We Are Storytellers
That’s what, perhaps, makes us different to other life on this planet. Although, who knows, maybe whales are singing song-stories to each other in the cold, dark depths of the Earth’s oceans.
I’ve been telling stories since I learned to speak. At school, my English teacher had a soft spot for my early written stories and would forgive my terrible use (or lack) of punctuation and poor spelling.
I never really tried to write a story, then, but found myself in the story and my imagination was telling the story to me. I just had to write it down as quick as I could, before I forgot.
One of those English lessons the story assignment was to write about the unsolved mystery of the Mary Celeste. What happened on that boat? My imagination needed no more encouragement and started to fill in the gaps, as if I was on that boat. I could see it, smell it, feel it and all I had to do was write it down.
I didn’t come to write a screenplay seriously until my late 20s. The first thing I wrote was picked up by Anglia TV. I had never had a creative writing lesson in my life. I had never been to film school. My imagination came up with a story. I simply wrote it down and sent it to them. Easy.
Then the development meetings started. And that’s when things became difficult.
Paul McCartney says you can’t analyse and reproduce the writing of a great song. It just happens. You fool around for a bit and it just comes. Legend says he dreamed the hit song “Yesterday” then wrote it down when he woke up. That’s pretty much how I wrote stories. I go into a waking dream and the story presents itself.
Those early development meetings didn’t work out for me. They wanted things changed. But when everything you create is fuelled by instinct, by being in some kind of weird trance, you can’t mess with that. I couldn’t make any changes and they let the project go.
I wanted to be a screenwriter and clearly I needed lessons, I thought. So, I read a bunch of books on how to write a screenplay, starting with one of Syd Field’s popular works.
The book destroyed my writing. Or rather, it destroyed the instinctive part of my writing, which was pretty much all it was. I set about trying to mechanically manufacture a “proper” screenplay, with 3 acts and points of no return, and crap like that. Produced script after script of utterly fake, unengaging, rubbish.
I even sold a couple. That’s because, occasionally, my instinct would take over and something real would come out. Just for a few scenes here and there. The rest was desperate-to-fit-the-formula crap. But people saw enough in the glimpses to believe there was something worth trying to develop. However, writing a great story is like acting, everyone knows when you’re lying.
What? Surely all acting and storytelling is lying, right?
No. Great storytelling (and great acting, great literature, great painting, great art) is the truth. The truth as you know it, the truth as you feel it, expressed through the filter of fiction. But if you get to page 50 and decide the hero in your story has to reach some kind of point of no return because Syd Field says so, and you force one in, is that the truth?
Well, maybe… What I learned, to become a better writer, a better storyteller, was that the point of no return device is just an idea. You can use it if it helps tell your story. If it doesn’t, don’t. If it doesn’t feel true, don’t use it.
And there’s an infinite number of storytelling ideas out there. If you become a slave to a story writing manual’s very limited set of ideas, your storytelling could just become very limited and probably pretty fake.
There’s the idea of 3 acts. Or 5 acts. Or 9 acts. Which one helps your instinctive story, which adds? Maybe none. There’s the happy ending idea, there’s the tragedy idea, the unresolved ending idea – which one works for you? They’re just ideas (however potentially powerful).
Since those years of “development hell” I’ve learned to trust my instincts again. Not just for writing, but in life.
I am a storyteller. I’ve always had an instinct for it. These days, I have knowledge to go with it too. Experience which tells me, sometimes we need to re-learn to use our instincts, like we did when we were too naive to tell anything but the truth.
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