Hemingway and Storytelling

Hemingwaywantabes, never forget that competent authors are superb storytellers. While reading the classics, note how the canonized authors weave a story. Whether the choice is fiction or non-fiction, the story must be clear, have a good beginning, middle, and end, and never be boring. Reading well-written books helps you realize how others have accomplished the feat. In On Writing, Stephen King states:

Good writing . . . teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good, old-fashioned jealousy—I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand—but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing . . . is a part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

In Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, the author presents an interesting strategy regarding fiction storytelling. Lamott quotes Alice Adams from a lecture about short story writing. The excerpt reads:

[Alice] said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know whom these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot – the drama, the actions, the tension – will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what they are left with, what happened, and what did it mean.

Fiction writers can learn from Scott Turow, author of several bestsellers, including Presumed Innocent. An excerpt reads:

The atomized life of the restaurant spins on about us. At separate tables, couples talk; the late-shift workers dine alone; the waitresses pour coffee. And here sits Rusty Sabich, thirty-nine years old, full of lifelong burdens and workaday fatigue. I tell my son to drink his milk. I nibble at my burger. Three feet away is the woman whom I have said I’ve loved for nearly twenty years, making her best efforts to ignore me.

Besides being a terrific storyteller, character description was Jack Kerouac’s specialty. An excerpt of On The Road reads:

He was a gray, nondescript-looking fellow you wouldn’t notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness – a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life’s work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night.

In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, author Dai Sijie sweeps the reader into his novel portraying life during China’s Cultural Revolution. An excerpt reads:

The room served as shop, workplace, and dining room all at once. The floorboards were grimy and streaked with yellow-and-black gobs of dried spittle left by clients. You could tell they were not washed down daily. There were hangers with finished garments suspended on a string across the middle of the room. The corners were piled high with bolts of material and folded clothes, which were under siege from an army of ants.

Providing a good beginning, middle, and end to a story by doing so with each paragraph provides excellent storytelling. In Down and Out In London and Paris, George Orwell presents a worthy example. The excerpt reads:

The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as was not surprising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had been noised all over the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by the police.

While Woody Allen may be better known for his comedic films, one of his books, Without Feathers, is a classic. A short stories he weaves is called The Whore Of Mensa, a great “what-if” detailing one man’s search for intellectual companionship instead of the usual sexual gratification. An excerpt reads:

One thing about being a private investigator, you’ve got to learn to go with your hunches. That’s why when a quivering pat of butter named Word Babcock walked into my office and laid his cards on the table, I should have trusted the cold chill that shot up my spine.

“Kaiser,” he said. “Kaiser Lupowitz?”

“That’s what it says on my license,” I owned up.

“You’ve got to help me. I’m being blackmailed. Please.”

He was shaking like the lead singer in a rumba band. I pushed a glass across the desktop and a bottle of rye I keep handy for non-medicinal purposes.

“Suppose you relax and tell me all about it.”

In the non-fiction bestseller Seabiscuit, author Laura Hillenbrand captures the reader’s attention by providing visual and dramatic scenes propelling the reader into the middle of the action. An excerpt reads:

A minute later the field bent around the far turn and rushed at the grandstand. There was one horse in front and pouring it on. His silks were red. It was Seabiscuit. The crowd roared. Pollard [the jockey] and Seabiscuit glided down the lane all by themselves, reaching the wire in track-record-equaling time. Kayak was right behind them. It was Pollard’s first win since 1938.

Storytelling – the key to any good writing. Tell a good story and readers will come.