Storytelling

The historian deals with the past,
    but the true storyteller works with the future.
You can tell the strength of an age
    by the imaginative truth-grasping vigour of its storytellers.
Stories are matrices of thought.
    They are patterns formed in the mind.
        They weave their effect on the future.
To be a storyteller is to work with, to weave with, the material of time itself.

                Ben Okri, The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling