Transcript: Episode 4

Hey, writer friends, and thanks for joining in for this month’s episode of the Inspirited Word. I hope you’re doing well, wherever and whenever you’re listening.

I want to start today with a note about what I mean when I’m talking about storytelling on this podcast. When I’ve talked about craft in these first few episodes, I’ve mostly framed it with terms from fiction, just because that’s where a lot of my own writing and editing work falls. But since the start of the show, I’ve heard from a couple listeners who write nonfiction, and I realized I haven’t yet unpacked how storytelling connects with nonfiction work. So it would be understandable to feel like I’m really talking to fiction writers in this space, and nonfiction folks are sort of listening in from the edge of the circle.

But at least as I see it, nonfiction writing is storytelling, just as much as fiction writing is. The Venn diagram of nonfiction writing and storytelling is actually just… a circle. Or I guess, storytelling would be one huge circle, and both nonfiction and fiction would be firmly inside it… and also overlapping a bit.

Storytelling is often seen as synonymous with “making stuff up,” as in “making up things that aren’t factual.” But I find it more useful (and accurate) to think of storytelling as the conscious crafting of narratives – narratives that can be factual, imagined, or some combination of both. Any time you string together your knowledge, insights, experiences, and intuitions into a narrative, you’re telling a story. You’re “making stuff up,” in the sense of making a narrative that didn’t exist in that form until you created it (even if you’re working from fact).

It’s maybe easiest to see this at work in genres like memoir or the personal essay. The writer is crafting a storyline out of their lived experience, a storyline that they’re also presenting as an immersive narrative for an audience. But other kinds of less quote-unquote “creative” nonfiction are storytelling, too.

Any time you’re writing something and face a decision about what to include or how you want to include it, that decision and the way you implement it are an act of storytelling. You’re intentionally opening one door and closing (or at least omitting) another. You’re creating a path for your reader, and that path is your consciously crafted narrative (even if the path is made up of facts or fact-based opinions and theories). So in this sense, all writing, no matter the context or the genre or the intent, could be called storytelling.

(I guess maybe writing a scientific paper miiiight not be storytelling, at least if you’re doing it right… but I’m not entirely convinced it’s not? I honestly don’t have a deep enough background in any hard sciences to have an opinion there, or at least not one I need to be sharing all over the internet. Social sciences, though – definitely storytelling.)

Obviously, some forms of writing have way more crafting and constructing involved than others, in terms of imagining things that aren’t factual. So fiction genres have a way more overtly story-like quality or presence. But that doesn’t make other genres not storytelling. (Including poetry, although I have yet to hear from any poets who might be listening. If that’s you, let me know –  you can send me a haiku through the contact form on the website, or join the newsletter circle.)

Anyway, all this is to say that if you’re a nonfiction storyteller, you are welcome here and don’t have to feel like you walked into the wrong club meeting but can’t figure out how to gracefully leave, which is definitely not how I once ended up joining the wrong volunteer group for three entire years. For my part, I’ll work on making my craft references more overtly multi-genre on the occasions when specific stuff like structure and narrative arcs come up.

Now that I’ve explained a bit more fully what I think storytelling is, and how wide that definition is, it shouldn’t be too surprising that I also think storytelling is everywhere. And if pretty much everything you read or watch or listen to is a story – factual or otherwise – then an awful lot of what we consider to be our objective reality is actually created by storytelling (our own, or somebody else’s). Stories may not be tangible, but in a very real way, our lives are fully embedded within the stories that surround us or that we choose to surround ourselves with.

This is part of what can make storytelling such a beautiful vocation. A storyteller is someone who wants to engage actively and reciprocally with the narratives making up their world. That is some powerful stuff. But it’s not always beautiful stuff. Stories can do harm, especially when they wear the skin of a factual story but have guts made of nightmares and dogmatic delusion. That kind of story makes a world where the paths are all just rabbit holes of doom that dead-end at PizzaGate.

I’m pretty obviously talking about US politics here, which I don’t think I need to belabor, lest this episode take a descent into a tangent so deep and yawning we’ll never get back out the other side. But I’m also talking about less obvious nightmare narratives, and even unconscious ones. I’ve talked in previous episodes about some of the shitty stories we might be telling ourselves that have the face of fact but are actually self-defeating fictions right through to the bone.

All of this makes being a storyteller a doubly powerful calling. Not only do storytellers consciously craft narratives, we’re also uniquely positioned to learn how to spot them around us in the world. That very convincing article everyone’s sharing in your virtual feed of choice? It’s a story – the writer literally made it up, no matter how factual it may or may not be. (And, more importantly, no matter how factual it may appear to be.)

