Storytelling as a Fine Art
David Farland's quest to find any hidden wisdom on the art of storytelling
JimWolverton
10/15/2011
When I was 16, my brother-in-law Dan McBride talked me into reading a novel. He finagled, cajoled, urged. He really had to work at it. You see, I opened the book a couple of times and sincerely tried to read it, but couldn’t get excited about it.
It appeared to be a silly book about imaginary creatures called “hobbits,” and the opening to the book bored me silly.
After several attempts, and after Dan had explained a bit about the background to the story, I read one evening and eventually discovered that after a tedious opening, the book became riveting. I remember even looking at the page and wondering what had changed. When had it gone from dull to lustrous? When had it turned from something that was mind-numbing into something that consumed me?
The novel of course was Tolkien’s epic masterpiece Lord of the Rings. I raced through the book, and then re-read it, and pored over it again. As I did, I found that the “slow” beginning wasn’t really slow. It was more relaxed, and it contained important clues to mysteries that would later appear throughout the book. It gave me time to learn to love Tolkien’s world and his characters, which was enormously important, since this is a novel in which the entire world is placed in jeopardy.
So I began to see clues as to why the author had put certain words and ideas to pen, and the things that had once bored me became intellectually exciting.
Yet a question remained: “How did Tolkien do it?” To me, his work seemed as magical and as mysterious as the world he’d devised.
I went searching for books of similar quality, hunting for fantasy novels wherever I could, reading science fiction when I couldn’t find fantasy. I read anything that had won a Hugo or Nebula Award, then expanded into mainstream fiction, reading from the Nobel Prize winners, and a great many others. That’s how my love affair with reading began.
Along the path, I also decided to become a writer. If you’re reading this, most likely you’re one of us.
I know the instant that it happened. I was running out of fantasy novels to read, and so I began making up my own story and telling it to a friend at work, a hippie named Paul Toups. Paul would relate his troubles. He’d rented a house on an island in the Willamette River, and raised corn on his little farm, called Frog Hollow. Often, pigs would swim across the river and ravage his cornfield. Then he had problems with a crotchety landlord who often threatened to turn him out.
So his stories became inspiration for a fantasy, and he became Master Toups, the mayor of the village of Frog Hollow. Pigs became ravaging monsters that ransacked the village and his landlord an evil sorcerer. One day as I was spinning this yarn, he said, “You know, you should take all of this and put it in a book!”
It hit me: of course I should write a book. Other people do it, so why can’t I?
That night after work, I drove to the nearest town that had a major university and ransacked their bookstore. I found textbooks professors required their budding writers to read, and bought them all—along with a used typewriter.
But as I began to study the books, I discovered something to my dismay. The first book that I read gave excellent advice. It was Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, a classic in the business. It had reams of good advice on how to write with flare and precision and grace, but didn’t give a single clue as to how to compose a great story.
So I read more books, many by accomplished writers, and found that they too were lacking. A lot of the basic body of writing knowledge was repetitious—handed down from author to author, and I soon realized the information I was getting came in four major categories: basic mechanics for writers, stylistic tips, storytelling tips, and marketing tips.
“Writing Mechanics” is the basic information on how to punctuate properly, how to put manuscripts into proper format so that editors won’t toss them instantly into the trash, and so on. Every author needs to know this, and so almost every beginning book on writing will cover it.
The second body of information is “Stylistic Tips.” That’s what Strunk and White covered. They offered great advice on things about avoiding sound repetition, keeping your sentences short and readable, using voice properly by avoiding anachronistic speech or neologisms. This helps new writers get over the hurdles of basic composition and recognize their own weaknesses, and so on.
Every author needs to know this, and nearly every beginning book on writing will cover it. In fact, because during the early twentieth century authors became very focused on style, and many of our finest writers are great stylists, the information presented in this field is quite complete, though in many cases the guidelines are rather arbitrary and sometimes even wrong. I’ve heard authors proclaim, for example, that you should “never use an –ly adverb.” So I can’t say that “she sang beautifully”?
