The Building Blocks of Storytelling: Gossip

When I was a teacher, I took the part of the stern moralist when dealing with gossip—easy to do when kids were being hurtful, but harder to maintain when they weren’t.

The writer part of me found their daily dramas endlessly entertaining, because I saw not just echoes of my own school experience, but human experience.

Gossip is basically storytelling: not literature, but story in simplest—and most complex—form. Because we don’t just repeat the facts (or what we assume are the facts) of what hap...