Imagine the earliest humans gathered around a campfire while saber-tooth cats, dire wolves, and the more familiar dangers like bears and hyenas and who knows what else prowled in the primitive dark. Before they slept, they must have talked to each other, and much of that first talk must have been stories: What they did or saw or heard or felt; what their daily adventures were; maybe what they learned.
We come from a long line of storytellers.
It’s the same today. If you become a good eavesdropper (a skill I encourage in any writer), you hear stories at the grocery store, in line at the post office, riding a bus, eating in a restaurant. Everywhere. People relate their stories.
I taught high school. Teenagers tell stories too and I don’t think there was much difference between their subject matter and the earliest humans.
For a long time, I puzzled over the difference between the little stories we all tell each other and the ones I read in books.
It wasn’t until I listened to a presenter talk about this very subject that the distinction became clear.
My more educated friends had probably heard this before, but it was new to me when I learned it. I went to a high school creative writing conference and attended a presentation on “Natural Narratives.” The premise was that there are stories people tell each other on a regular basis, and that these stories are all structured the same way. They include these parts, not always exactly in this order:
– Abstract or quick summary. This is sort of a set up for the story, like “I was nearly scared to death this morning.”
Orientation. Here the storyteller answers the basic journalistic questions: who, when, what, where and/or why, like “My mom and I were pulling out of our driveway to go to the store.”
– Complicating action. This is the bulk of the story. “We were about halfway onto the street when this pickup truck with frost still covering its windows missed our bumper by an inch. Mom saw it coming, but I didn’t. Her scream nearly startled the hell out of me.”
– Result or resolution. This is where the listeners find out what happened at the end. “She apologized about fifty times before we got to the store.”
– Coda. This is where the storyteller brings the audience back to the present. It’s the storyteller saying that the story is over. “It took an hour for my heart to get back to normal.”
– Evaluation. The evaluation answers the “so what?” question. That might be something like, “So, I’m going to be a lot more careful backing out of the driveway from now on.”
I thought back to the stories I hear kids tell each other.
I’ve intentionally listened for these elements since the presentation, and they pretty much nail what a person does when they tell a story. What the speaker did then was to show how “natural narratives” can become “literary” narratives.
He said that although the difference between the “natural” and the “literary” can be tough to discern at the boundary, there do seem to be three distinct differences.
- A literary narrative will mess with the six narrative elements:
– Delete the abstract, coda and/or evaluation so that the reader has to provide those parts
– Put the elements in a different order. Maybe starting with the coda and then to the other parts.
– Add dialog
– Add characters, change the location, change the point of view (first to third, for example).
- Use a more literary language:
– Show instead of tell
– Make allusions
– Figurative language (like simile, metonymy, metaphors, etc.)
– Make use of the sound of language (rhythm, diction, syntax)
- This doesn’t mean making prose sound poetic (necessarily), but it does mean the language should be clear, tight and strong.
- (this is the big one) Make a connection to a larger meaning:
– Like poetry, a literary story is seldom just about what it appears to be about. Don’t tell in the story what the larger meaning is, but that meaning should come out.
- Unify and Focus:
– An image or symbol or metaphor should unify the story. More than a single unifying element may exist.
– Like poetry, the language should be concise.
What the workshop facilitator had us do during our hour with him was to tell a “natural narrative,” and then rewrite it into a “literary narrative.” The main difference between the two for me was the attention to making a connection to a larger meaning. I thought it was a very interesting exercise.
As I said, the boundary between a “natural narrative” and “literary narrative” isn’t finely delineated, and it’s not necessarily the difference between stories with a lot of action and stories without, or stories told colloquially vs. stories told formally.
What I took from the presentation that immediately impacted my own story telling is that I started to look for the presence of the six elements from natural narratives in my work. My stories that didn’t seem to be successful often managed to leave one of the elements out, often time by not paying enough attention to orienting the reader.
Not orienting the reader was my weakness. Yours could be different. Sometimes at the beginning, but also in any scene change. I’d be so caught up in the storytelling that I’d forget that the reader couldn’t see the new setting when I jumped to a different scene. Where were we? Were we inside or outside? Where were the characters in relation to each other? What else was changed that was important to understanding the scene?
But for someone else their weakness might be in not communicating the resolution well or one of the other elements.
Remember the campfire from the beginning of this essay? I like to think that among those primitive humans, some of them grew better at this storytelling thing. They may have become known for it. And somewhere along the way, a really good storyteller learned that the effectiveness of their story didn’t have to be tied to the truth.
They could exaggerate, rearrange the incidents, invent dialogue, create characters, and they learned that a good story made their audience laugh or cry or cringe in fear. Their stories sent the audience to sleep with grand adventures in their heads filled with heroes and villains and larger-than-life events.
Maybe it happened that way. I don’t know, but you have to know the first story told by the fire was something like, “Grog saw a lion by the pond today,” and somehow eventually evolved into Gilgamesh, and The Iliad and the Odyssey, and Pride and Prejudice, and The Pickwick Papers, and the explosion of story that fills our libraries and book stores now.
I don’t think you can go wrong by looking at the elements in “natural narratives” and applying them to your own fiction.
Those first storytellers may have a lesson or two to teach us.
