Storytelling

By John Leggett

Anyone who has tried to write knows that storytelling is an art, just as making music or painting a portrait, and we admire it when it is well done. When it is well done, we are often astonished by its appearance of simplicity, says John Leggett, author of Storytelling.

Leggett, a former editor who for 17 years was director of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, says “It looks so easy that we feel we can do it equally well ourselves. It is only when we do, that we discover how even the simplest tale offers a gallery of opportunities for getting it wrong. A badly told story spreads boredom, or pain, just as surely as sour notes from a violin.”

In this guide, Leggett builds a case and gives guidelines for telling stories that keeps readers interested, providing insights into character, plot, point of view, voice, theme, scene and “the big story.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483515991

Book preview

Storytelling

by

John Leggett

Lovers' Lane Press

Napa, California

1988

STORYTELLING

Copyright © 1988 by John Leggett

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher, except for brief passages or quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

FIRST EDITION Second Printing

Lovers' Lane Press

1781 Partrick Road, Napa, CA 94558

Change the name and it's about you, that story.

Iiorace,65-8 B.C.

No tale so good, my Antipho, but can be spoilt i' the telling.

Terence, 185-159 B.C.

The Doormat

Story is a way, and for some of us the best of all possible ways, to transmit emotion, to get the feeling of experience from one heart to another.

A person who wants to share an idea is likely to write an essay, but a person who wants to share an emotion, to tell what it is like to have a schoolgirl's crush, or fear of the dark, to be alone in a strange city, or to grieve for the loss of a father, can probably tell us about it most effectively in a story.

For the listener, story is a painless, possibly even joyous, way to learn about life, to learn how to live life, through the experience of others.

For the storyteller, making up stories is not just a way of life, but a way to give meaning to life, to the storyteller's own life, if to no one else's.

A friend of mine who has the good sense to write for his pleasure, tells me, When I write a story, it opens me up.

Since, like most of us, he writes mainly about himself, I understand him to mean that in the act of storywriting he can enter his imagination and there put the random, disorderly, often painful experience of his past into some kind of order, even to make sense of it.

Perhaps the order and sense can be seen and admired by someone else, and that possibility is important, but fundamentally the act is for the self. A person who does it regularly finds the experience rewarding in itself, and occasionally exalting.

The Difficult Art of Simplicity

Storytelling is an art, just as making music or painting a portrait, and we admire it when it is well done. When it is well done we are often astonished by its appearance of simplicity. It looks so easy that we feel we can do it equally well ourselves. It is only when we do, that we discover how even the simplest tale offers a gallery of