Waiting and Hoping

On success in storytelling.

Photo by Sebastian Voortman

No one should really know my name.

I’m not a famous writer or speaker or filmmaker. Who am I to tell you how to put together stories? How do I know what makes a story stronger or how to take a bad story and make it into a good one?

Telling stories is the only thing I’ve done consistently throughout my life. I babbled stories at my older brothers, parents, extended families, and I took note of when they were rapt or bored. My parents would debrief in the car on the way home from family events and I would listen to the stories that they’d share that the other hadn’t heard, about this uncle’s car accident or that sister’s medical appointment. They were teaching me which stories worked and which ones didn’t, and I couldn’t help but take it in.

Throughout my life, storytelling has helped me make a career. When I made my own major in college, stories helped me convince others. When I interviewed for jobs, stories were what pushed me through to the next round. Stories are, more than anything else, the building blocks of my life.

So, no. I don’t have many professional credits to my name. But there are many things I wish I would have learned about the craft when I first started telling stories, techniques that would have kept an interview going, or kept a family member from looking away in the middle of a sentence.

I’d like to warn you, though, that I can only ever teach you the things that work for me. This may feel a bit obvious; whenever you are reading any written piece, it is written from that person’s point of view, but some people treat all writing advice as universal. I know that certain things that work for me would never work for others. There are some rules that I would never break that other writers consider flexible and vice-versa. As with all things, take what might work for you and toss the rest.

My favorite book about writing is not On Writing by Stephen King or Carlson Writes a Story by Ron Carlson or the Zen of Writing by Ray Bradbury. It’s Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. She is also not the most well known of writers, although I’m sure she has done quite well for herself. I’ve never read her other books, although family and friends have and I’ve gotten mixed reviews at best.

So why does her book on writing work best for me?

Because it isn’t really about how to write a better story. It’s about how writing can help you live a better life.

Delving into all of the wonderful things Anne Lamott teaches is an entirely different blog post, but one of the chapters in Bird by Bird is dedicated solely to the reasons why we write. If you want to be famous or make money, there are other ways. Play the stock market, donate to charity, start a business. But writing for writing’s sake, for the pleasure of building a world and showing it to another person, of giving someone the pleasure you yourself have extracted from other books, that is singular. And separate from the idea of making a living.

I don’t really want to hear the things that Stephen King has to tell me. He might be able to tell me how to become a successful writer, but, to me, success isn’t as important as being a good storyteller. Storytelling isn’t just something I want to be good at, it’s something that’s in me, something that happens when I’m left to my own devices. If you gave me every pleasure in the world, if you placed me in paradise with every possible entertainment at my beck and call, I would write. If you put me in a cell, isolated from the world, I’d figure out a way to tell myself stories. Even in high school, I have assignments that I had completed or papers handed back to me that I immediately flipped over and started writing stories on the back of.

My senior year in college I had a writing mentor tell me not to apply to an MFA program straight after graduation. “Only go to an MFA if that’s the only thing that you can do,” he said. “If you can do anything else, try that first.” My parents told me similar things in Junior High when I harbored a small desire to become a preacher.

I’ve been able to find other ways of making a living and I still struggle with the idea of massaging my writing to fit more perfectly in a box so I can be marketed more easily. At the end of the day, I’m not someone who will sacrifice what stories I want to tell on the altar of success. I’ve been able to use storytelling to shape a life for me that lets me tell the stories I want to tell, not the ones that will sell the most books. Hopefully, those stories will get me an audience, someday. I’m privileged enough that I can wait and hope.