The Power of Storytelling
By Kenneth Atchity
Reprinted from WritersDigest
Based on Keynote Address at the 2005 Midwest Literary Festival

From my childhood on the front porches of my southern Louisiana family, I've been obsessed with good stories - fish stories and bear stories, tragic stories and hilarious stories, thrilling stories and sad stories, inspiring stories and admonitory stories. Stories get us into trouble, and get us out of trouble - which is why we have so many attorneys in this country. Stories let us size up first dates, and end relationships smoothly. Stories make us remember, and other stories make us forget, our fears. Stories are to society as breath is to the body: they are the very air of culture. Questions hurled at us from every direction:

  • What's your story?
  • What's it got to do with my story?
  • But what's the real story?
  • Do I believe her story?
  • Whose story do you believe?
  • I got tired of his story.
  • There's something about their story that doesn't add up.
  • Let's get our stories straight.
  • Let me tell you a story...
As Muriel Rukeyser said, for us humans, "the universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

A storyteller is a dreamer who communicates his dreams to all of us. Doing so in today's Globe Theater is not only his privilege, it's his responsibility. If you're a storyteller, congratulate yourself for daring to do what you do, and for doing everything you can to find out how to do it better. Storytelling is a vocation, as difficult as any priesthood you can be ordained to. For, whether you're a journalist or a novelist, a children's book writer or a screenwriter, your storytelling career is necessary to the sanity and the salvation of the human race. When Michelangelo was flat on his back telling the story of the world on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Pope Julius II invited him to attend a reception at the Vatican. "Tell him," the artist said to the Pope's messenger, "that I am doing an important work and cannot come down." Today, the world is even hungrier for stories. Intellectual property, for the first time in history, is more valuable than real property - as you can tell by comparing the fortunes of Bill Gates with Donald Trump.

In the first handbook for writers we know of, The Poetics, Aristotle wrote:

I think poetry [by which he meant all forms of well-crafted dramatic storytelling] is more serious than history because history shows us what was or is, while drama shows us what might be or could be.

While real life frustrates us with nuance and ambiguities, unclear beginnings and unsatisfying endings, a well-shaped story provides us with a sense of closure, a pattern - whether inspiring or admonitory - that's easy to remember and to take to heart. Sophocles said, "Count no man happy until he is dead," and therein lies the power of stories. Where love is unresolved, stories can be clearly tragic or comic, can teach clear lessons, can instill hope or incite fear.

Is it tough being a storyteller? You know it is. For one thing, so many people are doing it - telling stories--you'll need to learn how to set yourself apart from the rest - whose unprofessional, unfinished work clogs the pipelines and exhausts the gatekeepers. To begin with, remind yourself your career is both a cross and an honor bestowed on you. It's your job to put all your resources - philosophical, psychological, emotional, and financial - into living up to it. That's what dedicated storytellers have been doing since Euripides and Sophocles raised patronage money to stage their tragedies, or since Shakespeare hustled the Queen of England to build his Globe Theater.

So storytelling on the front porch is one thing, and even then not everyone does it well - as we all well know; but storytelling for the world market is quite another. How do you get from that front porch to the world of commercial storytelling? I've observed, from the careers of successful storytellers, including those of some of my own clients, nine "standard operating procedures" that lead to their success:

1) Persistence (aka endurance, stamina, determination). Edison supposedly tried 10,000 light bulb filaments before finding the one that lit up effectively. What if he'd thrown in the towel at 9,999? Many of the greatest storytellers have been rejected repeatedly, including Frank Herbert for Dune (32 times). Every no is a positive step toward yes.

2) Contacts (knowing people who operate in the world you're trying to enter). Storytelling itself is selling people on your vision, and networking with the gatekeepers who can bring your story to the world is just an extension of your storytelling salesmanship. Cultivate your contacts - treat them with the respect their role in the world of storytelling deserves, even when they might not deserve it individually--and sooner or later the gates will open.

3) Being a fun person to work with (and, its corollary, staying off the "life is too short" list). Movies are put together, book deals made, often because the gatekeepers simply like the storyteller and therefore want to help him. There are so many would-be professional storytellers that the most experienced gatekeepers have little patience for irritating people and behavior.

4) Timing (some call it luck). Since you can't control luck, what can you do about it? You can arrange your work, taking it not yourself seriously, around a plan that leads to success no longer how long it takes. For most professional storytellers, becoming "an overnight sensation" takes 10-20 years. Hope the lightning strikes sooner for you, but build a plan that leads to success regardless of when it strikes.

5) Pleasing your audience. The best storytellers have an overwhelming desire to entertain or instruct. The quickest way to mass success is through focusing on the psychology of your audience, not on your own. Fiction is not revenge for all those ills that life and relationships have caused you. Revenge is revenge. Fiction serves the reader's need. Theater serves the audience's need. The better you know your audience, the more they'll listen to you. "The secret of successful talking," Walker Percy wrote, "is having something to say."

6) High concept. Figure out exactly what your story's about and be able to state it concisely and compellingly:
  • A down-and-out attorney gets a case that can destroy--or restart-- his career.
  • A Halfling is the only one who can return the ring of power to its source and save Middle Earth.
  • A fish out of water - only she's a mermaid.
  • What if your anger therapist was the angriest man in the world?
  • What could make a man into a forty year old virgin?
7) A sense of wonder - "To write a mighty book," Melville wrote in Moby Dick, "you must have a mighty theme." This can also be called a sense of exploration - Writers write to learn more about what they're writing about. When they want to understand a subject, they write a book about it.

8) Always striving to be better - no matter how exalted your career may become, always speak the music to the ears of your literary representative, publisher, or producer: "I just want to be the best I can be." Because "there's no limit to better." Never lose your determination to work diligently to bring your skill and craft to the level of your ambition and vision. As your ambition grows, your skills should elevate.

9) Talent, by which I mean a story in which the storyteller's craft and technique fully equal his or her underlying vision.

I list "talent" in last position not because I don't value it but because it's the only one that, alone, isn't sufficient for success. The most talented storyteller in the world will fail if he doesn't have one or more of the other procedures under control. Any one of the first eight, by contrast, can alone be enough to succeed. You can sell a high concept that's badly executed; you can please audiences even if you have nothing else going for you; you can get lucky; you can succeed with persistence and nothing else. The good news is that talent accompanied by the others is what the gatekeepers to the world of storytelling are seeking. It's what motivates us to plow through literally thousands of submissions to find the rare one that gives us aesthetic delight as well as commercial motivation.

Meanwhile, when you stop to celebrate your initiation into the grand order of storytellers let's recognize how the seed of a simple story told by a campfire and published on the wall of a cave - "Long march. Few bison. Got lucky." - has grown into a mighty tree that spans all generations, all epochs, all languages, and all the world - cybernetically embodied in the Internet, the greatest extension of human consciousness since the telegraph, radio, telephone, and television. Commit yourself once, now, and for all to serving the order of storytellers, crafting your stories with all your might and heart and soul. Your stories are our best hope. You are our best hope.




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