are mysterious and unfamiliar. It is seeing people and events in a light that makes them look real. Storytelling is heeding the scents and smells and sounds of your world, and allowing them to whisper in your ear. Imagine. . .

What made you want to be a storyteller?

Carol Berg writes epic fantasy novels and short fiction under her own name and her pseudonym, Cate Glass. Her eighteen epic fantasy and fantasy adventure books have won national and international awards, including multiple Colorado Book Awards and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. All of this is amazing to a former software engineer who earned degrees in math at Rice University and computer science at the University of Colorado to avoid writing papers. Carol lives in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains with her Exceptional Spouse.