From The Millions:
If you have ever been in a writing workshop, especially of the MFA variety—and good for you if you haven’t—you are likely familiar with the most dreaded response a piece of writing can get. It can be phrased in a variety of ways, sometimes hedged and mealymouthed and sometimes forthrightly insulting, but it is essentially this: Why is this story is being told? It’s a curious criticism, one that invites responses that are escalatory and often epistemological in nature, for example: “Why should I care about your opinion?” or “Why is any story told?” or “Why do we bother doing anything?” This line of criticism, especially when it is directed at you and something you wrote, is maddening, both in its dismissiveness and in its unanswerability.
And yet it captures something about a lot of writing, even writing that is good, or “good”—well-considered, well-phrased, and well-paced. Lots of good writing has this inert, pointless quality, and sometimes otherwise amateurish, inept writing has a curious vibrancy. Whatever the case, the first test that any piece of writing must pass is answering, in some way, why it exists.
To put it another and possibly less clear way, all fiction has to do battle with its own fictional nature. There’s a minor absurdity inherent in the act of entering a world invented by another person, even if we ardently wish to enter such a world. As readers, we sense it in the beginning of any new book—the dipping of toes into the water, the wading in. It isn’t so much realism or factuality that pulls us beneath the fictional surface, but a kind of mysterious weight, the gravity of a story that, for whatever reason, needs to be told. Narrative lacking this quality cannot convince us to read past the bare fact of its arbitrariness, its status as something created. It sits there, only making us aware of the infinitude of stories that can be told, when a good story does the opposite, narrowing the universe to its singular vision and significance.
Link to the rest at The Millions
PG must admit that he’s never found anything the slightest bit strange or unusual about reading any sort of fiction. For him, it is completely natural.
Without going into boring detail, he will note that fictional stories have been created and consumed (reading, listening) for thousands of years. This suggests to him that the creation, consumption and enjoyment of fiction is a behavior very characteristic of humankind across a wide range of cultures and traditions.
I hope, as a byproduct, my fiction will create empathy. Not preaching, or making it obvious.
But there is a point to storytelling – living other lives, consequences and all. We don’t want to be entertained all the time; we want warnings. We don’t have enough time or luck to learn everything personally that we need to survive.
Except those who don’t read.
Yes! What was the point of our ancestors telling stories around the fires? To teach, to learn, to experience things. To be warned about approaching animals, or unusual geographical elements, or people from another tribe without caution. To entertain.
Humans are story tellers. That makes us unique (so far as I know) among all other animals. Even today, the reasons we tell stories haven’t changed. Some of us make money at it, some just do it for fun and the love of story. Neither is “right” or “wrong”, just is.
“Why is this story being told?”
So it will get out of my head and stop driving me nuts!
Lots of good writing has this inert, pointless quality, and sometimes otherwise amateurish, inept writing has a curious vibrancy.
Inert and pointless is good, while vibrant is inept?
Interpreting a text works better if you are willing to read more than one sentence. In the sentence immediately preceding the part you snipped, the writer characterized “good writing” as “well-considered, well-phrased, and well-paced.” The argument he is making is that even writing with these desirable qualities might be inert and pointless, and even writing lacking these qualities might have vibrancy.
Well-considered, well-phrased, well-paced, pointless, and inert?
Yes. The article itself is a case in point. It is overwritten to the point that whatever the authors thinks they are saying is buried in their stylistic tics and twirls.
Pointless and well-paced? With no point, how do we know it’s well-paced?
Conversely, we see lots of people agonizing over how they want to be an author and write books – yet they really have little or nothing to say. IMO, story telling is a natural imperative *for people who have a story to tell*. Those who do not would be better off studying accounting.
The issue is self-correcting. People who have nothing to say yet insist on writing don’t get read much after the fluff blows away.
Answering the question “why is this story being told?” is the equivalent of asking if many people will read it. So far, I’ve noticed some people are better at guessing, but no one knows.
Among the many answers to this question, IMO the best answer is “Money.”
I really don’t understand people who don’t read fiction. I could kind of get it if they just consumed stories through another medium (like TV), but those people who only read/watch/consume non-fiction and never fiction? I honestly don’t get them. It makes me wonder if they don’t do it because the only fiction they’ve ever read were super boring “classic” writing assignments in school so they decided they didn’t like fiction, or if maybe they’re not actually humans at all.
I’ve talked about how schools can ruin the culture of reading, I tend to get a lot of blow back from teachers.
So not much has changed in the decades since I graduated. 🙂
I’ve just returned from a high school open house this evening, where I cringed when I learned what was on the reading list this year for English. I think the choices have gotten worse since the 1970s, when I was in high school. There were some awful selections then, too, but there were also some books that I loved reading. I pity my children this year! I sure wouldn’t want to be reading what they will have to.
I had to read some pretty miserable “classics” in school, and I can’t remember any specific reading assignments that contributed to my enjoying reading. I’m a reader because my family are readers, and because I had a second grade teacher for an aunt (a grade early enough that the teachers seem to mostly still remember that they should make reading fun first and foremost). Seems like most schools these days (say from junior high up) are all about pushing kids to read the “right” things rather than checking to make sure that they’re choosing to read at all. I’m not sure what good they think it does to make sure kids are familiar with the historical significance of Huck Finn if they never read another novel after they leave school because they associate reading with mind-numbing drudgery.
Fiction (normally) forces the reader to consider things they may not have – or may not want to. If they can’t relax their worldview to view another’s they can’t get their head around it.
Heck, most that can’t/won’t read fiction can’t handle the idea of other cultures here on this planet – right now or in the past.
Shallow minds can’t take any worldviews but their own – least they have to go and admit that they might be wrong about things they know have to be true.
Interesting take. Maybe (to the degree that’s true) it’s part of what’s contributing to the “I can’t identify with anyone who isn’t exactly like me in every way” movement we’re seeing in fiction these days.
I had a friend who would rather be outdoors doing something. He only read magazines. Couldn’t stand to read long-form writing, he said, and fiction didn’t interest him. His loss.
I know a lot of people who don’t read. But I also know a lot who do.
Haha, whenever I meet someone who admits to not ever reading, I’m like, “Well crap, now what do we talk about?” Fictional stories take up such a large portion of my life, I don’t have much else to talk to people about. (My life is very dull, and I hate small talk.)
DadRed reads only non-fiction now, although he did read hard sci-fi back in the 1960s-70s. He reads slowly and methodically, and reads for content. Fiction has too many “But why…but what…” and he gets tossed out so it is not fun. That said, he does read a lot.
Agree PG. I’ve often said, with just a hint of melodrama, that story telling is a biological imperative.