It is socially awkward being a writer at parties. “What do you do?” you will, of course, be asked. Do you tell the truth?
“Well, I sit around all day, drink too much coffee and sometimes write a few paragraphs. I procrastinate a lot, but mostly I fantasise about imaginary people at great length.” No, of course not. Instead you mumble something about “being a writer” and then move on swiftly to asking “and you?” to avoid all the laborious explanations of why your books are not for sale in WH Smith.Inevitably you discover that your questioner does something worthy or high profile or well paid (or all three at once) and the next ten minutes can be happily spent getting the inside information on that. You call it research and yet again you resign yourself to never being able to sound so admirable or successful.
But with the Christmas cocktail party season approaching I am wondering about taking a different tack. It is about time I had a rebrand. I might try saying I am storyteller and see what sort of reaction that gets.
Why? To me saying you are a storyteller sounds so much more life affirming than saying your are a writer. It stresses entertainment and performance. It is a word that implies communication. Writer is a sad old sounding word, with built in angst in it.It makes you think of dragging a scratchy nib laboriously across a page in an unheated garret. Storyteller sounds bouncy and fun. It conjures up the fireside and the mead cup. I think that’s what you need at a Christmas party.
There are other reasons. When you read the reviews on Amazon, reviews by ordinary folk, it becomes clear that, nine times out of ten, what they are after when they pick up a novel is a great story. This is an ancient, primitive desire. The story is what helps makes us make sense of everything. There has been research done to show that there is an evolutionary advantage to storytelling. Now that is a profession to which I’d like to belong.
Another problem for me it that the word “writer” stresses the means of communication rather that the contents of the message. I love words and I love good writing, of course I do. I strive to write as well as I can but I know I am clumsy and slipshod and lazy with my tools. I am frequently deeply frustrated by them. It is the effect of words that interests me, not the words for their own sake. Often I wish I could send my ideas straight to a movie screen or into paintings. Words often seem unequal to the task I want them to perform. I want soundtrack, I want texture, I want the smell of things and the taste. I want my readers to experience everything. Oh heavens, I think I want to create a holodeck for them, just like the one they had on Star Trek, the Next Generation.
To say “I am writing” vastly understates the task I am setting myself. I am not just stringing symbols together on a piece of paper. I am striving to make an imaginary world credible and tangible to the reader. There are characters to create and develop; there are settings to realise and convey and all of this must be then carefully crafted to produce a logical, satisfying narrative in which the events pile up and up, each building on the other in order to create something that is both emtionally and intellectually satisfying. I write so that I can tell stories. Heck, I’d use a box of wax crayons if that did the job more efficiently than words!
