Musings: John Gardner On Becoming A Novelist storytellers
by Maureen Bush
uncommented
The Qualities of Storytellers
from John Gardner, On Becoming A Novelist:
“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 incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy 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 earnestness, 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. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.”
I must admit to many of these characteristics, especially a fondness for daydreaming and the telling of pointless lies. And in my writer friends? Oh, yes, indeed.
Maureen
Storytellers are dangerous people
I’ve been working my way through Story, by Robert McKee, a book on screenwriting. I’m finding it dense and slow but enormously useful. Here’s a story he tells:
“In 388 B.C. Plato urged the city fathers of Athens to exile all poets and storytellers. They are a threat to society, he argued. Writers deal with ideas, but not in the open, rational manner of philosophers. Instead, they conceal their ideas inside the seductive emotions of art. Yet felt ideas, as Plato pointed out, are ideas nonetheless. Every effective story sends a charged idea out to us, in effect compelling the idea into us, so that we must believe. In fact, the persuasive power of a story is so great that we may believe its meaning even if we find it morally repellent. Storytellers, Plato insisted, are dangerous people.” pp. 129-130
Here’s to storytellers!
Maureen