ABSTRACT
Borrowing story fragments starts from an early age. A two-year-old waddling like a penguin is soon joined by other children shuffling behind her, and a colony is born. When children engage in Helicopter Stories, they start to see themselves as storytellers, regularly sharing their stories with an audience and receiving immediate feedback from them. For some children, this encourages them to borrow images and topics of conversation that they know to be funny, including these in their stories with the purpose of making everyone laugh. In Christopher Booker’s publication The Seven Basic Plots, he argues that there are only seven types of stories in the world. According to Booker, there is no unique way of doing stories. During an introduction, when children tell stories around the stage, each story is acted out prior to the next one being scribed.
