Water Cannot Rise
Above Its Source

Why should storytelling be in any way, by any measure, “hard”? Why, when we tell stories all the time, when storytelling is as much a part of everyday social intercourse as eating, joking, or sex? Why, when most of us tell stories naturally enough in person, does storytelling on paper not come naturally?

147}ALL OF OUR STORIES LIVE INSIDE
US: THE TALE OF THE TAXI DRIVER

Riding a taxi to the airport, I asked the driver what I thought was an innocuous question—something along the lines of “How are you?”

Instead of answering, “Fine. And you?” the driver launched into his life story. But in place of the usual tale of immigration and struggle, he described to me a day in his life, beginning with the moment his alarm went off at six o’clock in the morning, and how he made breakfast for himself and his two children and got them ready for school. As he launched into this blow-by-blow description of his day, I gripped the passenger strap—bracing myself for a collision not with an oncoming car, but with this man’s entire existence.

As he went on speaking, describing his method of preparing oatmeal by microwave and how, before leaving them to catch the school bus, he would stoop forward to kiss his children on their foreheads, something strange happened. In place of the boredom I’d girded myself for, I found myself gripped by his tale. For an hour and forty minutes, the length of the taxi ride to the airport, I listened, rapt, to this man’s “story”—which was not a story so much as a thorough description of the process of being him—i.e., a precise and detailed answer to my question, “How are you?”

In her essay Writing Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor recalls how a woman living down the road from her, having read some of her stories, remarked, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” The remark impressed O’Connor, who goes on to say, “When you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there—showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.”

O’Connor’s notion was exemplified in my taxi driver’s tale.

O’Connor goes on to observe:

This is a very humble level to have to begin on, and most people who think they want to write stories are not willing to start there. They want to write about problems, not people; or about abstract issues, not concrete situations. They have an idea, or a feeling, or an overflowing ego, or they want to Be A Writer, or they want to give their wisdom to the world in a simple-enough way for the world to be able to absorb it. In any case, they don’t have a story and they wouldn’t be willing to write it if they did; and in the absence of a story, they set out to find a theory or a formula or a technique.

My cab driver had no theories to espouse, no formulas or techniques to illustrate, no abstract themes or problems to hunt down or resolve, and no sensational tale to tell. He had been asked a question, and he answered it: concretely, specifically, honestly, with feeling. And I listened, enthralled. He was a storyteller.