Craft of Fiction: The Storyteller & The Writer (As Phase and Stereotype)

Before discussing the elements of fiction, let's discuss the phases of writing. In mainstream literary culture, we often distinguish between "Storytellers" and "Writers." Storytellers are those who generate plot-narratives that are gripping and well paced, often at the expense of good prose and complex characterization. Writers focus on pretty prose and longwinded meditations on themes. Storytellers work with high concepts (VAMPIRE!, ALIENS!, SPIES! ALL IN A DYSTOPIAN WORLD!); Writers, the mundane (cooking, staring into a lake).

These are the stereotypes I've often seen employed when trying to divorce the idea that some people tell stories; others, write. It's a stereotype so we know it's not true, because there are no blanket judgments. But some people do fit the trend, enough to cause a debate in literary culture.

The phenomenon has its points. Stephanie Meyer has often been hailed as a storyteller but not a writer by her own fanbase. Readers love her world, her characters, her plot, but even they can admit that writing is not her strong point. I have no judgment on this. Writers should write what they love, and readers should read what they love. I'm an adult who reads comic books. Again, read what you love.

My issue is when I hear "storytellers" talk about their love of language.

First, I will have to back up.

[A note: a lot of the ideas I express are not my own, or more specifically they are my ideas of others ideas. I can't cite every idea, because once you internalize principles, you forget their source. I know for a fact the idea I'm about to share came from a book, but I've forgotten which one. I never thought I'd go from writing student to blogger.]

As a writer I noticed I had two distinct modes I operated in when creating a story. First would be the daydreaming I did when I could see my characters in my mind, living the story like a movie. I could see my characters fighting, walking down the hall, escaping from villains, or sewing.

The second mode was when I was actually writing, bringing attention to the language I used to express the characters and events I had "dreamed" about. I knew Character A and Character B would fight over A's affair. However, when time to write, I may stall, realizing I needed to find the words, the language, the dialogue, to express this scene.

Critics have a word, serviceable. Serviceable means the prose just merely tells the story (Sally was upset that Dan cheated on her). It lacks the creativity to employ language in such a way that it truly lifts the moment off the page and into the reader's imagination. It's not infused with the emotion and character of that moment.

A theory I learned of considers there are two stages, or phases, to writing. First, is the composition stage. This is where the storyteller thrives. She invents characters, situations, and events; she constructs plot and scene; she orders events; she creates complications and twists.

The second stage is the performance stage. This is the writer's strength. She creates the text; the choice of words, the dialogue, style, tone, and point of view.

Great writers are composers and performers; they are the musicians of narrative, creating a story and performing it on the page. Someone who loves language, which most genre writers claim, strike me as hypocritical when they strike against literary writers for their concern of style. Style is the substance from crafting language.

Often advocates of genre fiction like to go for the old "style over substance" critique. The problem of course is that beautiful prose to a talented literary writer has substance. The stereotype of the flowery sentence with alliteration and beautiful imagery but lacking in saying anything meaningful is not valued in literary circles. Look up great sentences/passages from fiction. Flowery and purple prose may sound beautiful, but literary critics don't fall for it. They want language beautifully expressed (rhythms, imagery, sound techniques...) and with substance (exploring love, life, and death).

Classic passages from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

"Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly."

"[Janie] was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid."

As for celebrated language with action, research Hemingway's descriptions of bullfighting.

A lot of literary readers, such as myself, are quite underwhelmed as what passes for great prose nowadays. But great stylists are always rare. They are brilliant; they are geniuses. Writers like Woolf and Nabokov are talented. And when one understands the diffrence between plot-narrative and character-narrative, you can see they are great storytellers as well. However, those regarded as strictly being storytellers have talent as well.

Sometimes literary writers label genre writers as plot machines. This suggests that with no soul or creativity we just spit out events at rapid fire. My theory: as a genre writer, I am the rapper of literature: RAP, rapid action poetry. A great genre writer has to form a string of events that connect into an arc, energizing a poetic between character and event; event and world; character and world. Writing Sympathy-B, I am always asking, "What next?" However, I have to generate plot that moves the narrative along on its arc, reveals new sides of characters and moves them along on their journey as well, builds the world, and I can't be redundant. I have to always find a new way for a character to do what's already been done (either in the history of literature or even previously in my story) but still make it feel fresh. A character has one power, and yet each battle needs to feel unique, exploding with character and action and setting in a prose style that makes it all come alive. I compose the choreography for a battle, but then I have to perform the dance through describing the scene and invoking prose that portrays how high energy the scene is. Great storytelling is difficult; writing a novel where events arc into a sequence, sequences arcs into an act, acts arc into a novel, and novels arc into an epic (the case with series) is no easy feat. Tolstoy's War & Peace has a culturally accepted criticism of its war descriptions. Action matters.

Genre writers often say "pretty prose" the same way a womanizer says "pretty girl." It's trivializing. However, if writing a great sentence was so easy, why don't genre writers just tell their suspenseful tales with great flair and style? Because crafting a great sentence is not that easy. Also, a lyrical style often does not suit action sequences (unless you love George R.R. Martin taking several big pages to describe a woman walking through fire).

Commercial literary fiction arose out of a desperate need to make the writer whole, to bring composer and performer, storyteller and writer, back to one creative entity for the sake of the market. Publishers needed fiction that was accessible to the people, breaking from elite high brow circles, but still offering something of literary quality. Anyone who loves the Victorian novel knows that this has been done over and over again, and it's ridiculous to act like the concept is new even if the jargon is. But today's literary culture has had difficulty reconciling the experimental spirit of modernism with more conventional practices. However, read Pride and Prejudice or Bleak House, and you will see what happens when a writer owns his or her full identity as inventor and performer, creating texts that are accessible to a mainstream audience while being worthy of close reading.

