Chain or round-robin storytelling for Table Topics at Toastmasters club meetings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One format for conducting Table Topics, the impromptu speaking portion of a Toastmasters club meeting, is to have the participants tell a sequential or continuing story. Bea Gogate used this format at our March 9, 2022 Pioneer Club meeting in Boise.

 

Several other names have been used to describe this format. Liberty Village Toastmasters called it chain storytelling, and the Toastmasters Wiki on Table Topics Ideas calls it a round robin story (#15). Shirley Kelly Presents calls it a continuous story, as does page 15 of the District 106 Toastmasters Club Programming Idea Cookbook which has the following description:

 

“Begin a story and ask Topics participants to continue it. The last line used by each participant is the first line used by the next participant.”

 

Back in high school I participated in a handwritten literary magazine which called a similar format the continuing story. Someone would write for a page. Then he would copy his last sentence onto the top of another page. That page got passed to the second person, who wrote for the rest of that page, and then copied his last sentence onto the top of yet another page, and so on.  

 

An article by Jessica Stillman on March 18, 2022 at Inc. is titled Researchers say they’ve developed a method that can train anyone to be creative. It describes using storytelling for training. Her article is based on one by Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste in the March 10, 2022 Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences titled A new method for training creativity: narrative as an alternative to divergent thinking.