York-born Danyah Miller on the Seven Secrets of Spontaneous Storytelling, Bretton Hall and learning to mime in Paris

It is something she learned the value of from an early age, when she was entranced by her father’s fireside tales.

“Stories are essentially what make us human,” says Danyah. “We make sense of the world through stories and storytelling.”

She has been doing it herself for many years and her flagship show, as she calls it, is I Believe In Unicorns, a solo theatrical performance adapted from Sir Michael Morpurgo’s book of the same name.

However, for all her years in the business of storytelling, she has just released her own first book. Seven Secrets of Spontaneous Storytelling provides the reader with practical tips for inventing tales but does so within its own story about a family going through a rough patch and in dire need of communication. Using a few techniques and tricks, she says, spontaneous storytelling “can be so joyful and easier than you think”.

For years people had suggested she put her tips down in writing, as contrary as that felt for an oral storyteller.

She says: “Rather than it being ‘this is what you do and this is how you do it’, I've written it as a story. Because I thought, I’m a storyteller, why would I chicken out of writing a story?”

Danyah’s maternal grandmother, Jenny Pennicard, and mother, Judy, were both born in York, the former having worked at the Rowntree’s chocolate factory, putting the red bows on to the Black Magic boxes.

As a girl, Danyah played around the derelict Holgate Windmill – known for the rare distinction of its five sails – sometimes walking there on her stilts from their home on Grantham Drive.

“It was all black and boarded over and we just hung around and played around,” she says. “It was a time where you just hung out all day and then came home at night for something to eat. And so the windmill played a very big part in my life.”

Her father, David Lodge, started the campaign to renovate the mill, but sadly died before its sails returned.

However, it provided inspiration for her new book as the windmill makes an appearance in the story, being the spot where the family meet Dorothy, who helps to open up their imagination.

"I think of her as those women who I've met in my life who have passed on information as I raised my children, and as I teach, and as I performed,” says Danyah, who is now based in Guildford.

In the mid-1980s, she trained in drama, dance and English at the former Bretton Hall College on the outskirts of Wakefield. “I absolutely loved it. I had a little moped and I called it Sebastian, it was orange. And I would set off from York (to college) and go just 30 miles an hour, all the way back to Scissett (where she lived after the first year).”

After graduating, she moved to London, and took a telemarketing job in an office in Catherine Street, opposite the main entrance to Theatre Royal Drury Lane. By lunchtime, she had dashed across the road to ask if there were any jobs and the theatre manager, Billy Roberts, offered her the role of an usher, starting that evening, to sell programmes, brochures and ice-creams for the show 42nd Street, which had Catherine Zeta-Jones in the chorus.

It led to Danyah becoming the first female manager for Stoll Moss Theatres in the West End, before numerous other managerial positions in the following years.

She was chief executive of the Cheltenham Everyman Theatre when she met her late husband John Miller, a record producer and theatre producer, who she married in a field in Gloucestershire in 1998. They founded their own production company, Wizard Presents, in 1999 and had their daughter, Sofie, in 2001.

However, Danyah still dreamed of being on stage. So, in 2002 she decamped to Paris with 18-month-old Sofie to re-train in mime, physical theatre and clowning at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq.

She says: "I’ve done that often in my life, just sort of stepped out. Just gone: ‘Right, okay, change direction, change plan, do something different’.”

On her return to the UK, Danyah secured her first school storytelling job, at a primary school in Coventry.

Through her work in schools, she witnessed the power of oral storytelling for young people. She says: “Children are much more likely to remember the story than just a whole series of facts. But also, they (stories) help us with empathy, with connecting to other people, to understanding the world in which we live.”

She uses the example of war, which is part of I Believe in Unicorns.

“Stories can allow children to explore what's going on in their world, but in a safe way, so that they can then come home safely having explored those ideas, which gives them more resilience, gives us all more resilience, to be able to navigate the world and understand the world in which we live.”

In the years since, she has continued to support teachers, librarians and other educators to use storytelling in their jobs.

Looking back, she says: “I was always quite clowny, always trying to make people laugh. I talked too much at school, I was always being sent out of class. I was always on the other side of the door, looking in, for talking too much.” She lets out a little chuckle: “Now I get paid to do it.”

- Seven Secrets of Storytelling, published by Hawthorn Press with a foreword by Michael Morpurgo and illustrated by Kate Bunce, is out now. Danyah also features on Radio 3 show The Verb, hosted by Ian McMillan, from 10pm tomorrow.