This post is adapted from an essay I wrote for Comp I last fall, and it's probably going to be a lot more enthusiastic and much harder to keep track of than the essay was.
It's a little hard to describe yourself. Our natural tendency to guard against pride blurs the lines between self-esteem and arrogance, creating an ultra-effective system of avoidance based off humility. We tend as a society to downplay our own skills, and use others we know as mirrors to see ourselves. So for that reason, it was a little hard for me to get started on this essay[the prompt was "Choose one word to describe yourself, one experience that changed your life, or something else that I can't remember], but I guess the word I would choose would be "storyteller".
Why a storyteller? Well, that kind of began with my grandma, a lady named Linda. She worked, among other things, as a librarian at a nearby Arkansas college, and later at the public library in town. She'd occasionally bring me to work with her when I'd come to visit. She introduced me to the wonderful books of Leonard Kessler(His animals are awesome. You can find a homemade retelling of his "Kick, Pass and Run" in the February or March postings from last year), Peggy Parish(Gotta love Amelia Bedelia), Norman Bridwell(Clifford!) and Matt Christopher(Sports!), and she would always be able to satisfy my childlike curiosity by retelling stories of what life was like when she was growing up. We'd invent tales, too, involving the animals on the farm, we called them Critter Stories.
My mom was instrumental in developing that love of reading, too, encouraging me to read anything I could get my hands on(within reason, of course). I discovered the historical fiction of Robert Elmer, found a lifelong friend in Mark Twain(love him), and discovered the amazing world of Greek mythology through The Book of Virtues. (That is a
FANTASTIC book, by the way. On the back cover, one of the blurbs from a review says that "this book should be given to all parents upon leaving the hospital", I completely agree. Sitting on my shelf right now is the same dog-eared copy that I first dove into when I was seven or eight, and good grief, I'll probably reread and still enjoy it when my kids want to hear a story.)
[Where was I? Got distracted....the hardest part about writing this essay was to keep it under three doublespaced pages, I
barely succeeded. Now that I'm updating it, I'm free to go down rabbit trails and recommend things....by the way, "Rabbit Hill" by Robert McCloskey is a great story, that I first read because Marguerite Henry enjoyed it. And if such a great author as she was would recommend it so highly, well, I just had to see for myself. And most of Robert McCloskey's writings were very good anyways.]
I memorized "The Story of Ferdinand"(Mom read it to me on request every night over and over and over...I wonder if she got tired of it?) and "The Giving Tree". (Same thing, and I've always thought Shel Silverstein looked like the scariest person on Earth.) It's always been interesting to ponder those stories, wonder exactly what life was like for the tree or Ferdinand, watching as the world went by.
And the
PICTURES! My goodness, all those stories have wonderful illustrations....Robert McCloskey, Shel Silverstein, Leonard Kessler, Charles Schultz, Wesley Dennis, Wallace Tripp, Lynn Sweat, Norman Bridwell....I've always wished I could draw. If I could only have one fiction piece achieve lots of readers, I'd want it to be a children's picture book. Not a mildly interesting one, but a great one, like all these classics I've been mentioning, that captures your imagination and lets it grow, jump into and become a part of that universe, to know the characters like your best friends and hang on to that love throughout your whole life.
The TV shows I watched probably had a deep influence on me, too; "Wishbone" and "Arthur" were two of my favorite PBS shows, "Reading Rainbow" was good, too. "Recess" and "Doug" on ABC's One Saturday mornings(None of these are on Netflix, by the way....most of the shows I really enjoy aren't. It's annoying.), and seriously, can anything ever top "The Andy Griffith Show"? I think not. Also the WB's "7th Heaven" and Pax's "Doc" and "Early Edition" would go right up there in my favorite-shows-ever list. They all exposed me to character development, multiple story arcs, and the importance of conflct, providing a good base for beginning to tell stories of my own.
[I didn't discover "MacGyver" until my early teens, but that totally belongs up there. Why don't they make good comedies like "Full House" anymore? That is a great show!]
