There was a time, if you remember, when people told stories. In barrooms and barbershops, after late dinners and with midday coffees, these were bombastic, haphazard, convoluted, and implausible stories, told with grand expressions and by breathless voices to disbelieving, or at least skeptical, ears. These were bewildering, ludicrous, and nonsensical stories—best told, when you’re a child, by a strange man with a long beard and worn hands, or by a woman who speaks so softly that you have to lean forward to hear her most peculiar secrets. These were meandering, impenetrable stories that forced you to ask, after about twenty minutes, what is this even about? These are the stories that I miss—the stories that we’ve decided, it seems, to let go, having figured that a few thousand years of storytelling is enough.
Witnessing how the language comes alive, in vernacular, in the presence of a truly original sensibility, is what pulls me closer. I remember the gravelly voice and deliberate mannerisms of the old man across the street from where I grew up, telling me stories from decades before my birth about places that I had never seen. The stories are long gone, his voice is still fresh in my mind. And I remember how the retired detective that I knew in New York spoke every sentence—a greeting, an order to a waitress—as if it were confidential information, his voice restrained, always at a whisper, so that even the most prosaic of his tales sounded ominous. Hardly anything that he told me is still with me, though I can recall with precision the character of his voice, how his eyes looked through you, the way in which he assessed and measured and watched everything around him. And I remember, too, so many of the countless stories that I’ve heard on buses, in cafés, on planes, at pretty much every spot where strangers are compelled to wait, with the details always a bit fuzzy but the memory of the teller always clear, which makes it all the sadder to notice that these stories have mostly disappeared from life.
The secret to these stories, I believe, is no different than the secret to writing that captivates: it arrives when language somehow manages to convey an individual sensibility, with the story nothing less than an artful reflection of the teller. Of course expressing what is essential about you isn’t exactly easy. It requires an adeptness with words, which few people possess, and a precise understanding of yourself, which almost nobody possesses. But combining a facility with language along with an ability to be introspective is how you create stories that are intrinsic to you. Which very quickly leads to the conclusion that the events or drama or importance of the story isn’t what matters: it is the personality behind the words that you remember.
The best and most memorable performances are impromptu, serendipitous, closer to a lively and unpredictable conversation than a retelling, with the emotion and passion of the speaker the most crucial aspects of crafting a story that’s fundamentally human. Which is why the old writing advice—show, don't tell—isn't necessarily the best storytelling advice during a conversation, as the listener is, in most cases, more captivated by the speaker than the story. The listener is pulled closer by the ability of the speaker to articulate in a novel and enchanting manner; by whether the speaker can exaggerate, or understate, or stress a point just right; in whether the idiosyncrasies and gesticulations and passions of the speaker enhance the narrative. Yet those elements of storytelling are often dismissed, as the contemporary priority ends up pushing the listener away: in a persnickety approach to facts, through endless backtracking in a search of the supposed point, by the relentless focus on veracity and particulars at the expense of narrative.
Whenever I’m listening to a captivating, lively, and whimsical story, and the teller proceeds to stop, because showing a photo is easier, I feel a bit dejected. The moment loses its poignancy. There’s an exhale, and a distancing. Listening to the story through the speaker’s words was allowing me to inhabit a new perspective, however flawed that might be, and that’s what I really wanted, because I’m always more curious about the speaker than the story. Telling a story does provide a hint about some past event—but it, more importantly, reveals a lot more about the storyteller. How a story is told will always be more important than what actually happened when the point is intimacy, when the goal is to close the gap between speaker and listener. A picture or recording is insufficient when you, as listener, want to inhabit a human perspective. When you want to observe what the speaker observed. When what’s articulated is fascinating because the speaker has selected the words.
Instead of telling stories, people now exchange information. We give a little information, then we take a little information. A bit of gossip. Some hard facts. We meet as spies, trafficking in the sources that we’ve heard, or as journalists, broadcasting the tidbits that we’ve picked up. There’s no time to opine, or for the spontaneity that’s inherent to conversation, there’s no space for loose thoughts or digressions or personal observations, as we are ceaselessly reaching for a more factual world, where our anecdotes come from news stories, where our descriptions come with photographic evidence, where our personal stories and opinions and even memories come from what we’ve overheard. I hear a little bit of information, you hear a little bit of information, so now let’s compete to see who has learned about, rather than experienced, the best stories. Here, take a look at what I found in the ether. And what have you found today? There’s a stream of data in both of our pockets, an unwieldy, endless stream that prods us with alerts and updates from around the world, always urgent, always profound, that makes the most distant news seem local, so let’s make an exchange: the pinnacle of conversation, it seems, is whether you can compete against the stream.
You might think that this is a counterintuitive result. It could have been different. How strange, in fact, to make interestingness contingent upon your ability to compete with the internet, to devolve personal storytelling into an exchange of factual information, especially when the opposite result seems more likely. If I have a computer in my pocket, and if you have a computer in your pocket, then we, today, don’t have any need to argue or even discuss facts. Isn’t it peculiar to value speed, to want the information first, to have memorized the most facts—when, and this is pretty much the definition of a nightmare, the game is endless and you will always lose? The computer will always be faster. There will always be information that you don’t know. And winning, whatever exactly that means, by having the best sources and tidbits and impersonal information to exchange, won’t feel like much of a win, because it negates all of the things that make you actually interesting, because it negates that which is most salient and singular about you, and because it ignores the true reason why it is worthwhile to listen to you. One consequence of free and ubiquitous information could have been to let humans focus on all the stuff that’s, well, human.
I worked with a police Captain for many years who was the best story teller. Sure, there were exaggerations and half-truths, but the joy was in hearing the story telling. The cadence of the Captain’s voice, the inflections. And his stories were often about ideas. Ideas of truth, or sacrifice, or love. As Eleanor Roosevelt said: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” If she were alive today, she might have added, “Minds addicted to online information regurgitate data but the stories in them are dead.”
That third paragraph made me suspend my breath and then sigh, Charles. I love it when I read something really SMART that absolutely reflects my own feelings! Well, I guess we all do, but thank you. I don't have anyone smart in my real life, so I especially like having you as a "friend". And, any time you give me permission to break a rule ( eg show, don't tell) is like receiving a gift. As long as the language is artistic and thoughtful, tell away, I say! Another thought-provoking piece.