About TaleKeeper

Telling a good story well is a craft, and like any craft it has tools worth knowing — a sense of how much room a scene needs, a name that fits the character wearing it, a feel for the shapes storytellers everywhere keep arriving at independently, a rough idea of how long a piece takes to read or tell aloud, and the discipline to draw a story out of someone else in an interview rather than just talking at them. None of that is complicated on its own, but pulling it together for every story, every time, is where craft turns into guesswork.

TaleKeeper exists to make that craft a little more concrete. Instead of long essays you have to read end to end, the site is built around a set of small, single-purpose tools, each aimed at one real part of storytelling. The Story Arc Plotterturns a target word count into a stage-by-stage budget for the Three-Act Structure, Freytag’s Pyramid, or the Hero’s Journey. The Character Name Generatorsuggests invented, tradition-flavored names by role — hero, trickster, elder, or guardian. The Folktale Motif Findersearches a curated slice of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index of recurring international tale types. The Reading Time Estimator works out how long a piece takes to read at silent, read-aloud, or narrated paces. The Campfire Story Timer turns a telling time into a five-beat live-performance schedule, and the Oral-History Interview Planner splits an interview into sections with a suggested question count for each.

Alongside the tools, the blog and learnsection dig into the reasoning behind them — how narrative structures earn their proportions, what makes an invented name feel right for a role, why the same tale keeps resurfacing under different names across cultures, and how to run an oral-history interview that actually draws a memory out. The Museum of Folklore & Storytelling is a browsable collection of folklore figures and heroes, mythical creatures, storytellers and bards, and world folktales and fairy tales, with every entry, image, and fact drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

A few things worth stating plainly. TaleKeeper is an independent site, not affiliated with any publisher, folklore institute, or academic body. It is supported by advertising, which is how the tools stay free with no account required. Every result the tools produce — a word budget, a suggested name, a tale-type match, a reading time, a telling schedule, an interview plan — is a planning aid built on stated formulas and curated data, not a guarantee of a good story or an academic citation. If something looks off in a tool or an article, or there’s a tool you wish existed, the contact page is the place to say so.