A few weeks ago, Ben Mikaelsen came to our school as this year's visiting author. Ben was a delight, and I'll write more about his visit in another post, but for now, I want to concentrate on his philosophy about writing.
"Writing," he said, "is storytelling."
Of all of the things that I got out of Ben's visit, and there were many, this simple sentence resonated with me in a way that I never would have expected. It stuck in my brain and kept tap, tap, tapping through my thoughts. You see, in some fantasy world of mine, I consider myself a writer. I always have, from the time I was very young, around seven or eight years old. It's all I wanted to do. Well, that and read.
So, why did the utterance of this sentence have such an effect on me? I think I figured it out. See, the thing is, as much as I love to write, I am not much of a storyteller. What Mr. Mikaelsen was talking about was just letting go of the notion that every word needs to be weighty and special and telling the story you want to tell. That has always been so incredibly hard for me. When I write fiction, I gnaw my knuckles over every syllable and twist of phrase. I get so caught up in trying to make every word the perfect word, I end up writing in nothing but fits and starts. Sometimes I even give up, thinking that it'll just never be perfect so why bother.
Even now, as I write this post, I'm stewing about words. How does one overcome that? Because I think Ben is absolutely right. The story is much more important than the words themselves. If you can tell a great story, you can get around to fixing the words later. Maybe in one of the fifteen full revisions that Ben says he does to each of his books!
I have actually written a book, a YA novel called The Power of Merit Ruhl, which took me two years to write. I'm proud of it. I had a story I wanted to tell, and I told it. But I agonized over words the whole time. Now, I want to try to tell more stories. I want to write a sequel to my book, and even make it into a series. I have the stories to tell, the arc for each of the four major characters, in my head. The question is will I be able to set aside my obssession with words and just tell the stories?
My favorite books tell really amazing stories. Donna Tartt's The Secret History is a good example of this. If you've never read it, go out right now and get yourself a copy. It's the story of a small group of friends at a private college who do a terrible thing and then have to hide their mess. This story left me breathless. There is one point of such delicious suspense that I practically ripped the book because I was holding it so hard. Another example of spectacular storytelling: Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier, a book that, though I've read it many times and even taught it, can still keep me enraptured to the very last page. I don't necessarily remember all of the fancy phrasing and uses of foreshadowing and symbolism from either of these books. I remeber their stories and how those stories thrilled me.
Having said that, I do have two favorite books that are all about words. They also happen to be wonderful stories. Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth uses words in the most extraordinary ways. There's a car that "goes without saying" (The car literally only moves when those sitting in it stop speaking). Milo, the main character, gets stuck in the Doldrums, an actual place inhabited by the enerygy-sapping Lethargarians. At one point Milo ends up on the Island of Conclusions, which one can only get to by jumping. But even with all of this phenomenal and hilarious wordplay, it's Juster's storytelling that comes through. I taught this book for years with 6th graders, and one student, now a senior in our Upper School, came back to the middle school library looking for a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth. Why? Because in his English class they were talking about the idea of The Quest, and Milo's story stayed with him since he'd read it six years earlier. That's storytelling!
The other book I must mention is Mark Dunn's brilliant Ella Minnow Pea. In this gem of a novel, the people of the island of Nollop find themselves being allowed to speak and write fewer and fewer words because the letters on the monument to their island's namesake, the person who came up with the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," are falling off one by one. The island's government forbids the use of any letter which falls. It's an epistolary novel, one that will captivate word lovers. But as you read the book, you'll be most concerned about what is going to happen to the poor people of the island, particularly young Ella. She's racing against time and the government to find another sentence that uses all of the letters of the alphabet. I won't tell you how it ends. You have to read the whole juicy story.
Just writing about these outstanding stories makes me want to jump back into writing my own stories. I will work on letting go of the words and allowing the story to come first. I must. By the way, I'm attaching the prologue from my novel here: Download Merit Ruhl-Prologue I hope someone reads it! I would love to know what you think of my story...and my storytelling.
