Talecraft
By Lance Schaubert | April 15, 2016 |
By Flickr’s Hernán Piñera
You don’t write with your keyboard. You don’t write with your pen or your hands. You don’t write with your typewriter, your chisel, your audio transcriber, your fancy new app, gadget, or journal.
Most people find this strange since, for instance, the field goal kicker for the St. Louis Rams kicks primarily with his leg.
But not the storyteller. “Writing” is one of those rare more-than-actions for our more-than-physical world.
See this is the problem with most journalism about fiction writers. Journalists try so hard in interviews to get the story behind the story, to “see through” fiction rather than using fiction as a tool through which to see. They insult those of us who have spent years fantasizing and imagining and crafting another world from scratch. As Terry Pratchett would say, Fiction is a minor province in the world of Fantasy, not the other way around. Even the most Woolf-esque, heady literary fiction is fantasizing and, if it’s not, it’s little more than memoir.
That’s not to slight memoir.
That’s simply saying we fiction writers do something that nonfiction writers do not do.
We craft tales from scratch.
Recently at a writers’ enclave in Massachusetts, I considered leading a session in which I confiscated the phones, computers, typewriters, pens, and paper of every attendee. We would then take a simple writing prompt for a fairy tale or mythology and would write it together. Aloud. Without any recording device to bear witness. Then we’d retell the story, start to finish, patching it together. Then we’d elect a delegate—the best of us—to tell our community’s tale from start to finish.
And then we’d write our own longhand versions.
We’d type our own, personalized first drafts on the typewriters I brought.
And finally, we’d each write a full draft on our computers, revise, and share our various versions of the central tale that night. Some end results would be literary, others romantic and so on—just as the medievalists riffed off of Virgil and Homer and Arthur.
It’s a proof of concept. Since we received the gift of consciousness and history broke forth in a sudden dawn, we humans have told one another stories around the dying embers of campfires. See, most people misunderstand oral tradition. They think the ancients were terrified or superstitious of the written word. On the whole, that’s a cartful of horseshit. Socrates, for instance, wasn’t afraid of the written word. He simply thought it was insufficient. His argument—ironically recorded in Plato’s writings—goes something like this: you only know what you’ve internalized. If you have not internalized or memorized your text and narrative, you don’t know it. The ancient Jews had their children memorize the first five books of their sacred texts—one of which was Levitical law. Can you imagine an America (or Australia or Britania) in which every child graduated the eighth grade having memorized all of the primary legal codes used in American courts?
We’d have a lot fewer frivolous patent lawsuits, I’ll tell you that much right now.
Oral tradition is a both an outlining tradition and a memorizing tradition. And this is still true today. Some stories are kosher for everyone to tell—days of disaster like September 11th or days of joy like the birth of a brother. Other stories are for family heads to tell—bits of family mythology like the time the world’s largest hippo spray-shat on my Mimi Wiggins. Only Grandpa Deano Bubba can tell that story at family gatherings, but he’s teaching me to “tell it right.”
And then some stories can only be told by your wiseman, sage, or your nationhead. These are origin stories and law. They’re stories told by rabbis and shaman and priests. They’re the things your drill sergeant teaches you about life in the trenches. Things we “hand down and entrust to reliable men who will be able to teach others.”
They do this because the most important stories must be well-told. And if they have but one bad telling, the whole narrative identity of your people risks being thrown off for all of time.
It’s a craft—a way of telling.
Though your novel is capable of far more interior headspace than an oral tale or other external mediums like a film, you don’t write with your keyboard, your pen, or your paper.
As a teller, your tool is your mind. The narrative part of your brain.
You use your narrative mind in three ways:
- Memory
- Imagination
- Memorization (or “study”)
In order to fashion a good story, well-told, Talecraft wields the memory of your own human experience to craft voice, the imagination of your consciousness to craft world, and the memorization of both the ways in which your preferred stories are told and the materia that composes technical details related to setting and character. Not a pen for a tool, oh no. A shared empathy brought about by made-up characters and worlds that feel familiar. The wedding of foreign and familiar through fabricated or exaggerated narrative, that’s our craft.
I won’t have the space here to flesh those three out, so instead I’ll ask a very leading question and respond to you once you’ve populated the comments: how has your memory, your imagination, or your memorization of the memories and imaginations of others helped get you “unstuck” during a harder season of writing?
