WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my older sister and I had a game that we played on the long summer afternoons when supper was still hours away and we had nothing to do. We sat in our swings, too hot to move, until one of us started the game, and then we would forget the heat, the small yard with its mosquitoes, the impending supper, everything.
The game was simple. It required two people: the teller and the listener. The teller’s task was to describe a place as vividly as possible. The object of the game was to convince the listener she was there. The teller had to carry on the description until the listener said, “Stop. I’m there.”
I do not remember all the places we visited in the course of this game, but I do remember the very last time we played it. I was the teller and the place I wished to evoke was paradise. I did not know then that the damned are generally livelier than the saved, and that even Dante and Milton had wrestled with the problem of making virtue entertaining. Emboldened by ignorance, however, I began.
First of all, I filled paradise with the rich furniture of our own church. I put in the brass angels that held the candles and the stained glass windows in which old men read the Gospel to lions, dragons, and assorted penitent beasts. For how could I make paradise pleasant unless I made it comfortable? And how could I make it comfortable unless I made it familiar?
So I put in the hum of the electric fan behind the pulpit and the smell of peppermint that the head usher gave off instead of sweat. I fear it was a rather tedious description, and if I were to describe paradise for you today, it would be something like spring in San Francisco. And hell would be some bone-melting heat wave in New York City.
But however conventional the line I handed my sister, it was a lot more concrete than any account of the kingdom of God I’d heard in Sunday school, where heaven was treated the way my parents treated sex. Yes, it exists. Now don’t ask any more questions.
At the height of my telling, something unforeseen happened. My sister burst into tears.
“Stop!” she cried. “I’m there!”
I looked at her in astonishment. I knew she cried at weddings and funerals. But to cry at a place pieced together out of our common experience and our common language, a place that would vanish the minute I stopped talking! That passed beyond the bounds of the game altogether. I knew I could never equal that performance, and we never played the game again.
The joy of being the teller stayed with me, however, and when people asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered, “I want to tell stories.”
And the people to whom I said this always remarked, “Oh, you want to work on a newspaper, do you?”
I grew up thinking that if you wanted to tell stories, you had to go through the initiation rite of working on a newspaper, and that all writers had to do this before they could become proper storytellers. When I was ten, I asked my mother, “How do I get a job on a newspaper?”
For it seemed sensible to get past this hurdle as quickly as possible.
“You apply for the job,” said my mother. “But, of course, nobody will hire you without experience.”
“But how can I get experience if I need experience to get a job?”
“You could start your own newspaper,” said my mother. “You could start it this summer.”
In the summer we lived in a small town on the edge of a lake. On the opposite side of the lake stood a gravel pit, which employed nearly all the men in the town. The quality of life in this town did not encourage reading. There was no library and no bookshop. There was not even a Christian Science reading room.
At night people went fishing or fighting. Lying on my stomach at two in the morning, my face pressed to the bedroom window screen, I watched the man across the street drag his wife by the hair down the front steps of his house while her lover fled out the back window. I wondered how these people would like a neighborhood newspaper. I wondered if they would read it. I knew it would have to be free, as nobody in the whole town would be willing to buy it.
But there was an even bigger problem than finding readers. I hadn’t the faintest idea how to gather news. Census takers were badly treated in these parts, and even the Jehovah’s Witnesses had learned to leave us alone.
So I put the idea of a newspaper aside, until one night the lady next door dropped by for a visit. She was a large woman who made it her business to know everybody else’s. She plunked herself down in our best chair to exchange gossip with my mother, who never had any but who knew how to listen to the great events of the day. What were these events? Ray Lomax was out casting for bass and hooked Mrs. Penny’s baby through the ear lobe, John Snyder had been drunk five nights running, Tina O’Brien was pregnant by somebody else’s husband, and so it went. These were the plain facts. Our neighbor’s description of these facts would have done credit to the New York Post.
She paused long enough to smile at my sister and me. We were sitting at the dining-room table with our paper and crayons, and we smiled back.
“You like to draw?” she asked.
We nodded. She did not know that we had quit drawing the minute she opened her mouth and were transcribing every word she said. Here was news enough for ten newspapers! After she left, my mother censored what could be construed as libel, and my sister copied out the news in that anonymous schoolgirl hand she saved for thank-you notes and party invitations. We ran off our first edition on the wet face of a hectograph press, and we hung twenty-five copies of the Stoney Lake News in the living room to dry. The next day I went forth to deliver it.