That embarrassing memory you keep replaying every time a certain song shuffles onto your playlist, the one that makes you feel like a nesting doll full of increasingly stupid dolls the deeper down you get? That memory is a story – it really happened, and also you’re continually making it up.

This podcast is a story. I am making up everything I’m saying to you right now (although I’m doing my best to make the guts of this story nightmare-free).

Understanding how stories make up the world – how stories are crafted, and how we are in relationship with them – is the life’s work of the storyteller. It’s our superpower. And it gives us the ability (and the responsibility) to make up things of truth instead of things of oppression or occlusion.

This brings me to the more concrete part of this episode: How are stories of truth made up? (I said this is the “more concrete” part, not the “very concrete” part.) How do we mix fact and fiction and experience and insight into a powerful, living story?

I often see two opposing bits of advice on this for writers, depending on the type of story you’re writing. If you’re working on genre or mainstream fiction, or if you’re writing nonfiction for a mainstream audience, you’re probably going to hear this: Your story should have a message, and every single scene or section of your story should reinforce that message.

On the other hand, if you’re writing in a quote-unquote “literary” style, you’ll hear the opposite: You must avoid any kind of overt message and think primarily about the aesthetic shape and value of the story. By defining a clear message, you’ll end up stripping all the nuance out, and that’s where the real meaning is.

I want to dig into both of these arguments a little, starting with the mainstream storytelling angle. On the surface, it looks like pretty good advice to craft your story around a message when you’re writing non-literary stories.

Brief but important sidebar here on the topic of types of stories. The distinction between literary writing and other styles is slippery at best, and unpacking the cultural baggage and bullshit around it could be its own multi-season podcast, but I’m going to sum it up like this: Literary writing is more about the words on the page – the style and tone and timbre of the storyteller’s language. Mainstream writing and genre fiction is more about what happens in the narrative – the who, what, and how.

Put another way: If a literary story has a crap plot, it can still be a successful story if the language is really lovely or moving or unique (it might not be the greatest literary story, but it will still be ticking the most important boxes). If a mainstream or genre story is packed with clunky sentences, it can still be successful if it’s a page-turner.

“Mainstream” writing also goes by other names like “commercial” or “general audience.” Basically, if it’s not literary, but doesn’t fit in a clear genre bucket like mystery, romance, or sci fi, it’s mainstream.

Like I said, this is my attempt to quickly sum up a very subjective and complex and sometimes emotionally charged topic, just to give us some context. So please don’t @ me. Or at least not about this.

Getting back to the question of “should your story have a message”… When you’re writing a non-literary story, it does sound pretty logical to write toward a message, since the story is most concerned with the who, what, and how. Focusing those aspects on a clear, singular theme can be a useful way to make decisions about what should happen in the story and how to convey it – so that you end up with a cohesive, compelling read. The message basically becomes the why to go with the who/what/how.

I often see fellow editors and writing coaches advising something like this:

To write a story readers will really love, you need to write with a specific “takeaway” in mind. Readers want to learn something from your story, and they learn that takeaway through the way the characters change over the course of the plot. So for example, if you want to craft an impactful fictional love story, you should first come up with a message about love (something like “love is a strength, not a weakness”). Then each scene in the story should somehow tie into how the characters evolve from thinking that love is a weakness to understanding that it’s a strength. This creates a satisfying arc and leaves readers with a clear idea of the point of your story.

/other-peoples-advice

This approach can and does help writers put together functional stories. I’ve worked on stories for both individual authors and for publishers that were planned out this way, and it can indeed help make a story cohesive and engaging. It’s a very useful tool.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think readers actually love stories because they enjoy learning concise, clear takeaways about the world or the human condition. A story that somebody loves might have one of those, sure. But that’s not why they have a powerful relationship with that story. When was the last time somebody recommended a story to you by saying “oh it’s my favorite book, it really illustrates the theme that love is a strength and not a weakness”?

A clear, concise message makes it easier to work successfully with all the complex moving parts of a story. And there’s nothing wrong with using a message this way. Sometimes you need a really clear conceptual anchor to transform your draft from a pile of maybes into an actually finished draft.

This applies to creative nonfiction just as much as to fiction. Obviously there are some types of nonfiction where the message is baked in. But in any type of creative nonfiction, you’re facing very similar choices as with fiction – the characters and events in your story just also happen to be real. So a predetermined message can help you make those choices about what to tell and how to tell it.

