The Spirit Of Storytelling

My Life As A Bed informed me that tomorrow, August 9, 2008 at 9 p.m., there'll be a TV feature on CNN called The Spirit Of Storytelling, just in case anyone might be interested to watch. Here are two other interesting articles, also on the CNN site: Doris Lessing: Born Into Stories; and Uncovering The Secrets Of Storytelling. Here are some excerpts:

We have all heard that time-worn phrase trotted out about everyone having at least one book inside them, and most of us like to believe it's true.

And why not? Humans after all are natural storytellers. From the gossip we pick up at the watercooler, to the soap operas we watch on TV, telling each other stories seems hard-wired into our DNA.

But how do you make those stories engaging and exciting? That's the million dollar publishing advance question all aspiring storytellers must grapple with, and one of the reasons that for many, that long-cherished book never gets beyond the planning stage.

Kurt Vonnegut's first piece of advice is sacrosanct and one by which all stories live or die.

"Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted," he wrote.

Nadine Gordimer insists that any author who tries to push a message on a reader ahead of narrative is in danger at best of producing bad writing, and at worst of lapsing into propaganda.

"The moment the fiction writer, the novelist, the storyteller, the poet starts to think that 'I am writing to persuade, I am writing propaganda' then this is a tremendously bad thing for whatever talent you have," she tells CNN. "You cannot put it at the service of something like this."

The British author Doris Lessing is even more emphatic. "If you're going to write to a formula of some kind the writing is dead, which we know by having seen it so often," Lessing says.

"Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for" Vonnegut also wrote, and then about motivation, "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water."

Now for rule four: "Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action." Put more simply, every word must count.

The great American writer Ernest Hemingway despised this kind of flabby, indulgent storytelling. Early on in his career he had a $10 bet with colleagues that he could produce a story just six words long. This is what he came up with:

"For sale: Baby shoes, Never worn." Needless to say he won the bet.

George Orwell said that a long word should never be used when a shorter equivalent existed, and that redundant words should always be cut out.

Back to Vonnegut, who as you may have by now picked up, had a very wry sense of humour. For rule number six he wrote: "Write to please just one person." It may be that you are aiming your story at others but, if you're not happy with what you're producing, it's unlikely you'll manage to convey much enthusiasm to an audience.

Or as Vonnegut put it: "If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."