Do you have the storyteller’s intelligence?

Glass of rosé, books from Readings in Melbourne

At the end of our drive down the Great Ocean Road and back to Melbourne through country Victoria, we had a bit of time to stop in Readings, Melbourne’s best bookstore. I picked up On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner.

Gardner says of “the writer’s nature” that a novelist needs the storyteller’s intelligence, which is “no less subtle than the mathematician’s or the philosopher’s but not so easily recognised”.

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or obstnacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing ernestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.

I read it aloud to my wife, who recognised me in in much of it, which doesn’t mean either of us thinks I’m a great writer, just that we agree I like dirty jokes, rail against religion, and eat too much.

What about you? Does that fit you? Do you agree that these are the qualities of a “storyteller’s intelligence”? What other sorts of “intelligence” do you think a storyteller needs?

New book on Amazon

When men with guns start filling the streets of town, what journalist wouldn’t reach for his paper and pen. That was the situation I found myself in when my visit to Ohakune coincided with the annual Easter hunt. This fascinating town sits at the foot of one of the world’s most active volcanos, and when it blows the locals head for the fireworks with lawn chairs and cans of beer.

The Ohakune Easter Hunt is the newspaper travel article I wrote about an eye-opening day out. (For a short time I felt like a world authority on pig hunting, at least among vegetarians who don’t hunt.)

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