Site menu

Home Bio Books Miriliel's Encyclopedia Free Stories Rackety Kate Favourite Places Facebook Twitter Blog Contact Me

 

Subscribe to Newsletter

 

 

The Campfire and the Craft

When I started in this writing game, I thought, in my naivety, that I had a pretty good chance. After all, I had the benefit of a tertiary education. I was widely read, highly literate. I’d even taught high school English. I could spell — most of the time - and punctuate — most of the time. I had the occasional arm-wrestle with a recalcitrant semi-colon — but, hey, who hasn’t?

Then came a procession of rude awakenings. I joined a critique group. I entered contests. I attended conferences.

And I discovered that being a wordsmith, even a competent one, wasn’t enough, not by a long chalk. To my chagrin, others weren’t as enthralled with my golden prose as I was. For heaven’s sake, what was wrong with them?

It took me quite some time to puzzle it out. If I wanted to keep my readers engrossed until the wee small hours, all the writerly craft in the world wouldn’t cut it; the reading experience had to be about the story. That was the heart of it, emotional engagement with characters who mattered, a plot full of twists and turns that gripped and wouldn’t let go.

Creating a world in words was as much about storytelling as it was about writing.

Christopher Vogler expresses it beautifully in The Writer’s Journey. “As writers we travel to other worlds not as mere daydreamers, but as shamans with the magic power to bottle up those worlds and bring them back in the form of stories for others to share.”

It was my personal road to Damascus and I was dazed. All those conference presentations about emotional engagement came together with an audible clunk. Of course, I’d known about it on a rational, intellectual level, but this was like a punch to the gut. I’m as much a storyteller as those ancestral tale spinners who crouched over the campfires, weaving myths of gods striding among the stars. Scheherazade, mistress of the end-of-chapter hook, is my sister in spirit. And yours.

You have books on your shelves that you read and reread, right? They are the work of the storytellers, because the story comes first. It always has. Each time, every time. As old as the human race.

But no one these days recites the whole of Homer’s Iliad from memory. The prodigious mental feats of the epic bards are no longer necessary now that so many of us are literate. The medium, the container if you will, has changed.

Many authors who appear on best-seller lists are brilliant storytellers, but only competent writers. I don’t need to name them. You know who they are. Conversely, the further you move into literary fiction, the more likely you are to discover someone whose greatest interest lies in pushing the boundaries of the craft of writing. It’s a continuum and we could argue forever about who sits where, because, in the end, it’s still a subjective experience.

But a great author has mastered the medium as well as the message. He or she is the complete package — a skilled writer telling a fabulous tale. When you enter this author’s world, you don’t want the experience to end, but after it’s over, you can’t wait to tell everyone you know.

So, what about you? You’ll be a combination, because everyone is, and that’s good, because you need to be if you want to be published. Do you recognize yourself?

At the wordsmith's end of the spectrum –

• You “hear” the cadences of the sentences you write in your head. If it doesn’t flow, you can’t stand it. You write short and punchy for action, lyrical and languorous for love scenes, hot and sweaty for sex scenes.
• You’re proud of the vivid word pictures you create. You adore alliteration, powerful verbs, unusual metaphors.
• You relish unusual words, you may even collect them. You know the difference between words that others confuse, like infer and imply.
• When you’re reading, a word or phrase used the wrong way, an awkward construction, drops you out of the story with a thud. It’s bad for your molars.
• You work with the spell checker turned on, even if it doesn’t always recognize the words you use.
• You own a dictionary and a thesaurus and, by God, you know how to use them! Right now, you’re tempted to look up infer and imply, just to be on the safe side.

At the storyteller’s end of the spectrum –

• Something happens to you in Real Life and even if it’s catastrophic, your first thought is—“This belongs in a book!”
• The kids in your life beg you, “Tell us the story of what happened the time you…”
• Scenes unroll like a movie in your head, often at the most inappropriate times. You hear snatches of dialogue, watch characters interact. Occasionally, you answer back or join in.
• You could swear your characters have a life of their own, the way they change things around. But when you type THE END, there’s regret mixed in with the triumph, because now you have to let them go.
• You keep a notebook by the bed, because stories creep into your dreams, your drowsy awakenings on your day off.
• You chuckle with evil glee as you construct a hook for the end of your chapter. Leave ‘em dangling, that’s your motto!

So, what to do? Awareness is half the battle. If you have some idea of where you are on the spectrum, you’ll know what areas you need to work on.

But consider this. If storytelling is an ancient art, part of what it means to be human, we have an instinct for it. Those instincts are good. “How to” books are useful, but in attempting to analyze something essentially intuitive, they can only go so far.

Read them if you must and pay attention. But follow your storyteller’s intuition. Scheherazade won’t let you down.

---

 

---

© 2006 Denise Rossetti

Rose graphic courtesy of Corbis