Gerry William

The analogies continue.

At 2 a.m. on a night just before I began writing this, I sat
awake in bed, my wife asleep beside me. My mind went back to
the time I began writing my first published novel. To write it, I
became a hermit, a recluse, spending days teaching and nights
alone with my computer, writing the novel that demanded to be
written. Two years of solitude. Two years focusing my energies
inwards for expression.

Reading and writing demand such solitude. Remember the
famous adage about writing — that you don’t have to live in an
ivory tower to be a writer, but you had better write in one.

Academics have it wrong. Storytelling and creative writing
are fundamentally different. Storytellers take the germinal of an
idea and shape the story to suit their audience. Different audience
— different emphasis, different words, different techniques, dif-
ferent words. It’s an organic process, an inclusive one shaped by
the need to communicate one-to-one with groups of people.

The writer’s published story creates one story for all of his or
her readers, regardless of who they might be. They may interpret
the story differently, but that’s a reflection of the reader, not the
writer. The words remain the same. The story is essentially stat-
ic, not dynamic.

Storytellers tend to use stock characters. It’s the story, the
_message, which is important, not the messenger. North American
writers tend to emphasize characters rather than plots. South
American writers haven’t fallen for that trap.

Back to my main theme. I owe my students more than to pre-
sent European literature. The carefully-crafted literary essay has
a deadness about it, a deadness that’s shaped and reshaped in the
writer’s own isolation and solitude. And don’t think I don’t see
the irony of crafting my essay, either.

There’s a wonderful energy in changing the message to suit
the audience. I've talked about storytelling to forty or fifty differ-
ent groups, and each time my message is worded differently,
because each time audience has changed, my students are differ-
ent.

I talk about the use of repetition as a storytelling technique. In
essays, repetition isn’t stressed, because the reader can always
return to a page or passage. Not so in storytelling. Imagine stop-

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