I have a
weak spot (okay, several) when it comes to public speaking. I have an
irrational concern that someone in the audience will have heard me before or
that I will repeat phrases or thoughts and thus bore them.
Of course, any
speaker repeats himself, but I almost never give the same program twice.
Professional speakers much more accomplished than I long ago proved the fallacy
of that, but I can’t seem to shake the irrational worry. I always search for a new way of saying something I have said before.
Fortunately,
something usually comes to me from some
source to allow me to make a slightly different take on the subject I have
been speaking about for over a decade. That subject is books (primarily
fiction)—writing and reading them.
While
fishing around for something to say to Sulphur Springs Rotary Club members, I
read a book review in “Writer” magazine about The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. The book was
written by Johnathan Gottschall, a scientist and scholar, and the review was
written by editor Chuck Leddy. When a
review of the same book showed up in two days later in Sunday’s Dallas Morning News, I knew that help
had arrived.
I have
been trying to make the case for the value of stories and how they change our
lives for many years.
However,
I had only personal experience and very little scientific evidence to back up
my claims that reading and telling stories are good for us in countless ways. And
that reading fiction rates right up there with non-fiction. Gottschall’s book
now offers scientific proof.
I once
had the unenviable job of teaching accountants how to become salesmen (that’s
an oversimplification that will have to do for now). What qualified me to do
that? Being an introvert (yes, I am). I have lost job opportunities because the trait
showed up on the Myers-Briggs personality tests used by many corporations and
universities. I didn’t change that natural inclination; I just learned how to
maneuver it to my advantage.
My
life’s ambition was to be a cowboy or baseball player, but God knew I was not
qualified for either. I was stuck as an accountant. So I sat at the feet, read
the books, and listened to the recorded messages of folks I considered some of
the greatest speakers and teachers. A lot of them were salesmen.
One of
the most useful but most discouraging things I was told is that people forget what they hear, remember what they
see, and understand what they do.
Then
another trusted source told me that people remember about ten percent of what
they hear, twenty percent of what they see, and eighty percent of what they do the first time. However, repetition increases those numbers exponentially.
You would think that information would have conquered my fear of repetition.
So what
does that have to do with stories? As I began to apply the principles I had been
taught, I learned something else. Months, even years after a presentation I had
made, people would repeat one of the stories
I had told. They may not have remembered the facts I provided, but they
remembered the stories and the stories told them how to apply what I was trying to convey.
I never
imagined then that I would be spending most of my time writing stories (fiction
and non-fiction). When I wrote my first books on financial planning, most of my
stories were edited out. I argued against it, but Wiley and Sons simply said,
“We’re a big publisher; you’re an unknown writer. Shut up.” They were right
about that unknown thing, but wrong about the stories.
When
they asked me to write a third book, I talked them into leaving in a few of the
stories. That book sold five times more
copies than any of the previous ones. I attribute that partially to the stories.
Writing
novels, however, is different. It’s a good thing I was naïve about the bias
against fiction (and reading in general), or I might never have started a novel.
Although I often kept secret my own taste for novels in the early years of my
career, I never imagined the bias to be so prevalent and I certainly never
imagined that so many (mostly men) did not read at all.
I went
on a short research trip with three university professors shortly after I wrote
my first novel. One had written a book on flora and fauna of Northeast Texas. I
offered to swap books (mine for his). He said he didn’t have time for fiction.
I wanted
to tell him I didn’t have much time for weeds, either, but I didn’t. I
purchased a copy of his book, thinking it would shame him into buying one of
mine. It didn’t. He took great pains to display his disdain for novels.
One
well-known author said that his parents and his wife asked him when he started
on his first novel if telling lies
was really going to be his life’s work.
That wasn’t
my first hint, but it was one of many that told me I had unwittingly chosen a
difficult path. Not only are novels the hardest sell, but non-genre novels out
of rural Texas raise the selling bar to an almost impossible height.
By the
time I discovered this, I was well into my third novel, and I had a small cadre
of devoted readers—enough for me to finally find a small publisher or two to
take me on.
But what
do we tell the stick-in-the-muds about the value in fiction? I told one of the elitists who said he did
not have time for fiction that he risked being uninformed—that today’s great
biographers use stories to tell about their subjects—even dialogue. So, how can they know what people actually
said so many years ago? Most of the
time, they can’t—they have to make it up.
Is that a lie? Or is it just a
clever way of telling a true story to make it more entertaining? And what
about the great novels that changed the world? I listed a few, but no sell.
I got
some support from an article written about Dallas physician and medical school
professor Abraham Verghese. I consider him an unbiased source because he is not
an author of fiction. The doctor said, “Good fiction can achieve a higher kind of
truth than non-fiction. Good stories are instructions for living . . . a great novel transports you to another
planet, lets you vicariously live a full life, and when you come back it’s
still Tuesday, and yet you’ve learned the lessons of a lifetime. That’s what everyone, doctors included, could
get from fiction. …. And God is in the details . . . you can’t skim and get
meaning.”
I have been saying for
years that stories bind us together—stories heal. I was speaking in the
spiritual sense, but James Pennebaker and a team of researchers at the
University of Texas determined that writing and reading stories raises the
t-cell level in the bloodstream, stabilizing the immune system.
Tom
Spanbauer says that “fiction is the lie that makes the truth truer—that facts
are about a series of events, fiction is about the meaning of those events”.
The most
asked question I get about my books is now and always has been, “Is any of this
true?” At the book launch for Go Down
Looking in early May, I quoted a line from “I wish I Was Eighteen Again”
the song that George Burns sang when he was in his eighties. I always thought
the second line was “Going where I’ve already been.” Turns out, the line is, “Going
Where I’ve Never Been”. Both apply to Go
Down Looking, but there is much more already been then never
been.