We were an instant success. There is nothing people enjoy reading about so much as themselves. To see yourself in print—it gives you a kind of status. You are worthy of notice to someone besides your mother.
When I look over those newspapers now, I see the real news was not the events themselves but the people who lived them and who narrated these events to me. I heard some wild stories and I wrote them as I heard them. And I have all those people to blame for my prejudice toward fiction that is to be heard as well as read. In my mind, writing a story for a reader cannot be separated from telling a story to a listener.
I still marvel at how easy it is to tell a story, as opposed to writing a story. Collecting the news in that small town, I met people who could tell stories. Stories that left you breathless with suspense. Stories that made you laugh till your stomach hurt. All my storytellers had one thing in common, however. They would have balked at writing their own words down. They would have found writing stories very nearly impossible. But telling stories was for them as simple as conversation. Many years after the Stoney Lake News went the way of all pulp, I was reading Tristam Shandy and I came across a statement that brought back my brief career as a journalist. “Writing,” says Laurence Sterne, “when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.” And I remembered, ironically, all those men and women who told me stories and who read little and wrote nothing.
The very old and the very young are natural storytellers. When you are very old, you narrate your past and it sounds like fiction. And when you are very young, you invent a past and it sounds like fact. Either way, all it takes is a listener to get you going.
I still envy the ease with which my son, at the age of seven, could tell a story. He would begin with no idea and no rough draft and no plan. But at ten minutes of eight, with bedtime in view, he would start spinning his tale. If he made it very exciting, he could prolong bedtime a whole hour. The problems of dialogue and character and plot did not trouble him. He moved swiftly from one crazy episode to the next. And listening to my son, I remembered the original goal of the storyteller: to entertain.
Let me say right now that there are many ways of entertaining a reader. Kafka and Joyce and Borges and Pynchon show us just how complex and diverse are the entertainments we choose. But I am dealing here with simpler fare, with the process of storytelling in a less subjective form. I am going to start with the first book that kept me up all night because I couldn’t put it down. That book is Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
I still go back to folk tales and fairy tales when I want to lose myself for a few hours and come back to myself refreshed. Always the same thing happens. I read perhaps two stories and resolve to read no more, for I have to do the laundry or scrub the kitchen floor. But I happen to glance at the opening sentence of a third story, and the pull is irresistible:
One day an old man and his wife were sitting in front of their poor hut, resting from their work, when a magnificent carriage drawn by four black stallions came driving up and a richly dressed gentleman stepped out.1
And now I can’t put the story down until I know who the stranger is and why he has come.
Or take another story, which opens not with an unfamiliar guest but with a familiar grief:
It is a long time ago now, as much as two thousand years maybe, that there was a rich man and he had a wife and she was beautiful and good, and they loved each other very much but they had no children even though they wanted some so much, the wife prayed and prayed for one both day and night, and still they did not get one.2
And with that sentence I am hooked. I know the story will tell me how she did get one. Fairy tales generally start at the point when somebody’s fortunes change, for better or worse. And I know that the woman in this story will not get her child the way most of humanity gets children. Fairy tales deal with exceptional events rather than ordinary ones. And as I read on, I am not disappointed:
In front of their house was a yard and in the yard stood a juniper tree. Once, in wintertime, the woman stood under the tree and peeled herself an apple, and as she was peeling the apple she cut her finger and the blood fell onto the snow. “Ah,” said the woman and sighed a deep sigh, and she looked at the blood before her and her heart ached. “If I only had a child as red as blood and as white as snow.” And as she said it, it made her feel very happy, as if it was really going to happen. And so she went into the house, and a month went by, the snow was gone; and two months, and everything was green; and three months, and the flowers came up out of the ground; and four months, and all the trees in the woods sprouted and the green branches grew dense and tangled with one another and the little birds sang so that the woods echoed, and the blossoms fell from the trees; and so five months were gone, and she stood under the juniper tree and it smelled so sweet her heart leaped and she fell on her knees and was beside herself with happiness; and six months had gone by, the fruit grew round and heavy and she was very still, and seven months, and she snatched the juniper berries and ate them so greedily she became sad and ill; and so the eighth month went by, and she called her husband and cried and said, “When I die, bury me under the juniper.” And she was comforted and felt happy, but when the nine months were gone, she had a child as white as snow and as red as blood and when she saw it she was so happy that she died.
