What do the best storytellers know?

Brooklyn 2016

One of the best storytellers that I know has never thought—I’m reasonably sure—about plots or settings, nor would he ever consider saying the word characterization. From his lips, however, comes a riptide of exaggerations, impressions, and stories: tales which are believable, tales which are clearly lies, tales which somehow fit between those designations. Perhaps his best stories begin as obviously true or obviously false and then lurch backward, placing suspicion on your original conclusion. A tale might commence over a morning coffee, persist into an afternoon meal, rather remarkably continue into an unscheduled dinner—when does sleep come?—before the storyline truly gains momentum as the night advances. The label raconteur is tossed around too freely, but for someone who badgers like a lawyer, delivers the occasional rhyme like a poet, and keeps you waiting for a conclusion like a bureaucrat, it just might fit.

Someone else I know has an almost dangerous ability to cause convulsions with her stories: intense, relentless laugher is surely guaranteed, and you’re certain to feel sore from the tremors of laughter. Her particular knack is for the non-sequitur. The disjoined aside. A sentence that demands more explanation. So I went to his son’s birthday party, but this was before I fired my first gun. The line between a peculiar sense of confusion and a sense of mystery isn’t a large chasm.

What’s clear is that the best storytellers provide a free session of hypnosis. Time disappears, outside context is irrelevant, their words are your thoughts. Wine tastes better, the evening air is fresher. We’ll worry about those pesky alarm bells later: finish this story first. Put another log on the fire, come closer, the night is young.

Although this artistry may also emerge in someone who is skilled with a pen, it’s a rare overlap, though that’s not because the talents are opposed. What’s obvious is that practicing the former requires the muck and grind of conversation, while practicing the latter requires the solitude and drudgery of the blank page.

Plenty of great writers, whose novels are filled with nuance and delicacy and precision, are also known for social ineptitude, and that’s not a great mystery. It’s the rare person who manages the overlap between raconteur and writer. If you look carefully at the true storytellers around you, however, you will begin to notice how the overlap appears. Those with the best timing, those who seem to talk ceaselessly, those who always pull the crowd in closer, are first—just like the most shrewd writers—the most careful listeners.

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