The Storytelling Gift

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.  - Donna Tartt

I was once called a storyteller by a person I respected. I think it was one of the nicest things anybody has ever told me to my face. I want to be a storyteller. I have always wanted to be a storyteller. I like stories whether I'm telling them or I'm listening to them or reading them. In the photo above is my husband and his aunt who has many stories to tell. Not the kind I tell. Her stories are about things she's done, times she's lived through, people she's known. Her father, my husband's grandfather, was an entertaining storyteller. His stories had a basis in fact, but I'm thinking he could embellish with the best of them to make his tales entertaining. Aunt Annie doesn't embellish. She shares from what she's seen in her ninety plus years. My mother was good at doing that too before age related dementia robbed her memory. If only I'd known the right questions to ask sooner. 

The right questions - that's what I'm trying to find the answers to now as I research for my work in progress. Where am I going to take my characters? What was life like in that time? What would they have done, thought, seen? So much to find out. So much to imagine. I've already stumbled upon one major "bridge out" sign. One thing I planned for my character to do wasn't something a person her age was allowed to do. Should I bend the rules and not be totally true to the history of the time? After all, I am writing fiction. But I like to make the historical background of my books as accurate as I can as I look back in time. It was a discouraging discovery that my planned happenings probably couldn't have happened. So now I'm going to have to find a detour, a new way to cross my storytelling river. 

In this picture is one of the next generation of storytellers in the family. Several of my grandchildren show a love of stories. This one's stories spring from the imagination unlike her great aunt's telling of the truth she's lived. Perhaps we all have stories to tell if we can only get someone to listen. Or to read. 

I'm listening and reading and hearing the stories of the past. Now to shape those stories into a past and present for my characters. That is the challenge of storytelling. Fiction with truth in the background.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a storytelling couch at your house and you can ask the right questions to bring the past of your family to life and to help your young ones dream their future.

A Blank Book

Happy New Year, everybody! Hope 2009 is treating you fine so far and that it will be a year packed full of good things and great joy.

We are four days into the year. Have you broken any of your New Year's resolutions yet? I sent out my occasional newsletter yesterday. (If you'd like to be on my list to get my five or six newsletters a year, you can sign up by clicking on Ann's newsletter on the homepage of my website.) Anyway, in the newsletter I say I like coming up with goals at the beginning of a year, but I don't do the resolution thing as well. Perhaps because I've always broken most of the resolutions I've made way before I should. A resolution makes me think "You can't do this anymore" like eat yummy desserts or play a computer game of solitaire when I should be writing. On the other hand, a goal makes me think "You can do this." I can write a better book. I can have it finished by deadline time. I can laugh at least once a day. I can read more books.

That's one of my goals this year - to read more. As I said in my newsletter, a writer needs to read. Reading feeds a writer's writing engine. Trouble is, a writer who wants to set her characters back in a historical time needs to do a lot of research. I like reading history, but I also want to read more books solely for pleasure, to stir up my own creative juices by reading others' words. Sometimes I wish I could somehow just absorb the historical information I need. Actually that’s sort of what has to happen so I can realistically write about a historical event. I have to put myself in the history with my characters and feel the wind and hear the thunder of the storms they are experiencing. That’s why I like reading diaries and letters of people who lived in whatever time period I’m researching. The letter writers might not have every fact of history right, but they know how the wind feels on their faces.

Many of my goals have to do with my writing. Most of my writing life I haven’t written to deadlines other than the ones I’ve set for myself. To get this or that story done by some arbitrary time I have decided on. It always helped to keep me focused on working to the end of my story even though I rarely finished my story as quickly as I hoped I would. Then last year I had a real deadline for a contracted book and learned I could keep my nose to the grindstone and force out so many pages each and every time I sat down at the computer. I love to write but at the same time it’s often very difficult to make my fingers start poking the keyboard and pulling the words out of my head. It’s easier to research one more fact, sharpen a dozen pencils, answer a few e-mails, steep another cup of tea, anything except digging out a new scene. I have another deadline not all that many months away, so I’m going to have to set some new goals and be disciplined at my work again.

I hope you are busy setting goals for the coming year. I think it helps to write them down, but of course, I'm a journal writer and that's what journal writers do. Set things down on paper. Dreams and goals. Good times and bad. In case you are in the goal setting or resolution making mode, here are some quotations you might enjoy.

• You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. - Les Brown
• Man is a goal seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals. - Aristotle
• May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions! - Joey Adams (It appears Mr. Adams has my opinion of resolutions.)
• Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle. -Eric Zorn
• We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.- Edith Lovejoy Pierce

That last one is my favorite. A blank book. Now all I have to do is fill up the pages and take advantage of the opportunities that await me.

A couple of opportunites are coming up next week as I'm going to be talking to two bookclubs. One in New York and the other in Kentucky. I love bookclubs. Anybody who enjoys reading enough to join a club to talk about books has to be my kind of person.

Hope all of you set goals that will make your life better and that with the Lord's help you move toward those goals. As Paul says in Philippians 3:14 (Br. Fred preached on this passage today) "I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." May we all press toward the mark.