Stories told

I wrote a bit about stories last year, and there proposed an idea about calling people over, to tell stories. I had a significance for such tales in mind when I wrote the post, but could not write it down in a way that would be satisfactory at the time. I'm going to try again today, maybe with more luck this time around.

Stories are, by and large, written down nowadays. Most of the stories I tell are not told, as such: I write them down, give them form and status. Writing gives stories a form that cannot be achieved without such labeling of the pieces. When one writes a story down, it includes making it fit a certain mold, certain kinds of expectations. Stories, when written down, gain status but lose freedom.

"Writer" is a profession. Have you ever heard anyone tell they're a professional storyteller? If you have, have you asked them if they were a writer? It doesn't really matter if you did, since they probably were. Storytelling is not something that happens anymore, not on a professional level. It's something that's done to pass time, or entertain children.

I don't mean to look down on writing: it's a profession much worth all the lauding it can get these days. Of course one could argue there's good literature and bad literature, but from today's point of view that's irrelevant: what we want, what we are looking for are good and bad stories.

A good book can be a bad story, and vice versa. Of course it is probable that more good books are good stories than the other way around, but for that I'd need to go to such amounts of research as I'm not prepared to today. In books, this separation is needed, whereas in stories, it is not relevant anymore.

The way the story is told is as important as the story itself, but when telling a story, there is no mold the story must fit. Told stories give free reign to the imagination in amounts that are impossible when stories need to be written down. Stories told might jumble, they might be confusing but they cannot be rigid. A story being told on the spot must flow, it needs to be like a living thing lest it wither and die.

There's a reason I've brought this up again. I've finally gone and started the storytelling evenings I talked about, a year and a half ago. The idea is even older, but now I have finally started. It's a feeble thing, still, but I've begun, and I have no meaning of stopping. Even if it is just me, telling stories to myself, I've found something worth doing, and trying to do it well.