And so her husband buried her under the juniper tree and began to cry and cried very bitterly; and then for a time he cried more gently and when he had cried some more he stopped crying and more time passed and he took himself another wife.3
Now consider for a moment what a miracle of economy you have just read. In two paragraphs a year passes but is not glossed over carelessly, one character dies, another is born, and a third remarries, and the storyteller shows all this so simply yet so concretely that I think nobody could wish for more details. There is something about the process of telling a story that forces you to come right to the point. When you are writing a story, how often does the simple action seem insufficient? And how often do you feel you must analyze or explain it? But when you are telling a story, your first impulse is to create your characters through what they do. You, the author, become the invisible medium through which they live.
I am, to be sure, dealing here with a kind of fiction that emphasizes a linear plot. I know there are many kinds of storytellers and many writers who write as if they were talking to us. I have already mentioned Laurence Sterne. I could also have mentioned Mark Twain.
But the great books of these men were written, first of all, to be read, not just heard, and although they can be read aloud magnificently, a clear understanding of their work comes only when you have the books in your hand and can reread some chapters and compare others, and follow themes and characters over many pages. These are the pleasures of long fiction. When I speak of storytelling here, I am talking about the story as it is told to a listener.
I think it is good for writers to have that experience of telling a story. In my writing classes at Vassar, I sometimes try an exercise designed to give students that experience. We make up a story together. It’s rather like making a crazy quilt. You tell your episode, and when your imagination fails, you pass it on to your neighbor, who picks up where you left off. I start by giving my students a list of ten or fifteen characters, which they may use if they are desperate or which they may abandon if they wish to make up their own. The list might go something like this: man, daughter, son, grandfather, magician, devil, car salesman, banker, angel, thief. I start the story by introducing a character whose strong passion for someone or something is likely to get him into difficulty. I say, “Once upon a time there was a woman who loved cars more than anything else in the world. And one day she—” Then I pinpoint a student with my nearsighted stare and say, “Miss Smith, you take it from there.”
And though Miss Smith looks back at me as if she has just seen the Last Judgment, she generally finds she can take it from there. Since the story is a communal affair, she isn’t afraid of failure, which I think is often the underlying cause when writers can’t write. And since the characters are given to her, she doesn’t have that feeling so many of us have when facing a blank page: in the beginning was the void, and darkness was upon the face of the page.
Most important, she has a main character whose ruling passion—in this case, a passion for cars—will create the action of the story. And thereby hangs the tale. I have found the experience of telling a story in this way gives us the rare chance to be objective narrators. For once in our lives we are not talking about ourselves.
Let me go back to the woman who loved cars and remind you that characters with an obsession or a passion for something they don’t have are common enough in folk tales. “The Juniper Tree,” from which I quoted earlier, opens with a woman’s overpowering desire to have a child. I could have picked dozens of other examples.
And we all know writers far more sophisticated than the tellers of folk tales who choose to write of such characters. Take, for example, Chekhov’s story, “The Man in a Shell,” which deals with a character who is obsessed with isolating himself from the world around him. Chekhov describes him as follows:
There are not a few people in the world, temperamentally unsociable, who try to withdraw into a shell like a hermit crab or a snail….Why, not to go far afield, there was Belikov, a colleague of mine, a teacher of Greek, who died in our town about two months ago. You have heard of him, no doubt. The curious thing about him was that he wore rubbers, and a warm coat with an interlining, and carried an umbrella even in the finest weather. And he kept his umbrella in its cover and his watch in a gray chamois case, and when he took out his penknife to sharpen his pencil, his penknife too was in a little case; and his face seemed to be in a case too, because it was always hidden in his turned-up collar. He wore dark spectacles and a sweater, stuffed his ears with cotton-wool, and when he got into a cab always told the driver to put up the hood. In short, the man showed a constant and irrepressible inclination to keep a covering about himself…which would isolate him and protect him from outside influences. Actuality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in a state of continual agitation, and perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the present, he would always laud the past and things that had never existed, and the dead languages that he taught were in effect for him the same rubbers and umbrella in which he sought concealment from real life.4
Now why choose such a character for the subject of a story? Because the story begins at the point when such a character meets someone or something that brings him out of his shell. When the man’s friends conspire to marry him off, what do you think he does? I will not spoil your pleasure in reading the story by giving away the ending.