Back to scholar
and scientist Gottschall and his book. He says (based on scientific
experiments), “Stories are defining parts of our everyday lives”. So what happens when the so-called facts
conflict with our memory-stories?
Gottschall
answers, “Humans have a knack for weeding out inconsistencies and putting in
facts that enhance our self-made narratives. A life story is a carefully shaped
narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully
spun meanings.” You have to love the
term strategic forgetting.
Some of my
readers who know my history and know the history of Northeast Texas barely got past the first scene in Go Down Looking before contacting me about something they remember
differently. I enjoy getting these questions and challenges. Usually, a little
more reading will answer their questions. If not, I always enjoy explaining why
I told the story the way I did.
Gottschall
goes on, “Fiction allows our brains to practice reacting to all kinds of
challenges that are, and always were, most crucial to our success as a species .
. . Stories make societies work better.”
Remember
what we talked about earlier: We forget
what we hear, remember what we see,
and understand what we do. Reading fiction allows us to hear,
see and do. I have many friends, mostly men, who have not read a book since
high school. They say they can’t stay awake or, “I’ll wait till the movie comes
out.”
That’s
because they only read words. They haven’t taught themselves to hear, see and do right along with the
characters in books. When they learn to do this, they read faster and begin to
understand the meaning of stories and begin to enjoy one of life’s greatest
pleasures.
Speaking of that, Willard Spiegelman in his
Seven Pleasures (Essays on Ordinary Happiness) book, lists
reading and writing as two of the seven. Listening, dancing, looking, walking,
swimming, are the other five. Okay, I don’t know why he left out the one you would
have chosen. I think the answer lies in
the word ordinary.
Writing
novels has given me a renewed appreciation for songwriters. They often say as
much in one page as I do in three hundred.So I
thought it might be fun to try this hear,
see and do thing with a few words from famous songwriter, Tom T. Hall. Who
doesn’t remember the year that Clayton
Delaney died?
In another song, “Homecoming”, Tom tells the story that covers several decades in one page, about six hundred words. And he
does it with only one character speaking.
Humor
me. See if you can see what Tom is telling us in the first verse, just
fifty-two words, four lines.
Guess I should’ve written Dad, to let you
know that I was coming home
I’ve been gone so many years, I didn’t
realize you had a phone
Saw your cattle coming in, boy, they’re
looking mighty fat and slick
Saw Fred at the service station, told me his
wife is awful sick
What do
you see in your mind’s eye with each line?
A son
returns after being away for many years with no contact.
We know
the approximate era because the dad did not have a phone when the son left
Daddy’s
a farmer/rancher—but the bigger issue is the son making small talk to avoid
speaking about the invisible barrier between them—his prolonged absence and his
guilt.
Fred is
probably a brother who has a sick wife. The brother has stayed behind with his
father.
Do you
have a vision of the father and son meeting for the first time in years? Where
are they? What are they wearing? I see the father in overalls and one of those Hank Williams hats, the son in a
loud western shirt with the top two or three snaps undone. The father is on the
porch and the son is at the porch steps of a little farm house with a fig tree
in the yard and a swing on the porch, a vine grows up a trellis.
Do you
see the cattle? What kind are they? See the old service station?
Now skip
to the fourth verse.
I’m sorry I couldn’t be here with you all
when Momma passed away
I was on the road, and when they came and
told me, it was just too late.
I drove by the grave to see her; boy, that
sure is a pretty stone
I’m glad that Fred and Jan are here, it’s
better than you being here alone.
Can you
see the gravestone, the little country graveyard? The anguish on the son’s
face, the disappointment and grief on the father’s? And now we know that Fred is a brother.
Now the
final verse (we’re skipping several good ones).
Well, Dad, I gotta go; we got a dance to
work in Cartersville tonight
Let me take your number down, and I promise
you I’ll write
Now you be good and don’t be chasin’ all
those pretty women that you know
And, by the way, if you see Barbara Walker, tell
her that I said hello.
We’re back
to the guilty small talk, the awkward departure in order to return to a life
the father does not approve of. And, of course, the old flame the son left
behind. See the sweetheart’s face? See the forced smile on the son’s face disappear
and a deep sadness fill his eyes as he mentions his old heartthrob?
Chuck Leddy,
contributing editor to “Writer” magazine concludes in his review of
Gottschall’s book, “Little wonder then that we seek to share our stories with
others: Our brains are hard-wired to construct and absorb stories. Our love of
story is what makes us human.”
Gottschall seals the deal with these revealing
words. “Until the day we die, we are
living the story of our lives. And, like a novel in process, our life stories
are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by
an unreliable narrator. We are, in large part, our personal stories.”
Now, go read. Oops. I forgot the ones who need to read this don’t
read. I am preaching to the choir. Marcel Proust called the moments of unity between writer
and reader “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” To my readers, I say thanks for that fruitful miracle. And thanks
for your kind comments.
I
am trying to hold up my end of this publisher/author agreement. Go Down Looking
is now officially released on Amazon and I need reviews. If you read it and
liked it, please go here and write a few words. You can also find it (and
review it) at B&N and most other online bookstores. If you don’t own it
yet, check out the special deal I am offering here.
At
the risk of begging too much, I also need reviews for the e-book version of
Rivers Flow. Go here. If you have already written one for the print book, feel
free to repeat the same words. Remember that I am offering special deals at my website here. Many thanks.
