Of all the things I have the hardest time getting rid of from my daughter’s childhood, it’s the books. It’s not like they are in great shape, or that they have any monetary value. In fact, it’s so easy to get cheap books, and our library public sale gets cheaper every year.
It’s the stories that I want her to read. The magic of Sherazade’s tales as told by Disney. The rhythmic rhyme of the original Winnie-the-Pooh, so often dumbed down in the modern early readers. The heroic tales of kids stranded on an island who save themselves, or the inspiring women who did amazing things when the odds were stacked against them.
Thomas King is my new favourite storyteller, and his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures, published as The Truth About Stories feeds an innate obsession with a human need for stories and storytelling. He says « The truth about stories is that that’s all we are. » He quotes Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor « You can’t understand the world without telling a story. There isn’t any center to the world but a story. »
The human brain seems to be set up for stories. I know that I have often wished for a brain that retains every word and fact perfectly, but what I do remember are the stories. I seek out podcasts by great storytellers, like Tim Hartford, Michael Lewis, Roman Mars, and Malcolm Gladwell. My daughter, who doesn’t read books as often as I did (we had fewer choices back in those days), gets some her stories from YouTube. She gravitates to the moralistic Dharma series, which is a little too neat for my liking, but I understand the draw for her, and it certainly has relevant talking points to discuss over the dinner table.
This summer, travelling in a van to visit friends and play tourist with my family in Saskatchewan , my parents were full of family stories, triggered by locations they knew people from, or memories that had been made away from home. My neighbour often tells me stories of her like, beginning with a laugh and the opener , « Oh, I haven’t told you that one ? » before she takes a breath and begins the story with delight.
I love stories, and I respect a great one, but I respect even more that skill that a storyteller can have for telling it well.
Sometimes, I think I am a decent reporter of events, but I have never felt compelling in the art of storytelling. Thomas King is providing some clues in his book to his success, and P.D. James similarly breaks down the formula of the murder mystery in Talking about Detective Fiction (which is better than the very prosaic title suggests).
Each chapter/instalment/story begins with the same way, with a paragraph that repeats. It’s a great paragraph, and it’s a device that works.
« There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it’s the dialogue or the response of the audience. But in all the telling of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away. »
At the end of each chapter, he repeats the same four sentences, with a predictable change in a fifth. It is a benediction, an admonition, a challenge.
« Take [sic:this] story. It’s yours…Do with it what you will…But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now. »
He also says, « You’ll never believe what happened » is » always a good way to start a story ».
He describes his brother telling a story, « drawing out the details, repeating the good parts, making me wait ».
He continues, « One of the tricks to storytelling is, never to tell everything at once, to make your audience wait, to keep everyone in suspense. »
Again, he contrasts, « Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous. »
Then he goes on to tell another creation story he calls Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and outlines the differences between it and the one I know so well from Genesis, and it’s interpretation from my « predominantly scientific, capitalistic, Judeo-Christian world governed by physical laws, economic imperatives, and spiritual precepts ».
In telling it, he takes a story and makes it sound dangerous, and then modifies it to be closer to the truth, but I enjoy the downgrade, because it’s fun. I enjoy the story, not because the story is so extraordinary, but the storytelling is.
He interrupts his story to make a sarcastic commentary, in case I missed the obvious. But I am laughing, so I don’t feel he is dumbing it down for me, just that he want me to hear the point.
My daughter would love this story, and I would love to tell it to her, but it won’t be the same. So I have to return the book to the library, and she may never read it, but I have to believe that the story I loved is now a part of me. That somehow, some part of the story will make it to her from me. So that she can see the magic in a story. So that she can see the danger in the story. So that she laugh at the story, and laugh at herself.
Each chapter begins with the same paragraph. It’s a great paragraph, and it’s a device that works.
« There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it’s the dialogue or the response of the audience. But in all the telling of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away. »
At the end of each chapter, he repeats the same four sentences, with a predictable change in a fifth. It is a benediction, an admonition, a challenge.
« Take [sic:this] story. It’s yours…Do with it what you will…But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now. »
A great idea bears repeating.
It’s what works for me. The story isn’t about an omniscient omnipresent potent creator god. It’s a series of blunders that we are capable of woven together as a warning and a truth. We come from complicated stories. We are complicated stories. That’s okay. In fact, it might just be the way things are. There is no fall from grace. No stain on humanity. There is acceptance, humour, pain, and grace.
The birth of a twins reflects the way I have been taught to believe to be an Asian look on life: zen, balance, yin and yang. There is a boy, light, right handed. There is a girl, dark, left handed. The right-handed twin smoothed mud into flat land. The left-handed twin stomped and piled the valleys and mountains. The right-handed twin fills strait trenches with water and organizes rivers to flow in both directions. The left-handed twin makes the rivers crooked, fills them with rocks, and lets them flow only in one direction, with waterfalls. The right-handed twin creates forest with trees all lined up, so you could go in and not get lost. The left-handed twin moves the trees around, so that some parts are dense and difficult and other parts open and easy. The right makes roses. The left makes thorns. The right makes summer. The left makes winter. The right, sunshine. The left, shadows. The right creates women, and the left creates men. (Until then, the story did not suit my feminist sensitivity to misogynistic norms, but the last move seems to even the playing field). The conclusion from telling to two stories in contrast leads back to his own personal stories as child. Although we love dichotomies, and « trust easy oppositions…we are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas. ». It is clear, though, that these enigmas are everywhere. Maybe in them are more authentic stories than the ones we like to tell.
Maybe at the base of our consciousness, we are all simplifying life to understand it, but a great story teller needs to do better than just making contrasts. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains in her TED talk The Danger of a Single Story , « The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar ».
Very often, I end a work day buoyed up by the stories that I have heard, even when the rest of the job has taken almost all my energy. I consider myself a decent listener, and a better interviewer, but if I think about the stories I have heard, they are more powerful than most of the people telling them. Once in a while, though, I met a storyteller that could take any ordinary story and turn it into magic. That’s rare, and when it happens, I always wish I didn’t have a job that spurs me on to the next important task, because if I could, I would sit there the rest of the day and listen to them tell me more stories.
My goal is the achieve the grand strokes of telling a decent story that compels beyond the basics, without the crutch of a murder mystery (which I find abhorrent unlike many), but my dream would be to tell a story like the story tellers all around us; in every good book.
A great idea bears repeating. And a good story lives on. It changes you. It displaces a part of you. It transforms you. It creates a new you. Tell your stories to those you love. Write them down. Collect them. Share them. They are, after all, who we are
