You have heard this before. Newspapers are dying, if not dead. No one reads books anymore. The Internet is going to images and words are being left in the digidust. Ironically, the written word’s obit gets rewritten every day. The latest news concerns how Google’s image search will soon replace word search and eventually, we’ll all be illiterate. It’s just as well. All too often, the words on the Internet are just vacuous shadows of their former verbal selves.
People have no trouble stringing together words. Anyone with a keyboard can type them. It’s the strung up completion of those sentences that lacks story juice.
In today’s sound-bitten clusterfunk, the art of storytelling has been stabbed in the noun by the artlessness of just telling. Sometimes we don’t even get that far. There are millions of bloggish rants across the web, hiding here and there to mug you as you surf by. I’ve foisted a rant or two on this page myself, but I’ve always tried to do it as a story. Which may explain the difference between writers and storytellers.
To most people, they are one in the same – and they should be. But they’re not. A while back, I read a critique of writing by an agent that had the most damning sentence imaginable to a writer: “The weakest area for most writers is storytelling.”
How bizarre. That is tantamount to saying the weakest area for most baseball pitchers is throwing the ball.
Some people are gifted writers; able to form poetic descriptions of people and places and situations or craft wonderful dialog – and yet, when it is all said and written, they can’t tell a story worth the reader’s time. Who hasn’t read elegantly constructed sentences laid back to back and as you are reading, your mind begins to wander?
I was once reading a well-known author and about a hundred pages into the book, I realized I had unknowingly stopped reading and was watching a fly adjusting itself on the windowsill, scratching and strolling in aimless flyishness. Catching myself, I counted back to a part of the book I last remembered. I had lost nineteen pages. Eventually, I lost the entire book. I found it years later, bookmark floating in mid-pages like an abandoned buoy.
Our English teachers work hard to make sure we understand the mechanics of sentence structure and grammar and obviously those skills are important. But if we get so caught up in the mechanics of our automobiles that we can’t go anywhere, what good is it?
A college professor once said, “Make sure you get your verbs and nouns lined up correctly, but never forget that the only purpose of writing is to tell a story. No matter if you’re writing a letter, a report, an article, a book or a movie, tell a good story because nobody wants to read a bad one.”
My grandfather was not an educated man. I never saw him write a single word beyond scribbling for the feed store. He was a farmer and barely made a living doing that. But he could tell spellbinding tales of gypsies come to town or two enemies who fought for sixty years and died together under a Chinaberry tree, burned into the bark from a lightning strike; their skin molded together as if they were Siamese twins.
One night, on the front porch, in a darkness so black that I could only hear his Southern drawl and feel the sting of his whiskers on my cheek, he plied a story of wicked deceit and tragic love and murder and forgiveness all in less time than it takes to watch an Andy Griffith rerun.
There is, indeed, a difference between just being a writer and being a storyteller. Writers may starve, but a storyteller will find a way to make a living telling stories as a plumber or carpenter or lawyer or prisoner or farmer.
Gilgamesh and the Bible thrived with no written word for centuries because they were great stories. That’s the power of a story. Something to keep in mind when you’re putting together that PowerPoint presentation.
