Calling All Storytellers
Author Frederic S. Durbin calls all storytellers from those in their early days to those further along to revel in the act of storytelling.
I’m teaching Fantasy World-Building to a classroom full of high-school students, and they’re working on parting blessings spoken in a culture of clans ruled by war-chiefs in a harsh, frozen northern environment. For this imaginary people, life is hard and brutal. Loyalty and courage are the highest values—my students have already established that. In groups, they’ve been working out the greetings these folk might use. I ask, “When two people are saying goodbye to each other, what do they say?”
Ravenna has a suggestion: “May the snow cover your sins.”
I stop in my tracks, extend both hands toward her, smile, and nod emphatically. “YES!”
That’s exactly what they say. In this culture, there will be blood. There will be a trail of dead bodies. Ravenna’s idea is that the people are saying to one another, “May you get away with murder. May the kinsfolk of those you slay not come after you.”
A broad-shouldered man cloaked in furs, a scar crossing his face from hairline to jaw, turns at the ramp of his longboat and squints back through the snow and the wind that knifes across the fjord, whipping his beard into black flame. “Little brother!” he roars: “May the snow cover your sins!”
A younger version of the first man holds up an axe. “May it pile deep over yours!”
The students work, week by week, on the geography of their fantasy worlds . . . the peoples and creatures, the history, politics, economics, language, cosmology, religions, folk sayings and superstitions, the fine arts. Students decide that the artistic expression of the desert-dwelling Toogs is to stamp, all in unison, with their broad, flat feet in elaborate rhythms on the sand, hundreds of Toogs together in the percussive music of their people . . .
And then they write, giving their ideas embodiment in stories—that is the goal.
Another day, a student is working on a cover letter for a submission. He reads, “In this scintillating and suspenseful story, . . .”
Gently, I stop him there. “No, wait a second,” I say. “Don’t call your work scintillating and suspenseful. Let the editor be the judge of that.”
This is not the stuff of the typical classroom. In my course, students are asked to write a scene in which the protagonist and the villain are fighting hand-to-hand atop a moving train. In another of my classes, we use a roomful of vintage, manual typewriters to practice concentration and deep focus, away from the beeping handheld screens, the Internet’s torrent. Always, we address practical concerns faced daily by working fictioneers.
The students have come to our school for the performing arts to learn from professionals in the field. In our department, Writing and Publishing, students want to learn from teachers who regularly do those things. We’re able to teach what we do in our real lives.
An old, cynical adage says, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” I would correct that to say, “Those who can should also teach,” because we need a next generation of those who can.
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This assignment—to write the piece you’re reading—was hard. It led me to a self-evaluation. Am I qualified to teach these things? Do I know what I’m talking about?
Well, I’ve been selling my stories and novels to traditional markets for a quarter-century. I’m not a household name, for sure. There’s no danger of being swarmed by screaming fans wanting autographs, or having to elude paparazzi. But when I did the math, I realized that, between first publications, reprints, audiobooks, e-books, libraries, book clubs, and the passage of time, some part of even my modest oeuvre has reached many thousands of readers. And that’s something—that’s miraculous and humbling.
Imagine it: a vast stadium with an uncountable crowd in the stands (if all those readers over time could be in one place), and you’re on the stage front and center—every pair of eyes in those stands has read your words, enjoying the gardens you’ve planted.
“But that’s you,” you say.
Fair enough. First of all, maybe you’re a lot farther along in your career than I am, and you’ve already stopped reading this essay. But maybe you’re just starting out. Maybe you’re still dreaming, still finishing that first project. Consider: We all start out having published nothing. And we all have the undiscovered road ahead of us, a keyboard under our fingers or a pen in our hands. Does success take time? Yes, usually. Does success depend on numbers? No—not in my experience.
You know what means more to me than numbers? Here’s one thing: the fact that I became a frequently-published writer in Cricket, a magazine my mom started getting for me from its first issue. I met Marianne Carus, the publication’s founder, who gave me my first break as a writer. I met other Cricket editors; I became lifelong friends with some. One in particular taught me to see what’s actually on the page, not what I thought was there. As a writer, I got to a point where I was working with these editors, sharing their vision, helping to bring good stories to young readers around the world. That means more to me than numbers.
For each one of my published books so far, I’ve heard from a great many fans I don’t know, who aren’t obligated to like my writing. New messages trickle in, bringing me great encouragement. A few such readers have told me, “This is my favorite book of all time”—not just their favorite of my books, but of all the books they’ve read. That’s worth more to me than numbers.
And the thing worth most to me, along with living my dream of making books and stories, is getting to pass on that love to my students and helping them with their craft. They’re all learning, in one way or another. Now and then, one of them reads an original work aloud, and it resounds. The rest of us sit in awed admiration.
In our classes, we hone the tools of fiction writing. We work on natural dialogue, sensory description, vivid action, purposeful language . . . symbol and flashback. Foreshadowing. We work on trimming the excess. We approach a published story like mechanics, looking under the hood to examine how and why it works. I tell them to go through life as collectors, with a notebook handy, because some of the best stuff in stories is stuff you can’t make up. It’s what you hear in the bus station, in the theater line, at church, at a yard sale. We work on writing not just what we know, but on writing what we want to know, what we’re passionate about, what we love. We often read our work aloud to one another, not because it’s an assigned task, but because it’s what we want to do. We write because we want to wow the audience—we yearn for those laughs and gasps of surprise . . . and best of all, those tears when a moment is not necessarily sad, or not only sad, but when it has wings—when it’s beautiful.
Long ago (yet not so long), as a high-schooler myself, I heard the writer Paul Darcy Boles describe writers in this way: “We are all storytellers, sitting around the cave of the world.” I already knew then that I wanted to rise and take my place before the dancing fire. Now new storytellers rise and join me, our shadows huge and dark on the cave wall. New and old storytellers, we raise our voices in turns, bringing forth tales only we can tell.
Check out Frederic S. Durbin's The Country Under Heaven here:
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