Finding the Story Teller

There is a lot of advice out there on how to write: use simple words, short sentences, don't have two characters with the same name. I could go on - I have taken several classes in creative writing, have read loads of articles on the craft of writing. And I have profited from all of this, I have to admit. I have served a long apprenticeship on learning how to write and I am still learning.

So it never fails to irritate me a little bit when I start reading a novel which does not obey any of these rules, a novel by an author who has had several books published and, according to the cover is "acclaimed".  In the novel I am currently reading, a crime thriller, sentences are half a paragraph long, characters tell the story to keep the reader up to date, and everyone sounds more or less the same despite the author's attempts to give them different voices. Not one single character stands out or grabs my attention in any way. The story line itself is interesting, indeed it is very current in its theme, but to be honest, it wouldn't bother me if I never got round to finishing the book.

And here I perceive another lesson. No matter how good the plot, if the characters don't grab you, you are most likely going to give up before the story really gets started. There are natural born story tellers among us. I recall when I worked in London yonks ago in a typing pool, one girl told us the story of a film she had seen the previous night. She kept us totally spellbound. Years later when I saw that it would be shown on TV I settled down to watch it expecting an exciting film. It was boring in the extreme and I switched channels after around fifteen minutes. This girl kept us all enthralled with her own life story. She gave us the whole history or how she had moved to London, leaving her boyfriend of several years, and how she had met a new guy and was madly in love. We all hung on her every word!

Alas, there are far too few such story tellers in the world. Writers can learn how to create tension, how to plot, how to hook the reader, but once in a while there comes an author who really stands out by his or her way with words, a writer who can pull us into their world of fiction and make us never want to leave it. When you open a book like that, you have hit gold, believe me.