Anatomy of Storytelling: How Do You Tell a Story?
This is part two of a multipart post based on a series of questions posed by Brian Gehrlein on Twitter.
You may have noticed that I skipped “What do readers want?” At the end of the day, I’m not convinced I can tell you what readers want. Every reader is different and is looking for different things in what they read, so I’d be forced to leave the answer as something general, like “a well told story.”
So why not just skip to answering the implicit question that answer brings: How do we tell a story? Is it something we’re all born with, or something we develop over time? How do we hone the skill once we have it?
Innate storytelling
To some extent, I believe that storytelling is something all people are innately born with. Ask any young kid what they are doing, and you can bet you won’t get a single, succinct summary.
Though you may be hoping for an answer like “playing tag,” most kids will spend the next two-to-five minutes stumbling through an account that sounds more like:
“Well, Hunter wanted… need… he brought a dump truck but I didn’t know… um… Sarah doesn’t like to play with dump trucks, and yesterday I saw a spider… um… it wasn’t a spider… it was… the spider in my shoe… and Hunter didn’t give me a turn, but my turn… but I was scared of the hairs.”
Why is that? I believe that all of us, even kids, implicitly understand that information requires context to be fully appreciated. It may take some unraveling and re-tracing of rabbit trails to decipher, but rest assured that to the little storyteller in question, the spider-that-wasn’t-a-spider is an important detail that will help to explain what’s happening to you.
Practicing the craft
Our instincts for storytelling can be a blessing and a curse for those of us who wish to tell stories well. On the one hand, it means we have a built in understanding of when a story isn’t working, which is good. But it also means we have a bit of hubris to overcome, because nothing feels more natural than laying out the details of a story and assuming that’s sufficient.
But, just as a child may provide too many stray thoughts or accidentally skip over key thoughts, we too often clutter our stories with extraneous ideas that aren’t actually helpful, excluding assumptions we’ve made that our audience has not. That’s why we practice storytelling.
A good storyteller will provide only the information needed for all the small stories making up their story to click together like a jigsaw puzzle. A good storyteller will be well versed in the assumptions she expects her audience to make, and won’t go against them unless she has a skillful approach to correct them.
Storytelling practice comes in two forms: consumption and production.
Practicing via consumption
Regardless of your preferred medium, it’s vital to keep a healthy and varied diet of stories. Consume stories from within and without the genre you practice. Consume stories that are widely praised and those that are critically panned. Consume stories from a variety of mediums (that is, if you’re a writer, read books, but also watch movies, play video games, attend stage plays, listen to symphonies, visit art museums etc.)
The more stories you interact with, the more comfortable you will feel with the elements of stories. You’ll hone your skills in whatever language is unique to your medium, and grow familiar with the languages used in other mediums. You’ll sharpen your sense of what does and doesn’t work about a story, and you’ll develop a critical eye to begin thinking about what you might have done differently.
It will also be helpful to consume critical analysis of the stories you encounter, but treat this like dessert: a little goes a long way, and it’s easy to overstuff yourself on someone else’s opinions.
Practicing via production
No one can become a great storyteller if he never tells any stories of his own. Just living life and maintaining your relationships will increase your prowess, as every interaction will be some kind of storytelling exercise. But don’t settle for just that. You must also produce stories in your preferred media.
You can practice by tweaking someone else’s story to make it your own, or by reimagining a new ending. You can start totally from scratch or use a prompt developed by someone else.
And of course, don’t be afraid to dabble in mediums you don’t specialize in.
Inviting an audience
This is the most terrifying step of learning to tell stories: inviting others to see your work and respond honestly to it.
We’ve all wondered when an American Idol contestant bombed in round 1, “Did he really think he was good? Did no one tell her she couldn’t sing?”
You’ll always have blind spots toward your own work. You can’t help but read your word through the filter of already knowing exactly what you meant, so you have to invite an audience to react to your story. It’s good to start small with a safer place, like a trusted critique group. But don’t stop there. Eventually, you’ll need feedback that you can be sure isn’t biased.
So what?
Anyone can tell a story. All of us do it daily. But not everyone can tell a story that will stick with the audience for years to come. If storytelling is the primary purpose of language (which, I’d argue it is), and language is the primary characteristic that separates us from animals (which, I’d argue it is)...
Isn’t it worthwhile to be good at it?
