Continuing on from my last post, I want to talk about stories.
Recently my friend Lisa and I interviewed Scott Pack of The Friday Project for Vulpes Libris. If you haven't read it yet, here it is again.
Mr Pack set the cat amongst the pigeons (well, if it is possible to do such a thing amongst the civilised sorts of Vulpes) with the following remark: "I look for a great story from a great storyteller. Haruki Murakami, Charles Baxter and Richard Yates = good. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith = bad."
What did he mean? The civilised sorts cried in polite almost-outrage.
Mr Pack expanded upon his comment thus: "I accept and can see that Amis, Rushdie and Smith are very fine writers but I don’t find them to be very good storytellers."
Whatever your views on the writers he is talking about, this exchange set me thinking about how much, or how little, story and story-telling are valued in books.
It is striking, after my last post on the prevalence of Rules in writing forums, how one of the few things NEVER discussed on writing forums is story. It is almost like a dirty word - as though it were a bit embarrassing, a little bit trashy to talk about story in the same terms you might talk about language or senses or sentence structure. Story isn't about "good writing". Story is...well...irrelevant.
But surely story is the most important thing of all? And surely story IS a language in itself? Story is just as much a conveyor of meaning and nuance as poetic sentences and nice word-smithery. And, at the end of the day, the poetic sentences and nice word-smithery are there - however beautifully, however thoughtfully - to convey the centre of meaning, or entertainment or whatever you are going for, in the form of the story itself.
I am very interested in stories. It is the primary reason I want to write. Listening to Radio Four recently, I was struck by something said by an interviewer to an eminent atheist scientist (no, not Dawkins). "I get the impression you are almost jealous," he said. "Of the power of ideology. "
Stories motivate people. They are looked down on in many ways as fanciful, fictitious, yet are all around us and carry enormous power. With a story people will behave in certain ways, obey certain rules - or not, go to war, kill, maim, be dutiful, be nasty, be kind, sacrifice themselves, sacrifice others, follow a code, feel like a proper man, a proper woman. They rarely are so affected by a "fact". We all have "stories" about ourselves, who we are, what we are like, of what we expect life to have in store.
They work as cultural touch-stones by which to measure behaviour.
Even in terms of men and women - from the earliest age people keep telling you what men and women are like in terms of story. (And no I'm not talking about pink and shoes here.) It's a real case of the power of Tell not Show.
For, in my experience it is men, on the whole, who are far more emotionally vulnerable and dependent than women (on the whole). It can be argued that this is also borne out by statistics. It is men who are more likely to commit suicide over relationships, take to drink, destroy themselves or their partner if they are rejected or are jealous, more likely not to cope if their partner dies, statistically happier and healthier in marriages or long-term relationships...and yet the male "story", both in fiction and as general hearsay "truth" in our society - from James Bond to Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus - is that men are emotionally distant, non-committal, un-needy, use-and-abuse, disloyal, independent, cold and just-interested-in-sex. It's a lie, but one that has become so ingrained - through stories - that we hardly question it. Perhaps it is, after all, what we want to believe.
I want to write because I want to write stories. First and foremost. Like most who write comedy I am, I'm ashamed to say, a moralist. (As I have often been accused of!) I write satire to poke barbs at those that get up my nose. I use the twists and conventions of story - and work with and against those conventions - to say something, to present a view of the world - yes, my view of the world. It seems to me that this is the most exciting thing of all about writing. To be able to play with these structures and conventions. And perhaps the most exciting thing about comedy too.
Which is why I don't understand why those on writing forums seem so disinterested in it. And why no one ever talks about that great big elephant in the room: story.
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