Ultimately, we as a society are multi-faced. We talk about the beauty of art being a democracy, but it's just talk. Self-publishing is a democracy; however it is shunned for a lack of quality. In other words, mainstream literary culture would rather see a handful of elites create a small culture of elite fiction (mostly white and heterosexual with minority niches builts around it) rather than endorse a system that is equally open to lower, middle, and upper classes; equally open to minority writers who want to write a detective series instead of a historical oppression narrative; and equally open to a writer who wants to craft a superhero epic where the lead relationship is interracial (black and white) and intersexual (bisexual and gay). (Note: I am the last writer described, but I might write a detective series one day. With self-publishing I feel free. I don't have to worry about industry politics. I don't have to write stories and tuck them away in a drawer, hoping the culture (but really literary New York) changes).

We have two paradigms, each with a problem. Traditional publishing has quality control but fails every year to achieve equality. Self-publishing has equality but every year thousands of generic, poorly edited novels are published. Oh wait, I just read a generic, poorly edited novel from a Big 6 publisher last week. But even if we consider each paradigm at its most ideal, it bothers me that mainstream society chooses elitism over democracy. Shouldn't having to filter varying quality be a worthy, and rather small, cost for achieving our ultimate goal of making publishing universal? The democratic approach allows every reader to decide for themselves what's good. The elite approach works off stereotypes, where a small group determines what's good for everyone.

The hypocrisy of craft is trying to divorce the artist as composer and performer. We all invent characters and events, we all express those inventions through prose. If we think we can only focus on one aspect of our writing identity, then we are not fully committed to our craft. But we all vary in our attention to each phase. However, great writers often do both with a general level of excellence. A great writing performer can make a boy playing with a toy truck seem magical, revealing the substance of such an every day moment through style, making us realize how we take the every day for granted. A great composer can create epics that speak to the imagination of our race, the human race, create portraits of the future that actually move us closer to that vision, and grab the attention of millions without making them realize they are learning the lessons of acceptance and integrity.

Literary writers who divorce conventional storytelling from their writing often crave the audience of the genre writer. They have something to say, but they feel no one is listening. The subtext: They feel people should just listen to whatever they have to say however they feel like expressing it. Readers should just be drawn to creativity. When the writer with high brow tendencies does begin to reconcile his vision for storytelling with mainstream tastes, she often feels ambivalent. To the media, she talks about how proud she is, but then she'll do some intimate interview or blog post sharing how torn she is to have legions of fans every time she writes fiction that isn't exactly how she wanted. It's narcissistic. If you want mass success, you need to figure out what the masses want. Or write your more inaccessible books and value the readers you find. But a lot of literary writers won't be happy until they have both, and it's society's fault (to them). We're not smart enough, schools didn't do their job, the internet and TV are making us dumb.

But challenging books or slower paced, meditative works are a difficult proposition even for literary readers. A novel has to truly capture your interest before you're willing to go on the journey of reading, and re-rereading (and re-reading) the text, unlocking more of its pearls with each pass.

If you want people to listen, you have to talk at their level. If your goal was to get people's attention, considering what gets their attention in the first place should have been a thought when envisioning your novel. It's fine to write for yourself, explore your own style, but if you know you are adopting an approach to craft that defies convention, then you've prioritized creativity over accessibility. It's easy to ignore the demands of the culture while you're writing. But once you want to be published, you can have an "Oh crap" moment. Your awareness of book culture comes crashing in. Accept that. Own it. Know that the readers who will enjoy your creativity are not the dominant force in the market. If you want mainstream readers, then understand that as a part of your vision and keep that in mind as you're developing your ideas of how you will approach character, plot, and narrative. Do you want to be the "real artist" with the small intellectual following, the celebrity with mass appeal, or the writer who reconciles the two? Trying to be "the real artist" with mass appeal would be great. But it's just not about what you want, you have to consider the greater culture.

Personally, I believe you write the stories you love, publish them (there's always a way) and let the readers and critics figure the rest out. You never know what will click or when it will, because it's not up to you. The readers and critics will decide whether or not you are a "real writer" and whether or not you get on the bestsellers list. But ultimately, every writer will have to prioritize their values. No one is entitled to anything. Novels with mass appeal often don't have mass followings. Novels that defy convention sometimes do (albeit maybe posthumously). Key modernist writers have been in print for almost a century, and not just because of academia. I bought my copy of To the Lighthouse from Barnes & Noble. But even so, why would you be snobby over a prestigious American institution adopting your work? What writer should judge who their readers are? Whether a college professor or a housewife, a reader is a reader.

Genre writers who divorce the writing from their storytelling often crave for the respect of the literary writer. But when a writer reconciles the two, bringing as much vision to forming characters and plot as she does to expressing that plot with a regard, a true love, for language, you enhance the level of your work. A science fiction action writer may never need high lyrical prose, but she can bring a greater degree of rhythm and vitality to the writing she already pens. It may not win favor from literary types who stereotype great writing as lyrical and meditative, but who cares? They were never your readers to begin with. Do it because you strive to reach deeper levels of craft for your fiction and let your readers rejoice in reaping the fruit.

The novel philosophizing housekeeping and the great epic traveling on a magical quest work together, revealing the infinite possibilities of the novel, capturing the imaginations of generations. There are so many subcultures, cultures within cultures within cultures, where we as a society need many different kinds of stories imagined. Mainstream publishing thinks the general mass are the only readers (and often treats them as one reader), because to them those are the only readers who can bring in numbers significant to them. But as society becomes freer, expression becomes more diverse and if the old institutions can't adapt, new ones will arise. So find the story in the mundane, and find the substance in the explosion.

 

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