Being a Good Grammarian Doesn't Make You a Good Storyteller

I once watched, through the spaces between my fingers, Andrea Mitchell interview Stephen King. I felt so sorry for King. Mitchell's whole attitude in the interview is the problem I'm going to be outlining in this article. She regarded King with a look of cringing pity, as if he was some lowly creature whose presence she was forced to endure. She made some idiotic remark about how critics were "universal" in their disregard for his work. Well, I'd like to know who and where these critics are. I'd like to know because I want to steer clear of anything they ever recommend. I'll bet they'll explain "why" they don't like him, and it'll all be based on somebody else's opinions and not on theirs. They recite the given dictums of a literary fundamentalism as if there can be no room for doubt when there is always room for doubt.

Stephen King is one of the best narrative stylists working in the English language. So far as I'm concerned, most science fiction and horror writers can write circles around the buckets of pretentious, ponderous prose that gets chummed around in "serious literary" circles these days. Many of these people don't seem to be writing for readers but for their critics. They're trying to impress the snobs, not express an internal feeling or vision to their readers. They want people to tell them they are brilliant.

As I always point out, no one remembers who the "serious literary" writers were in the Elizabethan era. We do recall that "trashy" theatre-of-the-people guy named Shakespeare. His plays were the equivalent of modern-day TV shows. No one regarded them seriously. And yet, what has endured?

I don't know what a good story is for anyone else but me -- it's like obscenity, I only know what it is when I encounter it. It doesn't have a specific form. There is no aesthetic dialectic that follows a certain pattern and arrives at a perfect chair. I'll warrant all the people who feel they know what a good story is for everyone, are basing it on some shared delusion of people who agree with them. And this is wholly based on ego. It's almost always tied up in technique. Technique is where we can base our opinions on easily traceable data.

When this topic comes up, I'm reminded of the film Amadeus. In it Mozart is portrayed as so brilliant that he's more than a bit insane. He also is socially handicapped. His antagonist counterpart is the well-bred, cultured and sophisticated Salieri, the composer imprisoned by his own lack of subjectivity. He didn't know what made Mozart's music good because he didn't know how to write his own music. He had lost his own ideas of "good" and "bad" in his subjugation of his own opinions to his teachers'. He lost the connection to that inventive wellspring of creativity we all have. As such, he was unable to find his own music. All he could do is ape the drab, heartless trill of his teachers' work -- which was probably merely the mimicked head sounds of their teachers, and so on.

Some of the most boring stories/books I've read have been perfectly edited. You can have all your ducks in a row in terms of grammar and still be a godawful storyteller. Storytellers, whether their stories are fiction or non-fiction, have a very different, less physical set of tools at their disposal. Some of it is "talent" (whatever that is) but most of it is experience. It's simply sitting down and learning to craft a good story.

If the spelling and grammar are there, that's great. If not, they can be edited. But all the English skills in the world will not turn a fair writer into a great storyteller.