The Technology of Storytelling

Writing is a form of technology: the book is a tool which more accurately (or perhaps, definitively) records a story for all time and space. Before writing, we still told stories, and these stories changed every time they were spoken, since a good storyteller would take the ‘frame’ of the tale and embellish it like a literary game of Telephone. The oral works which have come down to us in writing, such as those by Homer, or Beowulf, or any number of myths and religious texts, represent the oldest technology in existence: a thousand tale-tellers and their dreams kept the stories alive through sheer force of will, telling stories over and over again lest they fade into the twilight (as many stories undoubtedly did; we’ve probably lost more stories than we preserved). With the advent of writing we discovered new tool that would preserve a story, intact, for all time the second the ink dried on the page. Some feared it would make us lazy; perhaps we wouldn’t see the need to tell stories at all. After all, once we wrote them down, couldn’t we just read them over and over again? What need to keep making up new ones?

And yet, we did. In fact, we’ve probably written more in the past 50 years than was written in the past 500 (though I can’t speak for the quality!). We even invented a new kind of book which has since become ubiquitous with books themselves: the novel. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that this “new” style of writing was once exactly that—a brand new technology. The glut of novels that followed—fueled by a rising middle class and affluent women with time on their hands—promised new and exciting diversions: romance, certainly, but also gothic horror, scandalous satire, and exotic adventure. Imagine being the first person to cut the pages (old books had to be literally cut open) of Frankenstein, not knowing the work was destined to become a classic. Or browsing the local library one day and stumbling across something by a fellow called Dickens. 

While all of these authors did their share of borrowing, they were still pioneers, boldly creating new forms and genres. Books like Oliver Twist and Wuthering Heights passionately, sometimes clumsily, created the molds we continue to follow 200 years later. Even a recent bestseller like Andy Weir’s The Martian dutifully follows the Dickensian paradigm so faithfully that any 19th century reader would feel right at home (except for the colorful language, perhaps!). In essence, to write a novel is an act of historical preservation, as the age-old form is carefully taken out of mothballs and made to breathe our 21st century air. Remarkably, the breaths come deep and strong—it’s the same air, after all—and stories of outer space and zombie apocalypses are rattled off in a narrative that still retains a trace of a British accent.

Of course, this begs the question: if our ‘technology’ is more or less unchanged since the 19th century, what about the stories we tell? Aren’t we repeating the same stories over and over again? Even if we replace a story of doomed love on the moors with one on Titan, aren’t we still in Bronte’s England? Does changing the time or setting really change the story? This becomes even more distressing if we take genre fiction into account, which has largely replaced so-called ‘literary’ fiction in the marketplace. While every work of genre fiction, from romance to science fiction has its origins in the recent or ancient past, these works have become even more self-referential, a seemingly endless series of variations on themes from the latest bestseller. So what does it mean to be an author in the 21st century, when all the characters have been introduced, all the plots laid bare? Have we been reduced to being a copy of a copy of a copy, a fiction made of fun house mirrors that reduce the original to a grotesque caricature?

Going back several hundred years, the 14th century Indian poet, Kabir, once wrote:

Accomplish one thing and you accomplish all,

seek to do all and you lose the one vital thing.

When you water the root of a plant,

it flowers and bears fruit to satisfaction.

(Aphorism 37, translated by Vinay Dharwadker)

Okay, so he probably wasn’t writing about the writing per se, yet the shoe clearly fits. When writing every author faces the dreaded “anxiety of influence,” feeling the tread of his or her predecessors behind every keystroke. How can anyone write a horror novel after Dracula or The Shining? Contemplate science fiction after 1984 or 2001? And fantasy after Tolkein? The fear of not being original forces a writer to jump through torturous hoops, trying to extinguish one too many fears in the pursuit of a “novel” experience. Or take the recent craze for “world building,” prompting authors to create entire continents and planets from scratch, complete with strange beings and their arcane tongues—however much they ultimately sound like Elvish.

Yet instead of all this, why not accomplish that “one thing” which is at the root of all good writing: story...plot...character...emotion...belief. Attempting even one of these—even if a writer inevitably falls short, as we often do—is a miraculous feat. For as much as we admire Tolkein’s linguistic abilities, The Lord of the Rings saga isn’t a work of dry scholarship: it’s a story of heroes, of friends, of the small things of the world showing themselves the equal of the great. That’s why people come back to his story generation after generation, to imagine themselves heroes in such a world (and heck, I still can’t speak a world of Elvish).

Tolkein never lost sight of the “one vital thing” which too many authors forget in their scramble to be the “next big thing,” or more simply, to be “novel.” The novel is already novel, and we’re already dressing in borrowed clothes. Every reader who picks up a book is already sold; they already want to believe that your characters can defy death and race across the universe. All you have to do is accomplish one thing—whatever you want that one thing to be—and place your trust in that. The pioneers of storytelling gave us the tools, and they work remarkably well; perhaps one day we’ll toss them aside for something better, but for now we only need to water the plant. If we take care of the roots, to use Kabir’s phrase, the flower will “bear fruit to satisfaction,” meaning that it will bear the weight of both your story and the reader’s expectations.

We’re not original, but we don’t have to be: creating one good character makes us believe in storytelling again...it makes us want to read more. And as long as we keep reading, the stories will never end—and that’s the “one vital thing” every writer agrees on. We always want a sequel.