Writing and Storytelling aren't the same thing
And publishers' rejections are nowhere near as devastating as 5-year-olds who think you're boring.
There is nothing as humbling to a writer as trying to catch and hold the attention of a five-year-old. Well, except the experience of telling them a story and having them interrupt you with improvements. “No no no. They didn’t go into the meadow to find dandelions. Next they went into the enchanted forest to find a unicorn.”
Of course they did. And so the story changed to hold the little reader’s interest, and so I scrambled to find illustrators to bring these ideas to life.
Caption: Unicorn by Flora Bell
I’ve long loved the musicality of language, and I edit by ear, listening for the rhythm of sentences and the sound of words. But over the last few months, I’ve finally come to accept that being a good writer doesn’t make you a good storyteller. In fact, it can hold you back.
I’m staying at an Airbnb whose owners love genre fiction. The shelves are lined with everything from Anne Rice and John Grisham to Michael Connelly and John le Carré. The books are well-worn, read through. Every time I pick up a book from the shelf, I make it through five chapters before I remember that I was only trying to get a glimpse of what made the book successful. It’s completely obvious to me that they’re doing something right that I’m still learning how to do.
A long time ago, I was at a charity dinner. It was a significant expense for me at the time, and I have a high-paying job. I met a woman there who had managed to pay not only for her own ticket but for that of her partner. Intrigued, I asked her what she did. She was (and is) a romance novelist. Meeting her changed my view of the world significantly. At the time I hadn’t even written any books, never mind published them. I’d internalized the usual disdain for genre fiction, particularly romance. Now, I study genre fiction hungrily, trying to understand what makes these storytellers so successful.
It was only recently that I realized that all the so-called “classics” I grew up with were actually pulpy genre fiction in their day. Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas and Wilkie Collins were storytellers first, writers only second. It’s only in recent times that we’ve made the distinction between “literary” and “genre” fiction, and created a false supremacy of the first over the second, presumably to justify the cost of MFA programs.
To become a better storyteller, I find myself having to unlearn a lot of the techniques that I believed would make me successful as a writer. I keep telling myself mantras, like Shorter sentences, smaller words. Or, good writing is invisible. Because it is.
After all, the five-year-old won’t read my stories when she can do better.