There’s More Than One Way to Tell a Story

One of the benefits of being a novelist is that you have an excuse for sitting around, standing around, or lying around reading a novel. When others ask you what you’re doing, you can righteously answer, “I’m working.”

For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing a Weekly Pitch blog to accompany my nonfiction book, The Novel Pitch, which I plan to expand by adding more pitches in the near future. This means not only that I have a good excuse to be reading novels and short story collections but that I need to do so. I want to write pitch examples for as many categories and sub-categories as I can, and so I have purposely branched out from my comfort zone of mainstream, literary, mystery and detective categories to include science fiction, vampire literature, apocalyptic novels and other genres somewhat strange to my literary experience. And what I have learned is that there is good writing in every type of literature I have explored and that stories may be told (or in this case, written) in many different ways.

From ancient cave paintings to the hip-hop lyrics of today, human beings have been telling stories in many forms for millennia. It has been reported that the oldest known cave painting, found in Spain, is at least 64,000 years old and, having been attributed to Neanderthals, presumably predates human beings by 20,000 years. So, you see, whether told in pictures or in words, the need to tell stories seems embedded in our very nature. We are, as such books as Wired for Story by Lisa Cron inform us, well, “wired for story.”

But there are many stories to tell and many ways in which to tell the same story. In American Samoa, local history and culture are preserved in tattoos. Each village has a chief and a talking chief, who speaks for the chief. When a future chief reaches the age of 14, he and a friend, who will become the talking chief, begin to get their tattoos that tell the story of their village. This is no light matter as the process is long and painful and spans several months.

The traditional tattoos, which can cover the body from the chest to the knees, are made by tapping a shark’s tooth, which has been attached to a stick and then dipped into ink, deeply into the skin, producing a tattoo a few taps at a time. Furthermore, the two boys must prepare to take up the mantle of responsibility and give up some of their boyhood activities in return. They may no longer climb palm trees as this may rip the skin, and if the ink from a tattoo mixes with their blood, they could die. That being said, I feel fortunate that I can tell the stories I want to tell simply by typing words into a computer and thereby leave my skin unscathed!

But even within the more common realm of written stories in modern times, variations on presentation abound. Novels have been written in first person, third person, and even second person point of view, and some have employed more than one of those points of view in the same story. Moving the story forward with letters or diary entries is not uncommon, and flashbacks are just one method of providing the reader with backstory.

As I write this article, I am more than halfway through reading Audrey Niffenegger’s novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. I was surprised to see such an excellent and well-established literary writer jump points of view from one character to another not only within the same scene (considered a literary no-no with the exception, perhaps, of romance novels) but often within the same paragraph. Since this book is definitely not a genre romance, I was “shocked, I tell you, shocked!” But, hey, guess what? It works!

The point here is that there really are no rules when it comes to writing fiction, so don’t be shy. If you have a story to tell (and everyone does) and you want to share it with the world, then write it the best way you know how using whatever method seems best for presenting that story to readers in a way that they will both understand it and enjoy it.

Learn the “rules” for writing fiction and ignore them at your peril, but ignore them if you must. After all, fiction writing is all about taking risks.

So, go for it! And please contact me and let me know if you have experimented with an unusual writing technique or discovered one you like in some of your own reading experiences. I’d love to hear from you!

© 2018 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.
Photo: Talking Chief  © 2010 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.

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