On Storytelling
June 11th, 2005 by GoldFalcon
I have been a storyteller all of my life. It’s why I blog. Storytelling, while not peculiar to the Southern United States certainly has an active home there (thus the prominence of Southern writers in American literature), but the South has –mostly– a verbal tradition. Storytelling is done at kitchen tables, over camp fires, on tailgates, and on bar stools.
There is a cadence, an art, to telling a story that is much like telling a joke. You have to know how to draw it out, when to cut it short, when to exaggerate, and when to play it straight. I never realized how different it is to write a story (as opposed to telling it) until I began to attempt to write some of my “most loved” stories recently. These are the stories that are oft requested at whatever gatherings I wind up at, and the stories that Mrs. Falcon still loves after a decade of marriage.
I found that , in writing them, the stories changed. At the end they were not the same stories as I was used to telling. They became something in the writing that they never were in the telling: stiff, contrived (even when they were true). I puzzled over this fact. I am a good writer (not great, but good) and a great storyteller. I have been telling stories long enough to know that the last isn’t bragging, but I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t seem to fulfill my wife’s request to put my stories on paper. My more academic writing is routinely praised, yet I have been unable to transfer that passion to my short stories. I can’t seem to find a voice there. I wondered why.
Today (while waiting for the 876 programs to re-install on this thing) I had a great opportunity to read some stuff from my shelf. One of my favorite small books is Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through it and Other Stories. You’ve probably seen the movie that Robert Redford directed, Brad Pitt starred in and Ted Turner killed. The movie is still one of my favorites, but I was re-reading the Acknowledgments tonight when I came across Norm’s description of my (now) familiar problem:
“As it is known to any teller of stories who eventually tries to put a few of them down in writing, the act of writing changes them greatly, so none of these stories closely resembles any story I ever told my children.”
That helped me very little (though through re-reading him tonight I think I am less uncomfortable with using the first person in the story) in telling stories, but I can’t describe how it cheered me to know that I wasn’t the only one who felt their stories changed between the telling and the writing.
