Two-Way Storytelling

Storytelling, in its written form, is an evolution of older, oral storytelling traditions.  Despite the relatively static medium, a written story is no less dynamic than its verbal antecedent, because it is still a conversation between the writer and the reader, like that between the storyteller and the listener.  This is because the reader is not a mere passive recipient of the story the author is telling; they must actively engage with the words on the page for them to become a story.

One of the most fascinating things to me about writing is what other people get from a story, because it can be not only different from what I as the author intended, but might be entirely outside the scope of anything I as the author considered in writing it.  For November’s Elegant Literature prompt, I wrote a story about an archeologist kidnapped by space pirates, which led one of my writing group members to deep musings about the motivations and interplay between the archetypical archeologist (in-system) and the archetypical pirate (out-system).  His philosophical considerations were far deeper than anything I pondered before or during the initial writing, but after he wrote them, I could see the bare bones of them in the story, too, and those thoughts ended up being incorporated (in part) into my revisions.

It led me to reflect on the iceberg theory of writing.  This is usually invoked in worldbuilding or description, specifically, where you as a writer must sketch out only enough of the world to suggest to the reader that you did a lot more that didn’t make it onto the page, but I contend that you can, and should, extend the concept to storytelling as a whole.  What you put on the page, alone, is not a story.  It’s text, but it’s not a full story, and it doesn’t become a full story until the reader applies their imagination to those words.  In that sense, what you as a writer create is really the tip of the thing that is mostly underwater, be it iceberg, alligator, or hippopotamus, and the rest of its substance is provided by the reader.  The author provides a skeleton, a framework, and the reader provides the flesh, the substance, to fill out that initial sketch.

No matter how detailed a writer you are, no matter how much thought you put into your story and how many words you end up employing in telling it, you can never convey perfectly the image in your head…and that assumes that the image in your head is complete in the first place.  Even when you read The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien belabored for so long and in which he provided such vivid descriptions, what you imagine is not what was in his head, and it’s not what was in another reader’s head.  That’s just as true of The Wheel of Time or any other book.  Thus, the book becomes a product of the author and the reader together, just like in oral storytelling.

This is a powerful thing, and the greatest stories are the ones that take advantage of it.  Stories like The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars stick with us in part because they create something bigger in the reader’s mind than the immediate story being told.  It’s almost like they provide a playground and a few guidelines for the reader’s imagination, and then the reader is free to run wild within those guides.

You don’t have to think about all of the ways in which a reader might imagine your story when you’re writing it, and you probably shouldn’t try.  If anything, it is something you can keep in the back of your mind to motivate what details you decide to include and exclude.  I’m notorious, for instance, of providing a bare minimum of character description (to the annoyance of some readers) because I don’t think it’s relevant to most stories, and I would rather spend those words describing something that I think will make the experience of the story richer for the reader.  This is especially true in shorter stories.

When I was a younger writer, I didn’t think of this as a good thing – I wanted to write a story that would be the same for every reader.  It took growing my confidence as a writer, and reflecting on oral storytelling traditions and the performative nature of language, to realize that storytelling isn’t a one-way street, that I am not so much telling a story, dictating it via text, as I am sharing it with a fellow traveler along the journey that the story describes.  Like any journey, what each person who experiences it will take away from it will be different, and equally valid.  Thus, the written word, when properly executed, is no less alive than the spoken version, and words on a page are as dynamic a presentation as the best oral interpretation.