Fiction As Storytelling

I once experienced one of those "Eureka!" moments on the subject of fiction writing.

I was pondering how much trouble I had writing fiction when I was a young wannabe author. I knew what good fiction was when I read it, but I couldn't seem to translate that knowledge into my own writing.

I think I finally understand why: I got bogged down in so-called rules, formal outlining, trivial details of plot, characterization and description, etc. that had little if anything to do with storytelling. I didn't realize that a fiction writer is primarily a storyteller and this prevented me from creating an interesting tale.

What we call literature evolved from mythologizing in prehistoric cultures. Before written language, people gathered around a fire at night and listened to a shaman spin tales of gods, demons, heroes, villains and human fate. The stories were larger than life, which is why they fascinated. They lifted listeners out of ordinary day-to-day existence if only for a brief time. They helped to make the "short nasty" lives of prehistoric people more tolerable.

But much of modern literature has lost this myth-making quality. Many authors today write more and more about less and less, as if the essence of a story lies in trivial details. The big picture is often missing.

That's why I couldn't write decent stories when I was young. I focused on detail rather than the big picture and I suspect that a lot of new writers do the same thing.

There are only a limited number of great themes in fiction: love, war, adversity, hope, death, fate, etc. Modern authors tend to write about petty issues such as social standing (or its absence), violence, sexual politics and the like. The focus is on small and the end result lacks mythological depth.

My advice to new writers is to aim for the stars and concentrate on the big picture of human life. Be a storyteller in the first draft, then worry about trivial details when you rewrite.

Very interesting observations. Perhaps some writers aren't in touch with the prospective mythic element in themes because they've never read any mythology or picked up a book by Joseph Campbell or noted how Star Wars and The Matrix and other popular stories rely so heavily on myth.

Yes, the picture of human life is a good way to describe what's missing, especially as new writers begin trying to get a story down on paper. The last thing they need to be doing at this point is worrying about rules. Waste of time and irrelevant.

Malcolm