How to Tell a Story: Reflections of a Tale-Teller
As I was relating the plot of a new fantasy novel I had written a few months after publishing my previous novel, The Sun of God, my friend looked at me and asked, “Where do all your ideas come from?”
At first, I didn’t know how to answer her. Sometimes it feels like they just come to me out of thin air. My friend told me that that was what she didn’t understand about authors—how they got all those ideas. I wanted to tell her that they didn’t feel like ideas at all, but instead I just shrugged my shoulders and said—somewhat ironically—that I had no idea. But the question stuck with me, and I decided it deserved a blog post, since part of my “job” as a writer is to come up with these “ideas.”
I cannot speak for everyone, but I have found that in my case the stories I write are not always “ideas” that pop up into my head (though they sometimes feel like that), but rather they are stories from the world around me that I want to tell. In other words, I believe that someone’s ability to write a novel comes from their love of telling stories. And we all have stories. We see them constantly unfolding around us, within us, and beyond us. The difference between someone who writes a story and someone who doesn’t is that the former enjoys telling those stories, down to the last “nut and acorn,” as Tolkien might say.
Since I was young, I was always interested in the human experience. This manifested in reading voraciously as a child, and falling in love with ancient languages and history as I grew older. History, after all, used to be the same word for story, and history is a story, and it gets told today in many different ways. As a writer, you must be interested in the human experience. You must, furthermore, be able to relate to all kinds of people and delve into their consciousness, their wants and fears, their dreams and hatreds. At a human level, at least, you must relate to others. That’s why writers can write villains and heroes in the same breath, and make us empathize with those who seem evil, and love those who have done wrong. As one very famous author once wrote, “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us.”
But even more than empathizing with other people, a tale-teller (as my dear Tolkien always called himself and which I will adopt here) must enjoy thinking about the human experience. If the question What does it mean to be human? excites you, then you have a tale to tell. And I would argue this intrigue in the human experience necessitates, at the very end (or, more to the point, from beginning to end), an ability to face mortality. In other words, you must wonder about death. Because the essence of what makes us human is our very mortality, our doom to be born and die, which shapes and colors the experience of life so poignantly.
Many of my story “ideas” come from a curiosity, even a certain envy, of other lives. Not envy in the sense of wanting what they have, but a burning desire to know what it was like to live as the wife of Caesar in the turbulent rise of the Roman Empire, or what it was like to fall in love in different ages, in different languages, in different cities. Even in today’s world, I wonder about other people’s lives and how they experience their own mortality, their feelings and thoughts, not to be them, but rather to put my finger on that deeply shared truth which makes all of us human, and which nearly always escapes words. It is, ultimately, a desire to answer that question and understand what it means to be human.
Of course, not all of my story “ideas” seem overtly as meaningful in scope and topic as the rise of the Roman Empire or other historical themes. But even my lighter, contemporary romances touch upon important topics of love, vulnerability, and relationships, which are all cornerstones of the human experience. By putting yourself in the lives of others and empathizing with alternative versions of being, you can better understand your own life and personhood, and the peculiar trials and joys that mark mortality. This always rings true when I receive messages praising or even thanking me for writing a story that uncovered these truths and explored the cutting edge of being vulnerable, which, no matter who you love, is at its core a necessity for love.
My imagination—if it can really be called that in the face of a shared human experience we see all around us—can be sparked by very little. Sometimes I see two friends laughing with each other, or I read a line in an ancient text, or I stumble across a historical figure that is little known, or a news headline piques my interest, or something happens in my life that I can immediately unravel into a story of alternative events. Each little instance of a person’s life or history can be stretched and woven into a longer story, because at the heart of each act of living is a single, fundemental truth about being human which can only be understood in the form of a story, which requires vulnerability to empathize and recognize another’s humanity, and thus is the closest we come to living the lives of others.
As you can see, my “ideas” do not necessarily come out of nowhere. They arise from my desire to understand humanity in every aspect and light possible, and there are an infinite number of ways to write about what it means to be human. Having said this, I will admit that sometimes the process of telling a story feels strangely fated.
To give an example, I came up with the “idea” for writing The Sun of God after reading a line in Emperor Augustus’ Res Gestae, which was the required reading for my Ancient Greek class while studying abroad in Rome. I remember toying with the idea of writing a story about his rise to power at the age of nineteen and telling my classmates about the forbidden love story I had in mind and the different perspectives I would bring to the table, which was immediately met with enthusiasm.
All of this might seem like a natural formation of a story, but the strangest thing happened when walking in the Roman Forum one day for class, not particularly thinking about my story idea though it was always in the back of my mind. As we rounded a corner of a well-trodden street, and the sunlight from behind the Temple of Jupiter pierced my eye like lightning, I was struck with an idea for the title. The Sun of God—to symbolize both the fact that Augustus would become the son of a god and because he identified himself with Apollo, a god associated with the sun and who was also the son of Zeus, not to mention its allusion to an eerily parelleled life with the historical figure of Jesus, who was born during his lifetime. It felt too good to be true, and I always considered that a moment of divine inspiration from the gods (or son of god…) above.
Other moments such as this one have occurred to me, especially while I am in the process of writing a story. Stories, after all, do not formulate in the mind all at once. They accumulate words, phrases, and passages into one longer, overaching story. Many times I have found myself facing a plot hole or missing component to my story, and for the time being I would ignore it, knowing in my heart that the answer would reveal itself to me. And that’s exactly what happens.
As if there were some hand guiding the events of the world, a series of coincidences and accidents would lead to my discovery of the perfect “idea” for a specific hole or addition to my novel that makes it complete. Whether it is a book that is gifted to me on a rare colliding of circumstances, or a name from history that I accidentally stumble upon in my search of something entirely different, or even just a memory told to me by someone who I only see once a year, “ideas” like these seem to fall into my lap, or seem placed in my way, and I have a hard time deciding whether it is I gathering those stories into my own like a weaver of threads at the loom, or that all stories are ultimately a part of one, more vast, unending story that we shall not understand fully until our time has come.
To end this long-winded explanation of a truth inherent in all of us, telling a story comes down to a very human impulse, which I believe every one of us harbors, whether buried deep within or bubbling on the surface. Of course, while everyone can tell a tale, there is a difference between a good tale-teller and a bad one, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time. For now, this is the story I want to tell.
