The Art of Storytelling

Every story has its basic elements from protagonist to context to the outcome and resolution, whether good or bad. That's the start.

But not every story comes off the page, not every story can make your mind photographic or feel the lilt of its words so you get carried away by the flow of paragraphs and pages. A practiced author can make that happen but mass appeal doesn't prove art.

Beyond the page turners are those stories you never want to end because you're breathing through the sentences, rereading to sniff out the planning and placement, feeling your way steadily through the individual words to capture the minutiae necessary to make the recipe just right. The philosophy is in the details.

I'm reading such a book right now. I'm not yet halfway through East of Eden by John Steinbeck and I want to go back and read it from the start to make sure I didn't miss phrases like "the water of people", describing a crowd at the brink of riotous, righteous fervor or the making of pancakes as "little hassocks, small volcanoes formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned" or a man so close to remembering a far-off memory as "a little more there was to it, he dug it up and set it before his eyes in the air ahead of the horse's head". All read within a span of three pages.

The story is only an element, perhaps just a context for the author to weave in little tidbits imagined, crafted, found and stored in a separate place waiting to be carefully placed so the reader might catch a hint to pay attention exactly at that moment. 

I've often skimmed passages of page-turners to get to the end. It's an art to tell a captivating story that keeps you hungry but patient enough to savor the juicy details.   

Joan Didion - The White Album

Joan Didion makes me want to write.

I'm on a vacation/staycation, sweating in a humid apartment with two fans running, one in front, one behind me. I finished The White Album a week ago, reading The Year of Magical Thinking now and looking forward to her 56-page essay-book, Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11. I only heard of her a month ago in June after finishing Patti Smith's Just Kids. I wanted more writing like that; non-fiction, in-depth explorations of life through an autobiographical lens.

For a sci-fi/fantasy reader, it's been a wayward and rewarding pleasure. If psychobabble holds any truth, I went from "escaping the real-world" to jumping in it full-fledged.

"Most of us live less theatrically, but remain survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending."

There's a distant apathy to her style. I picture her flippantly flicking her hand as words go from brain synapses firing onto the page. She's good, she knows it, and it bothers her. She achingly tries to elucidate this feeling in her writing. "A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work", as an anonymous Wikipedia contributor references from an article about her.

"I gravitated to the random. I swung with the non-sequential."

She's more funny than serious though. More lost than analytical. She comes from wealth, is wealthy, and has a clear understanding that her station in life - as a renowned journalist and author - allows her (comped) access to varied aspects of life that others don't see. Her candor gives you front-row seats.

"Bike movies are made for all these children of vague "hill" stock who grow up absurd in the West and Southwest, children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made. These children are, increasingly, everywhere, and their style is that of an entire generation."

She's talking about the generation of the 70's, but I see the hipsters of today or sometimes the disconnected teen entrepreneurs or the laid-off brokers turned freelancers. Held accountable to rules that no longer pertain to them. Absurd, begrudging, distant.

I keep reading Didion because she keeps hinting at recurring themes. Having written since the early 60's till today, she could very well point out the "human search for meaning in a changing world". But it's something Obama might say in a campaign speech. We might see it on a billboard promoting Scientology, abortion rights, or Chase Bank. It may be assigned as a homework assignment in an English class focused on the classics; Of Mice and Men, Dickens, or Brave New World. The cliche doesn't bear repeating, so she writes to convey the feeling.

Patti Smith - Just Kids

Patti Smith writes innocently. She reads in a fluid way, the way a skateboarder must feel when the ricocheting of the wheels against the ground is lost to the smooth ride. It feels like Patti escaped the noisiness of the world, but not without difficulty. She knows of it, but lives beyond it.

I can't echo her writing through metaphor as well as a reader can decipher it through "Just Kids". Overall an ode to Robert Mapplethorpe, the book speeds through adolescence into young adulthood in mid-60's New York. Andy Warhol fanaticism, Martin Luther King's death, Jimi Hendrix being cool, Janis Joplin's insecurities, and other folklore play out in first hand.

Life just happened to Patti Smith, and she didn't struggle against it. She was lost and hungry and destitute, but kept going for the sake of art. I was sucked in by this struggle and couldn't stop reading, trying to figure out what this esoteric term that couldn't be seen or defined meant to her. Art in some sense was god, though the religious relation was never mentioned.

I couldn't relate to her hardship because I always found a practical solution for it. When Robert went through withdrawal, why did she take him to the Chelsea Hotel and not to Saint Vincent's? Why didn't she ask Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix to see her work and sponsor her? I was continuously drawn to her lack of finding a solution and letting circumstance suit her pace of life. Maybe she happened to life, because she would reject offers to sing or read her poems when they didn't feel right. She would pursue acting, though she didn't have any experience in it.

Patti and Robert had an approach to life that didn't at all make sense to me. I think that's the point. Patti wrote "Just Kids" to show the simple sinusoidal flow of life. Not just the content, but also the writing echoed that sentiment. There was no meaningful conveyance of "follow my route". There was no way you could anyway. No ego, no audience to write to, no publisher to impress. I'm reminded of Anna Nalick's "2 am" when she says she had to get a song down on paper before it threatened the life it belonged to. That's probably what Patti felt.

She was asked to write about her time with Robert by Robert and though you knew it the whole time, she only shared that at the end. This didn't have to be published for her to feel the work was complete.