Lee Martin - Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life

After years of writing both fiction and memoir, Ive come to believe that the term storytelling best fits what I do. Sometimes I tell stories about things that really happened in my life, sometimes I tell stories about things that really happened but with a healthy dose of invention added to the tale, and sometimes I make everything up by using my imagination. The point is that no matter the approach I take to the material at hand, Im always relying on the tools of the storyteller to construct an interesting narrative. If I do it well, the story will also take me to a place in which I know something I didnt before the telling began.

Id like to look, then, at a few tools in the storytellers toolbox that he or she cant do without. Whether you like to think of yourself as a writer of fiction or memoir, or both, here are some techniques that should serve you well.

Your first task as a storyteller is to persuade a reader. In both fiction and nonfiction we have to convince readers that whats happening on the page is authentic. We do that through the well-constructed scene. String enough well-constructed scenes together in a causal sequence and youll invite your readers to exist within that realm. What sort of material deserves the space that a scene allows? Moments made up of contradictions and turns, moments unlike other moments, moments that shake characters in some way or the other until theyre slightly different at the end than they were at the beginning.

Characters are interesting when theyre made up of contradictions. Its those contradictions and the writer who recognizes them that create the most memorable characters in works of fiction and nonfiction. If we give our characters free willif we dont fully know them too soonthey can take us to some interesting places that can either illuminate or complicate, or do both things at once, the thrust of our exploration of any particular subject. Our characters have to be able to surprise us, and the plot of a good story usually puts enough pressure on them until they cant help but reveal who they really are. The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, Chekhov writes in The Lady with the Pet Dog. A good story doesnt allow that secrecy to stand. A good story strips it away and leaves the character, to borrow from Woody Allen, without feathers.

A combination of sensory details can fully immerse readers in a scene and establish a writers authority. Readers are more willing to trust and follow a writer when they feel that the writer has a great deal of confidence in what he or she is portraying on the page. Scenes need to happen in specific locales; otherwise, they can seem not to have happened at all. Sensory details are the tools of the trade that the writer uses to convince us that something really happened. A carefully chosen detail can also provide an indirect path toward what the writer has come to say. Dont say, Im going to write a story of the loss of faith. Instead, la Flannery OConnor in Good Country People, say: Im going to write about a woman with a wooden leg. Im going to see where that leg might take me.

A good story locates itself within a particular consciousness. The interior journey of a point of view character provides an arc that coexists with the arc of the narrative. Readers want not only know to what happened but to also know the person who lived through the experience. Its the combination of the two that lends the narrative its significance.