I once tried to write a story about a man ruled by a passion for telling lies. I called it “The Tailor Who Told the Truth,” because in the last scene, he was cured of his passion for lying, and why hold a penitent man’s past failings against him forever? Descriptions of stories are always awkward, so let me quote the opening paragraph:
In Germantown, New York, on Cherry Street, there lived a tailor named Morgon Axel who, out of long habit, could not tell the truth. As a child he told small lies to put a bright surface on a drab life; as a young man he told bigger lies to get what he wanted. He got what he wanted and went on lying until now when he talked about himself, he did not know the truth from what he wanted the truth to be. The stories he told were often more plausible to him than his own life.
I found the process of writing this story very different from writing about my own experience or my immediate observation of someone else’s. In the first place, the tailor was born with a peculiar autonomy, a sort of arrogance, as if I hadn’t created him at all. He had already selected the details about himself he wished me to know, and I found myself describing places and situations quite foreign to me. The first half of the story is set in Germany before World War I, up to World War II. I have not visited Germany for at least twenty-five years, and my impressions of Germany between these wars come primarily from the old photograph albums kept by my parents, who lived there briefly during the twenties.
My ignorance did not deter the tailor, however. One night I dreamed that the tailor and I, his creator, had an awful row about the direction I wanted the story to go. I told him the plot, the action as I saw it. He told me that I had my story all wrong, it hadn’t happened that way at all, and why did I insist on changing the truth?
Well, he won and I wrote the story his way. Let me remind you that “The Tailor Who Told the Truth” is a written story; that is, I did not tell it out loud to a listener and write it down afterward. Though for me there is a close connection between telling and writing, they are, in the end, two different processes. But I believe that the more you tell stories, and the more you listen to stories, the more it will affect the way you write stories.
How?
First, you find yourself creating characters who are not just individuals but also types. I do not mean stereotypes, those unrealized abstractions on which so many stories have foundered. I mean types of people. The misanthrope. The miser. The martyr. The woman who wants a child. The man who lives in a shell. A character who is both an individual and a type is larger than life. Let us call him an archetype; he is some facet of ourselves that we have in common with the rest of humanity.
Second, you find you are not dealing with individual situations but with the forces that created them. I call these forces good and evil, though I would not name them as such in a story. Stories that develop archetypal situations have the truth and the authority of proverbs, no matter how fantastic the particular events they describe.
Third, you find yourself using fewer adjectives and more verbs, because verbs make the story move. You don’t develop your character by describing the kind of man he is—a bad man, a good man, an indifferent man; you develop him by showing what he does. It’s up to the reader to pass judgment.
Fourth, you the writer become less important than the story you have to tell. And thank heaven for that. Which of us doesn’t enjoy telling tall tales where we can lie outrageously without having to justify ourselves?
So far, so good. But we are readers and writers, not storytellers sitting around a fire, spinning tales out of a common heritage. I suppose it’s the desire to bring the two together that leads some writers to put a story into the mouth of a narrator, at one remove from the writer himself. In “The Man in the Shell,” from which I quoted earlier, Chekhov uses a narrator, so that we have a story within a story.
Let me suggest two reasons for using a narrator to tell your story. First, you may want a limited point of view rather than an omniscient point of view. Second, you may want the economy that a story has when it is told rather than written. Isaac Bashevis Singer once explained to an interviewer why he so often puts his story into the mouth of an old village woman instead of narrating it himself. He says:
Why I like narrators? There is a good reason for that: because when I write a story without a narrator I have to describe things, while if the narrator is a woman she can tell you many things almost in one sentence. Because in life when you sit down to tell a story you don’t act like a writer. You don’t describe too much. You jump, you digress and this gives to the story speed and drama … it comes out especially good when you let an old woman tell a story. In a moment she’s here, and a moment she’s there. And because of this you feel almost that a human being is talking to you, and you don’t need the kind of description which you expect when the writer himself is telling the story.5
To illustrate Singer’s point, I want to quote from the opening paragraph of one of his stories. It is called “Passions.”
