Storytelling
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by Deb in On Writing, The Girl
I have always been fascinated by stories. It’s the basis of what makes up lives, really, the moments that are remembered as so important or humorous that we retell it to our children and our friends. My favorite early stories came from family members and I especially loved listening to stories my grandmother told. Growing up in a family of fourteen children, there were many. Her father was a Baptist Preacher and the family farmed, including the grew both crops and cotton in Ellis County Texas, after trekking there from Tennessee. It’s frustrating to remember pieces of a story, like why my grandmother was crying in a family photo (with 14 children in the family, she was wearing big bows tied upon her feet; she had outgrown her shoes, they couldn’t yet afford another pair, and her sister Lilly was wearing her outgrown ones) and not have the details that make the story richer. I cannot help but long for the details of the child born in the middle of picking season for the cotton or the trek from Tennessee to Texas in the late 1800’s via wagon and mules. Oral story tellers are the foundation of so much of our pasts, and I find that I’ve aged too much to recall than tidbits of the stories I heard before my fifth birthday. I wish I had been old enough to write them down when she told me or disciplined enough to ask for re-tellings years later. It would have been a gift to commit those stories to paper before my grandmother died 17 years ago.
From the first moments that I could sound out words and realized that they formed sentences which in turn formed stories, I was hooked on the written word. I didn’t lessen my love for hearing stories, and to this day I love books on tape (or being read to at the ripe old age of almost-41), but I found that no matter where I was, I could entertain myself. I have been a voracious reader since the first grade.
When I think about it, I realize there was seduction in words even before I knew what the feeling was, I just knew that a few simple words on a page had the ability to send me to another place, make me feel and think and dream. Reading became my number one past time when I learned that I could immerse myself in a story no matter where I was: in my bedroom while the rest of my family slept, in the classroom when my work was finished, in the car on a boring trip, or up in the tree in my grandmother’s front yard. I read Little Women for the first time sitting in that tree. I am constantly finding writers that make me think and writers who make me feel and writers who make me laugh as I explore the worlds that their mind has created.
The desire to be able to do that for others came soon after I learned to read. I wanted to be able to make others feel the way I felt and see the world through my eyes. Finding the words to express the simplicities of the day or the complexities of the heart is a simple part of my being, yet the hardest thing to do at times. At times, I find that I can speak them, the challenge is to be able to also write them.
Through my desire to consume words as well as write them, I find inspiration for writing by reading other writers. Jimmy Buffet, for example, is a musician whose humor I appreciate (though I would never be a “parrot head”) and a quote from his auto-biography, A Pirate Looks at Fifty always comes to my mind when I ruminate on writing:
…I don’t have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers. Anyway, writing is not a competition to me. Writing is fun,and I am simply a storyteller. I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires. It’s a great challenge, like learning celestial navigation or becoming a seaplane pilot. Anyone bellying up to a bar with a few shots of tequila swimming around the bloodstream can tell a story. The challenge is to wake up the next day and carve through the hangover minefield and a million other excuses and be able to cohesively get it down on paper.
I want to take that tradition of storytelling that meant so much to what makes me, and be able to write in a way that others can see the world from my mind’s eye. The challenge, truly, is to find the discipline to carve through the fear and the other excuses and commit the words to paper.
And on that note, I have plans to watch old movies tonight. I hope you are having a lovely Saturday.