Another body of knowledge that is often discussed is “How to Market Your Work” to editors, agents, and the public. Every author needs to know this of course. We’re all small businessmen. Yet marketing advice is pretty ephemeral. The information must be updated from time to time, and what was true ten years ago is false now. When I began writing, we worried about how to sell to agents and editors. Now we’re studying how to market our works electronically to global audiences.
A final body of knowledge that authors need to know has to do with “Storytelling.” By that I mean, how do we tell a story? How do we put the pieces of a story together? I kept finding information in writing books, but the information I gathered seemed to be contradictory and scant.
In fact, authors couldn’t even agree on what constituted a story. One prominent author went so far as to say, “If I write something on paper and say that it’s a story, it’s a story.” It didn’t matter if it was a slice of life, or only a jape, or simply a character study. He called it a story. Other authors from the time of Aristotle have had far more restrictive definitions, ones that tried to answer the question “What makes a great story?”
If we couldn’t even figure out how to answer the most basic question, then it’s no wonder that we couldn’t begin to answer simple questions about story parts. Many authors describe a story as having a “beginning, middle, and end.” But that didn’t answer my burning need to know “How do I engross a reader from the opening line?” Where should the beginning begin, and how should the beginning end? How long is a middle? What parts does a middle have? How can I build my story through the middle? What makes a great conclusion?
In the 1970s, I couldn’t find the answers to those kinds of questions in print. If there was a single book on the topic, I never found it.
As an author, I wanted to know how to compose great stories, but the advice often contradicted known facts. For example, it’s commonly said that when we write a story, we should begin “In medas res,” in the middle of a narrative, so that the story opens with explosive action. Yet many fine novels don’t do that at all. Is A Tale of Two Cities a fluke? Or The Grapes of Wrath? Or even such popular fare as Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings? None of them have gripping action in the beginning. So what’s up?
Much of the information was just too vague to be useful.
In fact, even the most basic questions went unanswered: Why do people read? What makes a story riveting? How can I write the best stories of our time?
The answers that I found gave interesting clues, but in small bits of data. I felt like a starving man who goes to a feast, only to discover that all he’ll get is hors d'oeuvres.
In fact, the more that I studied writing, the more I hungered to find a book on storytelling that would answer some of my basic questions.
• How can I write a novel that will attract millions of fans, one that will be loved and remembered for ages?
• How can I create a world that enthralls readers?
• How creative should I be? When do I cross the line between being original and downright strange?
• How do I get an audience fully engaged with my protagonist’s conflict?
• What makes a protagonist fascinating to a particular reader?
• How many characters can a novel have?
• What are the best techniques for grabbing a reader’s attention early?
• What can I do to make my middles entrancing?
• How do I handle a protagonist who has weaknesses?
• In short, how can I beat stories told by Shakespeare, Tolkien, Herbert, and [insert the name of your all-time favorite author here]?
My list of questions seemed endless. The answers were scattered and few. Many fine writers simply didn’t know the answers. They wrote based upon instinct and gut feeling, honing their work until it felt right.
Some secretive authors didn’t talk about their craft much. They wanted to keep their answers hidden, for personal gain, or maybe they just didn’t think anyone would care. So I would study the works of Shakespeare or Twain or Borges and look for clues as to how they worked. Often I spent months or years pondering a question before I discovered the answer on my own. In fact, one question required three decades of thought.
Sometimes I would find a great storyteller—an author, agent, editor, director, scholar—who was pondering the same questions, and in those cases I was able to incorporate their ideas into my own. These include a long list of critics from the past, such as Aristotle, Plato, and Philip Sidney, to modern critics like Orson Scott Card, Robert McKee, Albert Zuckerman, and Tom Doherty.
As a young man, I kept haunting the bookshelves looking for a text on “Storytelling for Authors,” and never did find it. Twenty years ago, I realized that I would have to write my own.
“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”
