So in addition to being an avid reader, I'm also a writer. Obviously, right? But in addition to blogging about books and reading, I also write fiction, some non-fiction, and poetry, which means that storytelling is something I think about a lot. There's an art to putting words on paper that make readers feel for the characters they describe, but it goes beyond knowing what words to chose. Stories are designed to capture the human experience; in essence, they're holding a mirror up to nature (to paraphrase the Bard). They let us see on the page what we're too preoccupied to notice on the way to work or sitting around the dinner table.
Do you know what I see in that mirror? People.
See, storytelling cannot be completed in a vacuum. The very act of "telling" requires an audience to hear. Anyone who's ever told a story, of any kind, knows that audience matters. It isn't just a matter of who hears what, but of how your audience responds to what you say. This leads me to the thing that I love and hate most about stories.
The story I tell you is not the story you hear.
What you hear is a glorious product of your own imagining. Yes, perhaps it was my prompts that conjured them, but the visions are all your own.
Think of it like this. Every day, we're bombarded with stimuli: things that make us happy, angry, frustrated, indignant, elated. Each of these little reactions bubbles up within us only to fade away, replaced by the next response. Now along comes a storyteller. He presents you with characters and you find yourself able to envision them. Do they look exactly the same in your head as in the storyteller's? No. But there they are, just the same. The storyteller goes on to have these characters move and breathe and live and love before your very eyes and you feel for them, because, after all, that is the point. Now all those little gems of feeling, instead of drifting away, are strung onto a cord of words that holds them tight. You and he have created this together.
And he never gets to see it.
Our experience of the world is what we make of it. We all have our lenses through which we see the world. Thusly, no story, whether written, told, or viewed, can ever be experienced in quite the same way. Our response is uniquely our own, each and every time. This is one of the great joys and frustrations of being a writer. I can create something and send it out into the world, but no one will ever quite see what I do. For some, it will be infinitely better than anything I could have written, and for others, the resonance just won't be there. I can't make them see what I do. Nor would I want to. I love to talk about stories, my own and others', because I love to see how differently the same words or pictures can come across to different people. I love to pick them apart and see what makes them tick. It's an interesting exercise that's taught me as much about people as it has about storytelling. But perhaps that's less of a distinction than it seems. I try to keep that in mind when I'm surfing book review sites and see some of the cruel things people say to one another when opinions clash. The irony of the statement "Were you even reading the same book?!?!" seems lost on them. Of course they weren't reading the same book. No one ever is. Yet without the author, there would have been no place for anyone to start. In the end, it's a deeply personal thing, relating to a story. The funny thing is, it can never be done alone. We're all in this together.
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