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Albert Anker: Der Grossvater erz\u00e4hlt eine Geschichte, 1884<\/i><\/p>\n
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Albert Anker: Der Grossvater erz\u00e4hlt eine Geschichte, 1884<\/i><\/p>\n
A commenter was kind enough to leave his opinion<\/strong> on one of my reviews from a couple weeks back. (No, I won’t link to it. But I won’t delete it either.) He wasn’t happy with my comments on a certain novel. He said the novel talked about things he knew from first hand experience, and he’d found it a great story. My criticisms of the author’s writing style and use of words (if I understood his comment correctly) were out of line, in his opinion. Nobody cared about that stuff.<\/p>\n In a way I sympathize with him. There’s a difference between good writing and good storytelling. There are a number of well-regarded wordsmiths out there who can’t tell an interesting story to save their lives. And plenty of guys who’d keep you fascinated telling tales at a campfire, who couldn’t write a coherent sentence. There’s some injustice in the fact that the first group is considered superior to the second.<\/p>\n I’ve known a couple fellows myself, in my time, who could keep an audience mesmerized, even though they butchered the English language. They made good use of the verbal storyteller’s tools\u2014intonation, facial expression, changes in volume, dramatic pauses, gestures. <\/p>\n But the problem is that when a storyteller sits down to write a story on paper, he loses most of those tools. If he wants to have the same kind of effect on his audience, he now needs to use the written storyteller’s tools\u2014word choice, rhythm, sentence length, simile, metaphor, etc…. It goes on and on. I suspect a writer has a far greater variety of tools than the verbal storyteller. Which, sadly, makes the job rather harder. It takes a lot of work to learn to use them all. But with those tools the writer can do something the campfire storyteller never can. He can tell us things on multiple levels. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The character Marlowe is doing more than describing the weather and his own clothing here.<\/p>\n He’s telling us he’s not rich (the suggestion is that he has one good suit). He’s telling us he likes a drink from time to time. He’s telling us he’s impressed enough by money to make an extra effort to accommodate the people who possess it. But he’s also telling us he finds that effort a little ridiculous. He can laugh at himself about it.<\/p>\n Author Chandler, in his famous essay, \u201cThe Simple Art of Murder,\u201d tells us that the ideal hardboiled hero is a man who wouldn’t take a bribe.<\/p>\n Philip Marlowe has just told us, by indirection, that he’s that very man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Albert Anker: Der Grossvater erz\u00e4hlt eine Geschichte, 1884 A commenter was kind enough to leave his opinion on one of my reviews from a couple weeks back. (No, I won’t link to it. But I won’t delete it either.) He wasn’t happy with my comments on a certain novel. He said the novel talked about … Continue reading Two ways of storytelling<\/span>
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Here’s an example. I think I’ve used it before. The opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s mystery, The Big Sleep<\/a><\/i>. I won’t even set it up. Let Philip Marlowe tell you himself:
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