But even though a message makes a story easier to write, I don’t think it’s what makes a story easy to love.

Okay, so what about the stereotypical literary take on messages in storytelling? If you’ve studied craft from the literary angle, you’ve probably heard the opposite advice to the mainstream and genre story angle: Predetermined, clear messages may have worked well for some of the classics, but they aren’t done anymore in serious writing. Or, if you’re a literary writer, you may have heard nothing about messages in storytelling at all – I mean, what’s next, talking about outlines?? God forbid. Let’s just keep endlessly workshopping this contemporary Dadaist flash fiction.

(I’m realizing that it’s sounding like I’m dumping a full cooler of haterade on literary writing in this episode, but I promise I’m genuinely not anti-literary. It’s the genre I have the most formal writing training in, and some of my best friends are literary books.)

In literary writing, the major impact is supposed to come from the overall gestalt of the language – the artistry of the words themselves. So rather than focusing first of all on putting together driving or persuasive plots, writers are usually encouraged to focus primarily on developing their style, their artistic point of view as a writer. Yes, plot does matter in literary fiction. But the deeper meaning and life of the story is described not through things like “messages” or “takeaways,” but through things like “having a fresh voice.”

Just as with the mainstream writing argument, I think the literary approach has its merits, but doesn’t really capture what’s so powerful about reading a story we really love – a story that we encounter as a beloved, as I described it in earlier episodes. We don’t enter into relationship with “a fresh voice” any more than we do with “a clear takeaway.”

Both of these takes are honestly sort of… missing the point.

To come at this from a third direction, I’ve got another book reference this month from a book that is not really about writing: Non-things, by cultural philosopher Byung-Chul Han. (I think I need a subtitle for this podcast that’s just “how to make everything you read ever actually be about writing.”)  You might also see this book with its original German title, Undinge, which may or may not be pronounced the way I just said it because I forgot to look it up before sitting down to record. I’ll include the spelling in the episode resources.

A lot of Han’s work is about the loss of grounding cultural narratives in the internet era, and he has a way of talking about stories that highlights this question of what makes a story deeply powerful – a story you can be in right relationship with, to bring back a phrase from episode two of this pod. He describes this kind of writing as “linguistic works of art,” as opposed to writing that isn’t art, which is a point I’ll circle back around to in a minute.

For Han, an artful story is one that has “the character of a thing,” by which he means something the reader can encounter and engage with beyond just taking in the information or stylistic elements contained in the narrative. He writes that this type of story “resists the kind of reading that consumes sense and emotion... [and instead] lingers with the text as a body, as a thing.” Talking about poetry, he says that this kind of reading “snuggles up to the skin of the poem. It enjoys the poem’s body.”

According to Han, most storytelling in the digital and internet age doesn’t get anywhere close to having the relational, living character of a body (and I tend to agree with him). The digital world is about conveying things quickly and emphatically, competing for the brief attention of readers who have been trained that stories come in clips and soundbites, and that what’s highly relevant right now will be replaced by something else within weeks, days, hours, or even minutes.

Earlier in this episode, I proposed that the vocation of the storyteller is to consciously craft narratives of truth. Not universal truth, as I’m not sure that’s a thing, and often what’s called “universal truth” is dogma in disguise. But we’re aiming for truth of some real kind, truth with a body you can snuggle up to.

According to Han, digital era storytelling literally has no time for truth. Instead of conveying stories of truth, digital age storytelling conveys quickly consumable information (which may not be factual). Han says “What counts is short-term effect. Effectiveness replaces truth.”

He’s specifically talking about fake news there, but this also applies to a kind of writing I mentioned back in episode two – the kind of writing that focuses on using craft techniques to evoke a very effective but ultimately empty or ephemeral emotional response. It’s the kind of writing that wants to push your buttons and watch you react instead of having a real conversation with you.

This kind of writing isn’t always malicious or harmful the way fake news is. But it’s also not the kind of writing that creates a presence you can be in right relationship with, a body you can linger with.

Han argues that this kind of storytelling has become ubiquitous in the digital era, even in the realms of art. He says “What is problematic about today’s art is its inclination to communicate a preconceived opinion, a moral or political conviction: that is, its inclination to communicate information.”

So in other words, Byung-Chul Han really doesn’t think we should be writing stories with a message.