[coffee]
Lancelot Schaubert has sold his written work to markets like The New Haven Review, McSweeney’s, The Poet’s Market, Writer’s Digest (books and magazine), Poker Pro, Encounter, The Misty Review and many other similar markets. He reinvented the photonovel through Cold Brewed and was commissioned by the Missouri Tourism Board to create a second photonovel — The Joplin Undercurrent — that both fictionalizes and enchants the history and culture of Joplin, Missouri.
From scratch.
That was precisely the challenge I set myself for my WIP. No outline (sorry), no tools other than my intention. Pants it. Make it up from nothing.
Well, almost nothing. My memorization was novels of the type by Nicholas Sparks and Charles Martin. My imagination was the world of an artist and her inspiration, a wounded and yearning man, conjured by research and set in the state of my mother’s heritage, Pennsylvania.
My memory was my empathy for two people whose love could not be erased by time; quite literally, in this case, because their love was chronicled in renowned romantic photography made indelible by the internet, and even more indelible in their hearts.
How did that help me get unstuck? It helped me every day, in every scene. It’s helping me still as I revise. It’s both a tradition, a spirit and a craft, as you so elegantly state it: “The wedding of foreign and familiar through fabricated or exaggerated narrative.”
My way of putting it is less elegant. Honor the myth but make it my own. Elevate the world while anchoring it in the real. Use the tool of empathy which, really, is nothing more than surrendering to love.
Love this post, Lance. And BTW, memorizing verse, lyrics, speeches and passages from the Bible is a great discipline and the opposite of dull rote memorization. It’s a way to enlarge one’s soul.
You know, you never really feel like a real cook, like a real homemaker, until you’ve made a full meal from scratch. I think novels work like that — great challenge.
That imagination, memorization (research), and memory seem like really great starting blocks for you. I can imagine both the foreign and the familiar in those wells giving your work living water to sustain it through the whole process.
I won’t quote the Emerson quote twice in one month, but yes — honor the myth but make it your own. Thanks so much for the love, glad it helped you in some small way.
And I couldn’t agree more regarding memorization, but I defer to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in which he shouts “IF YOU ARE NOT A THINKING MAN, TO WHAT DEGREE ARE YOU A MAN AT ALL?”
The man knew how to memorize, I’ll give him that.
Cheers.
Hey Lance:
I’m having this very issue with my current WIP. It’s a rather complicated story, with two time threads, and I have known instinctively that until I can “recite it by heart” in its essential form — a bit more than an elevator pitch, but that’s the general idea — I don’t really understand my story, and am not ready to put it down on the page. I need to feel it “in my bones” not just have it in my head. I’m getting close, finally, and am preparing to put all that research and character work and plot brainstorming to good use. But I knew it, felt it not just in my mind but my body, that I wasn’t yet ready before.
I love that exercise you described. It sounds not just like great fun but like an essential lesson in story building.
And I rue the day we stopped memorizing. I think we’ve lost more than we know by not requiring that curious, magical skill.
Great post. Thanks.
Thanks for the kind words, David, and for stopping by!
Parallel timelines are crazy. I’m reminded of three works: The Virgin of Small Plains, Uncanny X-men, and One Day. When it’s good, it’s brilliant, but especially with X-men, the sheer number of alternate fates Scott Summer’s family meets… it can dizzy you. I think that’s a beautiful strategy: almost like a white collar theif who needs to know every step of a meticulous plan (I’m reminded of an old piece I wrote on here regarding fallacies and how they prime surprise). Man. I don’t envy you right now but I do admire your work. Let me know how that turns out, okay?
Oral tradition. It’s something all modern researchers and storytellers should look into more often. Without a robust oral tradition, for instance, Alex Haley would never have found his Roots.
Truth. Strange that the people most expected to memorize in our culture are (1) doctors and (2) actors. Telling.
Godspeed, brother.
Lance, I loved your post. You should definitely do a workshop like this to show the power of storytelling. I do this with children and they always have such a blast and they are better able to write their stories. I need to know my story before I can write it, and if I get stuck, I like to fix lunch for a trusted writer-friend and go through it. Somehow, the very act of having an audience leads the story in the right direction.
Well thank you, Vijaya. I would love to do this — if it doesn’t fit into a conference sometime, perhaps I’ll hold an exclusive five-person retreat that does just this. I’ve always liked the idea of an intensive apprenticeship when I’m old enough and have enough credibility to run something like that.
