I cannot remember a time when I did not love storytelling, both as a creator and a consumer. I read passionately and constantly in my youth - books are the best friend of an only child - and I continue to consume media of all kinds enthusiastically. There are many different ways to tell a story of course, but writing has always been the place where I am most at home. I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with fiction, but mostly it's off-again. In writing, the place where I am most at home is the essay. If I can show an audience what I saw, or convince them of what I believe, if I can express my view with an elegant turn of phrase, that's what turns me on.
Biographical essays, like The Soap Maker's Passion, are among my favorite to write. There's something to be said for the old cliché about writing what you know. My work - I'm a fundraiser for a very non-traditional non-profit - also demands a great deal of writing from me, which is one of my favorite things about it. In fundraising, crafting a good story is the difference between another enthusiastic donor and another person who walks away thinking you're a crank.
Storytelling is the second passion I share with my father. My father was a frustrated writer. I don't mean that he was unsuccessful in writing - though he was often unsuccessful in publishing - but rather that he seemed to write by dragging the words from underneath his skin by main force. Of all the things I'm glad I didn't inherit from my father, this ranks highly. Working creatively is emotional draining at times, but it's never the constant ache of dissatisfaction that it was for my father. I can find imperfections in anything I write, but there's enough of it that I can look at with real pride to make the failures seem worth it in the end. I'm not sure my father was ever even halfway happy with anything he wrote, and I can't imagine living with a passion that was so endlessly cruel.
It would be unbalanced though, to credit this passion to my father entirely. My mother is a storyteller of another kind. It was from her that I learned how to craft a convincing argument, how to talk about people and ideas in a way that will matter to your audience. Storytelling is about connecting; it's about learning how to speak to someone in a language that they will hear, and that ability to connect is something I learned - and learned to love - from my mother.
I've told my own stories, I've told other people's stories. Some of them mattered to me deeply, some of them were just ephemeral. In the end, it hardly matters what you're talking about. What matters is only that your audience leaned in; eyes fixed on your face, pulse beating in time to the cadence of your speech. What matters is that you spoke to them. That feeling - even far removed as it is in this context - is one of the best things I've ever experienced.
Storytelling is more about delivery than ideas. Isaac Asimov came up with remarkably compelling ideas, but he wasn't much of a storyteller when it comes down to it. Conversely, Shakespeare is often criticized by those who find it fashionable to do so, for having cheap, borrowed plots. It's a fair criticism, but it also doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that "star-crossed lovers" is the oldest story in the book, what matters is this:
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take,
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
Romeo and Juliet isn't even - in my opinion, at least - one of his better plays, but this interaction is everything teenage infatuation should be; it's charming and sweet, a bit naughty and oh so very dramatic. This is storytelling at its core, it doesn't matter that this is the oldest of all old stories told, we only care that through his words we can feel it as though it was we ourselves who never saw true beauty before this night.
This is the essence of what makes me passionate about storytelling; that commonplace human experiences like a young crush can become iconic and enduring because they were told in a beautiful way. Examined closely, no moment, no experience, no life is ordinary. Tell the story the right way and you can change the way we see it, you can make us love a person we've never met or understand a person we hate. By telling a story, we can make the world a more beautiful and wondrous place to inhabit, and that's the best thing that we could ever hope to do.
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