begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop

I was reading a novel when my grandmother, a staunch Roman Catholic—although she would have referred to it as Polish Catholic to differentiate her church from the one half a block down that Those Italians went to—saw fit to interrupt me. She wanted to let me know, she said, while I was still young, that I would need to make choices in life. Grandma advised me then that there were only three honorable professions for a woman. A woman could be a schoolteacher (librarian was a subset of this and a less respectable one, as librarians find it necessary on occasion to speak to men). Schoolteachers were admirable. If a woman were to find herself disinclined toward dealing with the public, she could take in sewing. Should her vision be so poor that she would be unable to teach school or sew detail work, she could go to work cleaning houses.

 

I nodded.

 

Then my grandmother—a woman so saintly she seriously considered becoming a nun before she met my grandfather—leaned forward, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “I would sooner see you become a prostitute than a novelist.”

 

I blinked.

 

With a firm pat on my knee, Grandma said, “Novelists tell lies for a living.”

 

I blinked again. And slid my novel under the couch cushion.

__________________________________________________

 

Everyone tells stories. It’s what we do to remember. Sometimes it’s what we do to forget. Mostly, it’s what we do to communicate. For better or worse, story-telling is our primary mode of communication. Think about the last conversation you had with someone. Odds are, at least one of you told the other a story. It is exactly that that makes so many people sure that they should write their memoirs up for publication, or even that they could create a wondrous work of fiction. Most of them are wrong, of course. Everyone tells stories, but few people tell stories well.

 

I’m sure you’ve all heard that the devil is in the details. This is true enough, but so is the potential. The details a storyteller leaves in or takes out of the story, the way those details are presented, their effect on the reader: these are what determine how good a story is. In George Orwell’s essay, “A Hanging,” he writes, “The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee.” This is a detail, and it is this sort of thing that makes the story real to us.

 

How the details are described is, of course, also important, but while a fortuitous turn of phrase may retain an audience for an otherwise atrocious and boring story, poor phrasing rarely makes us stop listening to a story with the right details. Lengthy inclusion of irrelevant details defines a bad story for most people. For example:

 

“So it was about 8 in the morning—or was it 8:30?—no, it was 8:00, because my cell phone alarm had gone off but not so long ago that it was 8:30, I don’t think—wait, no, that might have been the day before, so maybe it was 8:30 after all, or it might have been around 8:15 because they’d just done the weather on the radio so it probably was 8:15 when I stopped by Martin’s and then I was going in to get coffee and also I had to buy a green pepper because I like to put green peppers into my spaghetti sauce although I don’t always do it, it depends on whether my boyfriend is coming over for dinner because he doesn’t like green pepper, he just likes onions. Anyway, I was going in and while I was checking the green peppers—you have to check them or you might get one that’s gone soft or sometimes they get moldy inside—a naked man walked past me just as I found the perfect green pepper, and then I remembered that I hadn’t gotten the coffee because I’d been thinking about whether I should buy that new whole-wheat pasta, so I had to turn around and—”

 

See. That’s a horrible story. You don’t care about any of this except what the weather was like, because right now it’s pretty cold outside and how could anyone possible be strolling around the produce section of a grocery store naked? Did the forecast predict higher temperatures? Did he take his clothes off after he entered the store? But the weather is so obscured by worthless details that it would require the patience of a saint (do I owe any of you halos?) to even pay attention to the whole thing, and even if you did, you still don’t know what the weather forecast was. Terrible, isn’t it?