historical fiction

The Ghost of Storytelling Past

/ Scott Nagele / 2 Comments

I’m reading A Christmas Carol to my six-year-old at bedtime every night. I could have picked up a children’s version for him, but I’m going with the original, even though much of it will fly over his head.

I made this decision for three reasons:

  1. I’m cheap and didn’t want to buy another version of a book I already own.
  2. I’m not a fan of watered down versions of books. If the boy opts for a children’s book, we’ll choose one that began as a children’s book.
  3. I think one of the parts that is the first to be cut in the children’s versions is one of the parts I most want my children to hear.

Reasons 1 and 2 are self-explanatory. Let me explain reason 3.

A Christmas Carol is a brilliant story. It wouldn’t have been made into a million different movies if it weren’t. There’s so much to love about it, and so much to like in many of its offspring films. But there is one thing that the original text has that nothing else does.

Dickens

The beautifully illustrated edition we read.

The original has Dickens himself as the storyteller.

I’m not just talking about his genius with words. I’m not just talking about his ability to set a tone or his command of the narrative. I’m talking about those instances when the narrator comes onto the page and speaks directly to the reader. This is an ancient form of magic, all but lost to us now.

It is a relic of the time when children heard stories at their elders’ knees, when stories were enriched by the personality of the storyteller.

You can’t do that today. We won’t stand for it. We want our stories delivered anonymously, not chuckled to us by a narrator who presumes to refer to himself in the first person. We don’t want it to smell of grandpa’s after shave; we want an antiseptic story to be beamed through the vacuum of space, like it is on TV.

We want to be shown, not told.

Now, I will be the first admit that some of the old fellows did too much telling. I will also agree that showing is far more effective than telling in our time, when much of the art of storytelling has been lost. But I will argue that there is a mix that includes both showing and telling that is the rarest treasure in the unveiling of a story.

Dickens was a master at the mixology of show and tell. And who could appreciate show and tell more than a first grader? Okay, maybe a kindergartener, but what’s done is done.

I want to offer my children the chance to hear the storyteller’s voice — to appreciate when a story is even better because of who is telling it and what his character adds to the telling.

Maybe they won’t catch it this year, but there’s always the next. And besides Dickens, we’ve got lots of Hans Christian Andersen to get to.

There are only three parts of your story to worry about: the beginning, the middle, and the end

/ Scott Nagele / Leave a comment

I’ve moved on to my second proof copy of A Housefly in Autumn. This incorporates all the changes I made to the first proof. I normally go through four or five proofs before I am satisfied that the book is ready to be presented to the public.

In the first proof copy I made numerous changes, none of them major. A few of them were actual errors, but most involved making sentences more efficient. It’s amazing, the little things you don’t see until the manuscript holds like a real book.

The first proof had me worried about typographical errors and other embarrassing occurrences. I feel better about that stuff now, but the second proof brings its own worries.

These are big picture worries, about the overall execution of the storytelling.

Beating up the proof copy

My wife’s proof copy is already taking a beating, and she’s only just begun.

If you break a story down into beginning, middle, and ending, that leaves only three parts to worry about. This reduces the number of worries and gives you more time to worry over each thing.

I most recently obsessed about the middle. Before the first proof, I rewrote much of the middle, trying to transform parts that retained too much “telling” into more “showing.” Since this novel has a large oral storytelling component, in which a character literally tells a story, there were some limits to how much of this I could do.

I’m not saying I won’t obsess about the middle again, but since I just finished doing that, the middle will have to go to the back of the line.

For now, I’m focused on worrying about the beginning. It is an axiom of modern fiction that you have to grab the reader by the throat at word one and not let him breathe until he is irretrievably engulfed in the story. This concept is so well revered that a fair percentage of books now begin with explosions or with characters burying (or digging up) dead bodies.

Those incidents aren’t appropriate for this book, so I’m toying with adding a flash forward to an action-packed scene at the beginning. I need to do this without it seeming too much like a cheap gimmick. It also needs to fit with the historical setting, when people began a story at the beginning, regardless of where the bridges were set to blow.

If I can’t figure out how to work in some page 1 fireworks, I guess I’ll have to hope that my beginning is interesting enough. Meanwhile, I’ll worry that it’s not.

I have not spent much time obsessing about the ending. I’m pretty comfortable with it, except for maybe the last couple of pages. I haven’t found time to worry about a mere page or two, but I will at some point.

Do the last lines bring home the points I worked hard to make throughout the book? Or are they relics of the book this used to be, before it matured and added meat to its bones? These are the questions that await my future obsession with the ending.

Maybe that will come with proof copy number three.