The 5 Sins of Storytelling

by Laurie Alberts
1. THE SIN OF THE BAD HEMING-
WAY/CARVER IMITATION
When I was a graduate student in an MFA program and then later,
when I taught undergraduate ction writing, quite a few young, usually
male, students were enamored of Hemingway. Their male characters
were close-mouthed or terse when they had to speak; neither they nor
the readers had much access to their emotions. They showed grace un-
der pressure and took action when necessary. They were wounded by life
but very brave. They wrote a lot of sentences using was and were, as in,
the malls were very large but we didnt go to them anymore. Soon these
young writers became enamored of Raymond Carver and started writ-
ing stories with imitative titles like What We Talk About When We Talk
About Sex or Will You Please Roll Over Please. The moral of the story
is, write your own story.
Of course, emulation of great writers can be a good way to learn
craft. You can analyze how their scenes are built and discover how they
show rather than tell in their scenes. But in the end, writers have to nd
their own voices and their own styles and put them to use in their own
work. Some writers have such distinct voices and such unique visions
right from the get-go that this isnt a problem for them. If this isnt true of
you, and if you, like the majority of writers, have to struggle to nd your
own style and voice, youll need to be on the lookout for instances in
your work when youve taken on the style and mannerisms of writers you
admire. Just as you wouldnt want to plagiarize directly from someone
elses book, you dont want to inadvertently steal their voice or their
story. For one thing, readers will notice the imitation and wont appreci-
ate it. For another, youll be cheating yourself of one of the great satisfac-
tions of writing, which is to discover what it is you want to say and your
own way to say it.
2. THE SIN OF STILTED DIALOGUE
Dialogue sounds false whenever it contains information that the
characters would already know but the writer inserts as exposition, as in
My mother, Geraldine, would be very happy to come to your house for
dinner Uncle Joseph. Obviously, the dialogue should be more along the
lines of Mom would love to come for dinner, thanks. We assume the
uncle knows the speakers mothers name already.
Dialogue also sounds stilted when characters speak outside of their
own idiom. When my rst novel was being copyedited in manuscript, an
overzealous copy editor wanted me to change a line in which an Alaskan
sherman in a bar jokes about committing hari-kari. The copy edi-
tor changed it to the correct term for Japanese ritual suicide, hara-kiri. I
argued that my character would use the familiar Americanized version,
even if it were incorrect. Had the character called it the more formal term
in Japanese, seppuku, the dialogue would have been even more stilted.
In that instance the dialogue was being criticized inappropriately for
being too informal; when the dialogue is too formal, it also becomes
stilted. While a certain academic might speak in term of dialectics and
discourse modalities to his advanced literary theory class, if he spoke that
way to his plumber it would either be laughable or pathetic. If not be-
ing used for comic effect it would just be bad dialogue. As I noted in the
dialogue chapter earlier, read your dialogue aloud. If you nd yourself
stumbling over the words your characters are speaking in your scenes, its
time to revise.
3. THE SIN OF NOTHING HAPPENS
If a narrator or character takes her car for an oil change and no im-
portant events or interactions ensue, you could and probably should just
skip the scene and summarize it. I got my oil changed in the morning
before I went to the grocery and the dry cleaners. Or leave it out. Each
aspect of the day doesnt deserve a developed scene if none of these
events holds particularly revealing information about the character, or
advance the plot or themes of the piece. You dont need to make the
reader experience, via scenes, a characters humdrum errand-lled life in
order to make the point that the characters life is indeed tedious.
Of course you could write any of these events in a way that revealed
characterif the narrator got into a ght with the dry cleaner or spied
her ex-husband with his new girlfriend over the produce display, for
instance. Assuming that nothing as exciting as all that occurs, save the
scenes for more important occasions and compress time through sum-
mary.
You might use very quiet or slow scenes to set up for something to
come later, but, in general, if the scene does little in terms of heightening
the complications or furthering the plot or themes, consider summarizing
instead.
4. THE SIN OF CREDIBILITY PROB-
LEMS
First theres the simple problem of lack of continuity, as they say in the
movie businessone scene contradicting another. If you have a mother
with three kids in one scene and the same mother has seven kids in the
next scene and its only six months later, theres a credibility problem (or
shes done some mighty fast adopting). On a less obvious level, lack of
credibility can occur in situations such as when children are preternatu-
rally wise or always smarter than their parents, like those TV sitcom kids
who talk with the ironic smarts of little Jon Stewarts or David Lettermans.