They weren't much, just stories like every little kid makes up at one point or another, but Mom and Mimi both enjoyed them and encouraged me to keep working on them. So over the years I've dabbled in short stories in my spare time, I've put some of them on here.(Horsin' Around and that Christmassy story, for example).
I discovered Agatha Christie when I was about thirteen, while cleaning stuff out of the old two-story house on the farm, and knew immediately I'd found a master of the craft I hoped to make my own someday. I devoured about half of her eighty-plus works in about eighteen months(after that, the library didn't have any more), and rediscovered Louisa May Alcott's wonderful way of describing life. Interpersonal relationships and good dialogue were some of the main takeaways I got from Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables" series, that time period from the Civil War to the 1920's produced a
ton of amazing writers. (Louisa May Alcott, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zane Grey....)
[Miscellanous books I like that haven't already been mentioned: Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", "Where the Red Fern Grows" and "Summer of the Monkeys", both by Wilson Rawls; Fred Gipson's "Old Yeller"; "Upchuck and the Rotten Willy" and "The Backwards Bird Dog", both by Bill Wallace; C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia"; J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"....]
I got some training on how to write more effectively at fourteen when I began writing sports for local newspapers, learning how to use words to tell a factual, here's-what-happened, the-end news story, and discovered the worlds of modern-day authors William Goldman(The mind behind "The Princess Bride", the book is even better than the movie!), Bodie Thoene(Amazing writer of numerous historical fiction series, read everything from her you can get your hands on), Phillip Gulley(Harmony series, great humorous look at small-town living) and Jan Karon(Mitford series, extremely high recommendation!!!)
Always enjoyed acting and doing improv comedy, that sense of creativity on the run, but with a tight structure to follow as a guide.
And I grew up with country music on the kitchen radio, which is all about stories. A handful of basic outlines, but with so many variations in plot and angles of thinking....it's all about how to clearly grab the listener and make them understand the tale, the really wonderful songs make you effortlessly step into their universe, you understand everything that's going on.
My ideal personality I'm trying to achieve, I guess, would be a mashup of MacGyver, Peter Parker, Jo March and Atticus Finch: the resoucefulness and smarts of MacGyver, Peter's sense of humor and striving for balance in the crazy world he lives in, Jo's impulsiveness and creativity, and the strong moral values and courage that Atticus displays.
[I'm not completely sure what I meant by this paragraph....but my teacher was a hippie, and it sounded like the right kind of meaningless meaningful touch. I guess I meant that those are all qualities I admire in each of those characters, but there's
so many more I could add to this list.... Oh, good grief! Snoopy, Linus, the way Sydney Carton dies(I hated "A Tale of Two Cities, by the way. No, I hate anything by Dickens), Jay Berry Lee, Charlotte A. Cavatica, so many others....]
Stories teach us about life. They show us how the world works, set an example of how we should act, which sometimes means showing the other side of that coin, what happens when we fail or disobey. This is why Jesus taught in parables, because we're wired to retain the things we hear through story, and then think about the stories we hear, and learn from them. Great ideas can be passed on, traits of virtue praised in legends. We get our morals and values from the stories we absorb and drink in, which makes the art of storytelling the most effective teaching tool there is. (And also, this is why we need good discernment skills.)
What my life will be like up ahead, I don't know. Might I ever have a novel published, or maybe some picture books? How will the switch to digital technology impact the journalism and publishing worlds as we know them? And does anyone really care about one more collection of words strung together, honestly, if I did write something, would anyone read it? I don't know the answers to very many of these questions, or what form my writing may take. But whatever channels it goes into, I will always find stories, and they will always have a market. If not in money, then in time, because little kids will sit and listen for hours and think that I'm one of the most amazing people on the planet, knowing all these things, and taking the time to explain them. They might be inspired to create their own tales, remembering the history or fables I relayed to them, and the chain would just go on from there.
I am a storyteller.
