Babel Clash

Bill’s and Matt’s posts about reading really struck home for me. I like to think of stories (anyone’s stories) as a script for a performance. And I’ve learned the most about storytelling by telling stories (without any script) to live audiences, starting with my kids.

A live audience has a lot of power over the story that gets told them. They can demand a specific one, for instance. “The one about the monster!” was a regular demand of my then-preschool-age kids. The first time I heard them say this I was confused: I’d told them lots of stories about monsters. It turned out that the story they wanted was one I’d improvised about a monster eating our car. This became their favorite story and I must have told it hundreds of times before they grew out of it and we started reading storybooks at bed-time. (That seems like a long time ago now… because it was, I guess. I just asked my kids about Super Walrus, and they only vaguely remembered him. All stories are mortal, and Super Walrus was a story, therefore…)

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The audience can make demands about the form the story takes, too. My kids didn’t care about some variations; the monster could appear in various colors, for instance. But the essential plot-elements (from their point of view) had to be there, down to Super Walrus’ miraculous appearance from the sky at the last minute, falling down to crush the monster and save the day.

I was in desperate straits when I was originally improvising the story. In a calmer moment, I never would have come up with Super Walrus, a blubbery deus ex machina if there ever was one. But Super Walrus (and the monster’s horrified reaction as he was appeared) was unquestionably the reason why the story became an audience favorite. That’s another reason to tell stories in front of live audiences: it forces you to improvise. Necessity is the Super Walrus of invention, I guess.

Adults don’t signal their displeasure or demands as savagely and mercilessly as kids do, but they have their own methods. It’s a painful and unforgettable experience to lose the attention of a roomful of people because of something you have said, or failed to say, or because they’ve collectively decided it’s lunchtime. Comedians know about this and rightly fear it. But if you’re willing to use the experience as data, it can teach you stuff about telling a story.

Conversely, a positive audience-reaction can be strangely seductive, drowning out the whisper of your Muse. But the opportunity to spot what works with an audience and filing it away for next time is one of the big reasons to tell stories to people who are actually there (always keeping in mind that different audiences react differently).

The main thing it taught me, I think, is that the audience exists. I wrote for years (in fact, decades) before any of my fiction delighted the eyes of the public. Lots of people are in that situation, and it does sort of suck, which is why people seek out crit groups and other methods of getting feedback.

People who don’t do this may slowly forget that the audience exists—-or, more precisely, that they have their own interests, things they like and don’t like. A writer writing without feedback will gradually begin to engage primarily in self-gratification. This may be, as Woody Allen once put it so well, “Sex with someone I love!” but it’s not likely to impress any other person, no matter how ingeniously one does it. And nobody writes only for themselves, no matter what they say–if so, they wouldn’t write at all.

Bill’s advice to “be your own first fan” is really good, I think. Write what you want to read; if you don’t, other people are unlikely to be interested. But you should also write in a way that keeps the other person in mind. Their heart is a bell you’re trying to ring. If you don’t, you lose. And sometimes you’ll lose; no one reaches everyone. But when you do ring that bell, it’s a pretty good feeling.

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