You use the storify training with your kids? Regardless of what you use, that’s awesome.
Verbal processing certainly helps — I can only do it for some things, but my wife teaches me more and more how to do it as the years progress. Oral tradition, baby. It’s rock solid.
I think the memory of having my father read stories to me and my siblings and his lilting voice as he read is part of who I am now. He taught me to love hearing stories and to treasure words. In addition, my WIP is set in 1950; a few years before I was actually born. But there is overlap between that time period and my time period and I’m amazed at what comes back to me…like the feeling of cake makeup on my skin–which I remembered for a scene I wrote yesterday. Thanks for the post.
Oh for sure — for me it’s Grandma and the little golden books. Memory is an enchanting thing. What might help too is hitting the books to see if you can find childhood experiences from kids born in, say, 1946 — what products came out then, what christmas gifts. Then imagine yourself in that situation.
Pretty neat stuff.
Good idea! Yes…those Golden Books. I’ve done a little bit of this research, but there’ s always more!
Powerful post, Lance! Thanks for the reminder that it’s *from scratch* that I create.
You’re more than welcome, Zan. Happy to help.
I wish we’d tried that exercise! I will be thinking for a while about who is allowed to tell what stories. And your triad is an interesting way to look at the narrative mind.
For a bunch of years I was the teacher for a traditional dance performance group (morris dancing–look it up!). When I went back to work with the person who originally taught me the dances, I realized that my group had changed the style in subtle ways to accommodate our bodies and our aesthetic. We called it the folk process at work and had a good laugh.
I think that’s what we writers do with our memories and our memorizations. We work them over using our imagination, our voice, our moral sense, our aesthetic, etc. to create something new.
I don’t know poop about football, but if it’s anything like dancing, a kick comes from the mind’s split-second decisions and the muscle memory created in practice sessions and the adrenaline of the moment, even if all the audience sees is a leg moving. The leg, like our pen, is the interface between what’s happening inside us and the outside world of things.
Me too, Barbara. Perhaps I’ll find a place to fit it in some day in the future. Or, like I said above, host a retreat in which this is the methodology.
That’s a really interesting example — that dance troupe. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m reminded of Upright Citizens Brigade improv: in class, we would always have basic tenets like support and acting to the top of our intelligence and agreement (lots of “Yes, and…” in long form improv). But these things filled the mold that was our individuality, our personhood. You’re right on there.
And I should probably add that upon rereading the line about the kicker, I thought the same thing you said there at the end: yes, ultimately, the leg is merely the instrument. It took about two weeks of two-a-days in highschool for me to realize there’s more to football than merely throwing something and colliding with other people.
So too with the literary world.
“Journalists try so hard in interviews to get the story behind the story, to “see through” fiction rather than using fiction as a tool through which to see.”
I loved that observation, Lance. I spent the early years of my writing career as a journalist and have slowly learned how to change that perspective.
Thanks for the reminder.
Memory has helped a lot with my current WIP, which is a real-life novel based on my mother’s life. When I’m stuck, I often go for a walk and think about conversations we had about the important events in her life. I try to capture the memory in her voice to be true to the narrative.
My pleasure Maryann. Happy to see that you came around to this as I did.
Honestly, it comes primarily from two sources: The Personal Heresy by E.M. Tillyard and C.S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man, also by Lewis. Nothing bothers me more in an author interview then when a journalist starts talking which parts of the book are autobiographical. It’s an insult to the author, akin to saying to a rocket scientist, “Yes, but which part of your spaceship is meant to be a boat?” Sure, some spaceships can float on water — certainly the escape pods and emergency capsules can — but that’s beside the point. So too with fiction and the idea of autobiographical fiction.
I could go on for days. Maybe I should write up a piece elaborating on this…
Anyways, I should transition from that into saying your WIP sounds like a prime example: the easy part, in this case, are the memories you have of your mother. If you get stuck, likely you won’t need to wrack your brain for some memory you’re forgetting. Likely you’ll either need to hit the books and research what life was like for people like your mother at that point in history OR imagine what you, in her shoes and with her skillset, would do.
It’s that intersection — memory, imagination, research — that makes up the bones of our work as fiction authors.
Godspeed with your book. I wish you every success.