“When a man persists he can do things which one might think can never be done,” Zalman the glazier said. “In our village, Radoszyce, there was a simple man, a village peddler, Lieb Belkes. He used to go from village to village, selling the peasant women kerchiefs, glass beads, perfume, all kinds of gilded jewelry. And he would buy from them a measure of buckwheat, a wreath of garlic, a pot of honey, a sack of flax. He never went farther than the hamlet of Byszcz, five miles from Radoszyce. He got the merchandise from a Lublin salesman, and the same man bought his wares from him. This Lieb Belkes was a common man but pious. On the Sabbath he read his wife’s Yiddish Bible. He loved most to read about the land of Israel. Sometimes he would stop the cheder boys and ask, ‘Which is deeper—the Jordan or the Red Sea?’ ‘Do apples grow in the Holy Land?’ ‘What language is spoken by the natives there?’ The boys used to laugh at him. He looked like someone from the Holy Land himself—black eyes, a pitch-black beard, and his face was also swarthy.” 6
Singer’s story is a long way from “The Juniper Tree,” but a number of things in that paragraph will show you that their roots grow in the same place, the archetypal obsessions of man. The opening sentence directs me to the point of the story, which, like a fable, demonstrates a simple proverb: the man who persists can do the impossible. The man who wants to go to the Holy Land will find a way to get there.
Singer recognizes that a man’s actions are often inseparable from the objects that make up the fabric of his life. He also knows that we cannot see or touch an abstraction. And so he gives us garlic and perfume to smell, and honey and buckwheat to taste, and jewelry and kerchiefs to please the eye, and speech to please the ear. The speech is what I call essential speech in a story; that is, I could recognize this character by his speech later on, even if Singer chose not to identify him. The opposite of essential speech is small talk, which does not directly express a man or woman’s deepest needs, but which is really a way of avoiding them.
Now suppose you have resolved to try writing as if you were telling a story. You are ready to simplify your style and to emphasize action and plot more than you may ever wish to do again. But there is one more problem you will have to confront, and I have saved it for the last because it is the most unsettling and, at the same time, the most exhilarating. When you tell a story, you find that without knowing how or why, you cross over easily from the natural to the supernatural as if you felt absolutely no difference between them.
By supernatural, let me hasten to add, I do not mean ghosts, although ghosts of one kind or another may blow through your story and make themselves at home there. I mean the visible, tangible world released from the laws that, in ordinary experience, separate time from place. You know from your own experience that the supernatural is no farther away than your own dreams at night. I do not think there has ever been or ever will be a writer who does not draw on the healing chaos of dreams for the material of stories. Here is a world of wild and fearful happenings, which mercifully vanish when we open our eyes. But occasionally these happenings shine through our daytime lives and illuminate them.
When I am writing stories, I forget that many people do not read fiction, because they believe a book that is neither truthful nor instructive is a waste of time. And fiction, they believe, is not truthful but only made up. It is not instructive but only entertaining. Though my father read stories as a child, when he became a man he put away childish things. He died at the age of ninety-two, he was nearly sixty when I was born, and I believe he read his last piece of fiction in freshman English when he was eighteen. All the years of my growing up, he read nothing of mine except an occasional poem I wrote for his birthday when I didn’t have enough money to buy him my standard present of black socks.
Then one day, in his ninetieth year, he picked up a book of my stories and he started to read it. To his astonishment, he found himself in that book, a character in my stories, and like all characters, a fabricated being and yet a real one. In that book I was still trying to describe paradise, but now it was not a place. It was an experience occurring in time but not bound by it.
My father sat in his chair and read. He read one page for an hour. He never said a word to me, he never made a sound, and though he never cried in my presence when I was a child, now the tears were running down his face. He never said, “Stop, I’m there,” the way my sister did when we played our game so many years before, but it was the same game nonetheless, and we are all players. It requires two people, the teller and the listener. The teller tells the story he has made out of bits he has seen and pieces he has heard. His telling brings these fragments together, and in that healing synthesis, he gives the wasted hours of our lives an order they don’t have and a radiance that only God and the artist can perceive. We get up, we go to work, we come home dead tired, and sometimes we wonder what we are doing on this planet. And we know that in the great schemelessness of things, our own importance is a lie. Is the object of the game to tell that lie? Yes, to tell the lie. But in the telling, to make it true.
1. Lore Segal, trans., “The Master Thief,” in The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, vol. I (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 113.
2. Segal, “The Juniper Tree,” vol. 2, p. 314.
3. Segal, “The Juniper Tree,” vol. 2, pp. 314–15.
4. Avrahm Yarmolinski, ed., The Portable Chekhov (New York: Viking, 1973), pp. 355–56.
5. David M. Andersen, “Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations in California,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 16, 1970, p. 436.
6. Passions and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 296.