I have to mention here, though, that I suspect Han doesn’t think that anything except the peak of the literary genre can be considered art, or a narrative of truth. I haven’t read all of his work, so I could be wrong – but he seems pretty down on novels in general in this book, and he only mentions really good literary, nonrepresentational poetry as an example of storytelling with the deep character of a thing or a body.

My take is exponentially less rarefied; I think pretty much any genre of story can be art, and honestly I don’t even like using the benchmark of “art” to evaluate the amount of truth or power or enlivened presence a story has. I think that framework is just too loaded to be useful, and it doesn’t line up with the relationships we actually have with stories.

I’ve experienced that encounter of lingering presence with plenty of beloved stories that wouldn’t be described as art in a cultural philosophy book. Those stories have the thing-like aspect of a living body that Han describes – at least for me. And I’ve read plenty of artistic and poetic language that lacks that presence, that actually falls into Han’s category of short-term effect. Sometimes art is all artifice, no body. A poem can push your buttons and then walk away just as much as a novel can.

So I disagree with his statement that a poetic, nonrepresentative writing style is what transforms writing into a thing (and his implied statement that only an actual poem can reach that level of presence). But Han does really capture the tension I think many storytellers feel in the current era, that tension between the way stories are functioning in the world around us and the stories we’d actually like to tell.

As I said earlier in the episode, our lives are embedded in the stories that surround us. We see that in this world, the vast majority of stories are crafted, as Han would say, to deploy information to provoke an effective response.

And in a world that’s constantly, continuously being made up around us by think pieces, hot takes, viral memes, and pithy podcasts, it’s not always easy to see the line between a story that’s a body and a story that’s just wearing a skin, a story made up of manipulation or style without any truth. It’s not easy to draw our own line between crafting a story that’s truly alive or a story that’s just effective.

To start divining the shape of that line for ourselves, and where we want to place it in terms of our writing work, I think we have to start paying close attention to the way we respond to the stories around us. We’re so inundated with storytelling that we’ve learned to consume it, respond, and move on, often without even registering what’s really happening. We’re being trained to erode our own storyteller superpower, our ability to really see and understand the way stories are making up our world.

The first step to honing that power again is to take active note of our responses when we cross paths with a story – and I mean that literally, by making notes. This doesn’t have to be elaborate, and it doesn’t have to be comprehensive (otherwise you’d be taking notes all day). Just try making one or two notes a day about a story you interacted with, what kind of story it was, and how you responded. (And remember that I’m not just talking about actual books or literature here. Any media you took particular notice of during the day is fair game.)

Be as brief or as detailed as you like or are able to be. You just need to gather enough examples to start picking up on patterns. When you have a strong reaction to something, what kind of story is it? And what kind of reaction did you have – was it a deep encounter of presence and truth, or one of those effective short-term responses? And here’s the really toothsome question: What specifically about the way that story is crafted lead to your reaction?

Once you get into the habit of taking active note of your interactions with stories, it’s incredibly helpful to start doing deeper analytical dives with any story in your own writing genre that you have a strong reaction to – both positive and negative. Identifying what kinds of stories you don’t want to tell is a key part of figuring out what stories you do want to tell. Even we writers tend to just decide we like or dislike a story without asking ourselves to identify and articulate why specifically we feel that way.

Learning to always ask yourself why, and remembering to keep track of the answers somehow, is the best training for becoming the writer you want to be. Seriously, this is one of the most valuable teachings I’ve ever received about being a storyteller, and even though it sounds so simple, it’s also so easy not to do it! Making this episode has reminded me that I don’t do the “keeping track of the answers” bit often enough myself.

If you want a supportive push to actually implement this advice during the next month (and beyond), scroll down on your phone right now to join the newsletter circle at the link in the show notes. Subscribers get practical tips to go along with the pod episode each month, and this time I’m sharing a simple worksheet to help you identify what’s going on when you have a big reaction to a story – and to help you actually write that shit down somewhere!

This kind of habitual and intentional taking note, both literally and figuratively, is what really cultivates and honors our vocation as storytellers: to engage actively and reciprocally with the narratives that make up the world. It’s also the only real way each of us can answer questions like “should my story have a message?” I can’t really answer that for you, any more than I could create your story for you.

Instead, we each have to ask ourselves: “What stories do I most love? How do their bodies linger with mine? And why?”

If you know a fellow storyteller who might enjoy this episode of the Inspirited Word, please text or email it to them! Or DM it or tweet it or Mastadon toot it or whatever verb applies when you’re out in the swiftly changing digital world, taking note of stories. And as always – keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.