Lack of credibility is a real problem in memoirs or personal essays in
which the rst-person narrator, a stand-in for the author, fails to move us
or fails to make readers trust and believe emotions or even facts. Weve
heard plenty about the controversies over falsied memoirs, such as
James Freys or JT Leroys, but readers can nd a narrator lacking in cred-
ibility due to an attitude of self-pity or self-aggrandizing; if the narrator is
always the victim of others wrongs or always wins the day, the reader is
eventually going to feel resentful and distrustful. To be credible, a mem-
oir narrator writing from an adult perspective must be self-aware.
Granted, in ction we have the device of the unreliable narrator, as
in Eudora Weltys famous story Why I Live at the P.O., and there are
those memoirists, such as Lauren Slater, who have made a career out of
unreliability, as in her book Lying. But these are cases in which the author
deliberately invites you to mistrust the narrator. In most novels and mem-
oirs, trust between reader and narrator is essential. Dont risk losing that
trust by making your narrator either too self-regarding or too villainous to
believe in your scenes.
5. THE SIN OF SENTIMENTAL
SCENES
What is the difference between sentiment and sentimental? I think
of it as the difference between real sugar and articial sweetener. Sen-
timental scenes are as articial as SweetN Low. A sentimental scene
tries to manipulate emotion from the reader, usually pity or nostalgia or
warm and fuzzy feelings. Of course you want your reader to be moved
by the events in your story. What you dont want to do is turn off your
reader with scenes in which you attempt to squeeze out pity or nostalgia
or fuzzy feelings via mushy, maudlin writing. Most modern readers dont
have the tolerance for sentimentality that readers had in the days of
Charles Dickens. Even before our day, Dickenss novel The Old Curiosity
Shop inspired Oscar Wilde to say that One must have a heart of stone
to read the death of Little Nell without laughing. Its the perfect exam-
ple of sentimentality backring.
Even today there are practitioners of the tearjerker scene, in which
lovers must part with a lot of weeping or someone noble dies. Generally
the sentimental death scene requires the dying person to be an angel of
some sortalready articially sweetenedor to have a deathbed con-
version to goodness. Frequently last-minute forgiveness is featured. You
can practically hear the harps playing. Please dont misunderstandIm
not at all against a scene showing emotion or provoking emotion in the
reader. What Im against is fake emotionemotion that is forced in the
characters and in the reader. How can you tell the difference? When you
are moved by something you read, ask yourself if the emotional intensity
in the scene feels earned. Does it match the level of intensity of emotion
you felt when reading? If the characters are experiencing heightened
emotions but you arent, the writer has left you out by not making those
emotions convincing. The same goes for your writing. And be very care-
ful about using such clich and sentimental images phrasings as a single
tear ran down her cheek. What happens when you use sentimentality
rather than sentiment is that even though youre creating a scene, you
are still telling, not showing. You are telling your reader to feel something
that you have failed to show in a convincing way. And that defeats the
purpose of scenes.
Scene Exercises:
a.) Create a brief scene in which conict is apparent between two
characters. The conict can be small, say, over a choice of restaurant, or
large, such as a divorce.
b.) Write a scene between a cop and a driver hes pulled over. Write
it in present tense and then rewrite it in past tense. How do these tense
shifts alter the tone of the scene? Which works better here? Why?
c.) Go to a public space and choose one detail (of appearance, ges-
ture, voice, action) for each person you observe that reveals something
important about that person. Write a scene in which details reveal char-
acter.
d.) Write a short scene in which a parent and young or adult child re-
turn to the parents childhood home. The rst time you write it make the
scene occur in the winter, in the early evening. Then rewrite that scene in
the morning, mid-summer. Consider the way time and setting affect the
mood and tone of the two versions.
e.) Go to a public place where you can overhear but not see people
nearbya caf with booths or public transportation work particularly
welland eavesdrop on a conversation. Write down as much of the
dialogue as you need to establish the relationship between or among the
speakers. Is there a power relationship? What is the nature of the infor-
mation being passed? Is it merely chat, is someone trying to persuade,
is there a conict or does one of the speakers have an agenda? Can you
individualize the speakers from their words alone?
f.) Write an animal death scene that is neither sentimental
nor clich.
g.) Write a list of ten similes that are fresh and surprising.
h.) Rewrite the parent and child scene, above, from a different point
of view. If you wrote in third person, rewrite it in rst person. Or change
the point-of-view character from child to parent or vice versa.
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