Stories To Tell

“Tell the stories that only you can tell.”  I’ve seen this quote attributed to everyone from Neil Gaiman to Aristotle, and it came up recently amongst my writing group for a bit of discussion.  While the way it is interpreted – that you as a storyteller should seek ways to bring your unique perspective to the story you want to tell – is innocuous enough, even in that guise I fear that it can have a chilling effect on would-be storytellers.  I, for one, know that if I only told stories that I thought that only I could tell, I would probably never tell stories.

Sure, unique perspective, my personal viewpoint and experiences informing the work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  That’s all well and good, but even with my polymath tendencies I don’t think that my fundamental perspective and experience is so radically different that someone else couldn’t tell the stories that I want to tell, and probably better than I can.  A better writer than I could, assuredly, take the rough ideas that tumble around in my head and transform them into something far closer to what I envision than what I manage to make appear on the page.  As I practice more as a writer, the gap between what I envision and what I actually write narrows, but most certainly there is someone out there who has devoted far more time to perfecting the authorial craft than I, with my many other occupations, have done.

I still write, though.  Not because I think that my stories are unique.  Oh, I’d like to think they’re a little different from what others are writing, but truly unique?  Hardly.  Not because I think that I’m such a fantastic writer.  I read stories from authors and cultures across history and see a higher quality of storytelling than I can muster.  My reasons for writing have nothing to do with putting my writing out into the world, with being able to contribute something special to the corpus of human literature.  No, my reasons for writing are more selfish than that: I write because I enjoy it, and because I’m just arrogant enough to want to share what’s in my head.  Not because it’s unique, but because it’s mine.

Especially in this present day, there is a great deal of emphasis (unhealthy, in my opinion) on writing from unique perspectives, which is always framed in terms of external identity groups, and there is considerable debate about when it is or is not appropriate to write about or from the perspective of an identity group to which you do not yourself belong.  Yet, to carry this logic to its inevitable conclusion, none of us should ever be writing about any character besides ourselves, and what kind of a story would that be?  A memoir, I guess.  Arguably, we should perhaps not even be writing about ourselves, because how many of us know ourselves that well?  Storytelling is all about individuals, not identity groups.  It’s narrative physics, the quantum physics of the writing world, and if you can write from the perspective of one character who is not 100% identical to yourself, then you can also write about other characters who are unlike yourself.  This is not license to do so badly, and the more unlike yourself a character is the more you might struggle to do it well, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be done or that it isn’t worth the effort.

If you look back over the stories I’ve posted or published, you’ll see that there are characters in which you can see at least a fragment of me.  It’s no coincidence that so many of my stories involve thoughtful, academic characters, but that’s not actually me, even if it’s a facet that I’ve expanded upon in a given character.  Nor are those the only characters who appear in my stories.  In fact, some of my most interesting stories (in my opinion, anyway) feature characters who are little or nothing like me and have experiences and background nothing like mine.  Should I have declared myself somehow ineligible to write them because they’re not part of the story that only I can tell?  I don’t think so.  If we took this in a literal sense, we would have to throw all of speculative fiction out the window.

There are certainly stories that I can’t tell, and there are stories that I know I can’t tell yet.  Part of what I think about when I choose a next project is whether or not I think that my writing skill is at a level to handle the project, or if the project itself, and my skill, both need more time to develop.  That’s what, as much as I want to tell it, I’ve yet to dedicate myself to writing the Hiarathala story.  However, to say that we must tell the stories that are unique to us is to crimp ourselves.  Don’t set out to tell the story that only you can tell.  Set out to tell the story that you want to tell.