Category: storytelling

Story – the power of words

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn storytelling2 Comments

“The only thing that changes people is storytelling. If you tell a story then it’s either going to change somebody not at all, fundamentally or more often than not just at the edges and imperceptibly and maybe even enough so people will take it.” – Ken Burns

From a different perspective, Neil Gaiman has a strong view of the power of words when they’re shaped into a story, saying (for example), “Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”

Wikipedia writes that “Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view. The term “storytelling” can refer specifically to oral storytelling but also broadly to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story.”

One primary focus after a funeral is telling stories about the dearly departed. Through them, we not only share our memories, often with smiles and laughter. Doing this is universal and so patently human. Unless the deceased is famous, these stories represent the last time many of the tales will be told, and the memories are put on display for younger generations. It’s a sweet time.

We tend to share a lot of “remember when” yarns when we talk in bars, barbecues, reunions, and company picnics. Morals, history, events, and points of view are all part of the mix. If you look through the comments in an old high school or college yearbook, you’ll find a lot of history about the students and faculty.

Without all this sharing of events from our shared past, I think most of us would feel disconnected and alone. It’s as though stories flow through our veins. In many episodes of “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates, a fair number of people appear on the show with no idea about their ancestries. Sometimes they never know their parents, much less their grandparents. Or, for a variety of reasons, their parents never shared any stories about grandparents and great-grandparents. So they were adrift in time and space.

I know who my grandparents were because I met them and heard stories about them and read their letters to my parents. What a pity that so many people have no stories to connect them to their familial past. So much of what should be close to us remains unknown due to the lack of stories.

Ken Burns’ story in last night’s episode about the slaughter of the buffalo in the years prior to the 1890s, wasn’t a story we wanted to hear. But we had to hear it. It’s our heritage, our past, and a defining period in our history. Once you hear this story you will be changed. That’s what stories do for better or worse.

—Malcolm

The Forgotten Element of Story: The Author | Jane Friedman Blog

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn storytelling

“Have you ever thought you put too much of yourself into your fiction? You read through your manuscript and, woah, you are all over the page. It’s not just that characters reflect your own struggles, hopes, and personality traits, it’s that your hopes and fears are laid bare on the page. So you do your best to mute yourself. You alter characters, blunt your unadulterated emotions, make things a little less passionate. Writers aren’t supposed to put too much of themselves into their story, right?

“Or maybe you’re the opposite. You don’t want your writing to seem biased, clouded by your own experiences. You shape your characters into people who don’t share your background, beliefs, or love for puppies in teacups because good writers keep distance between themselves and the page.”

 

Source: The Forgotten Element of Story: The Author | Jane Friedman

Personally, I hope more emerging authors and students in writing programs will find their way to this post. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that one of my favorite quotes comes from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: ““Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” The reason I like this post from Jane Friedman’s blog is that author is asking you to acknowledge this and own it rather than trying to stifle it.

In short, the “you” that you allow on the page will determine whether the story sings or falls flat. She asks you to examine your own backstory, your values, and your impact.  Abernathy is spot on with this advice.

–Malcolm

 

Changing our world without knowing it

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn storytelling, writing4 Comments

“Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.” — Ben Okri

Ben Okri, who won the 1991 Booker Prize for this novel The Famished Road, is quoted often and in many places when it comes to words of wisdom about storytelling.

When we think of storytelling, whether from oral traditions of centuries past or the novels we peruse on Amazon, we tend to think of stories as tales intended to be read or otherwise passed along to others. What we overlook, out of habit, are the stories we tell ourselves.

Even things said over and over in jest/sarcasm such as “My feet our killing me.”  I suggest that if you say that or think that often enough, your feet will ultimately kill you because the idea has become part of our world view about yourself.

Those who teach meditation often ask us to get rid of the on-going interior monologue that runs like an endless podcast inside our heads. First, it’s uncensored and often negative in some way. Second, it fills our thoughts with dribble, shutting down our ability to hear the stories we need to hear. Third, that monlogue is a barrier to the songs of the universe, knowledge we might get through intuition or other communication with higher powers and totem animals.

And then I guess we might say that if the only person we’re listening to is that podcast from ourselves, we won’t hear much else. What a pity, in a world built on stories, thousands of voices are trying to get our attention.

–Malcolm

Refuge Eye shows us the world through the eyes of refugees

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn storytelling, writing

The world, and our understanding of it, expands when we read the stories from other cultures. The online hub Refugee Eye facilitates this wondrous expansion of our knowledge. In addition to its other work, Refugee Eye recently created a museum exhibit called “MY GAZA: A City In Photographs” which opened on March 11 and runs through May 8 at a new San Francisco gallery at 849 Valencia Street.

According to the organization’s website, “Refugee Eye is a visual storytelling hub where we redirect the refugee’s content to the public, attempting to bridge between dual worlds in a time of building walls—adding up refugee perspectives to the public discourse by offering vivid stories from their exile environments.

​”Through Land and sea, millions of refugees leave everything behind to their uncertain fate. The towns and villages where we live or come from are getting connected more than ever before. So it’s inevitable for our progressing world to start collectively examining and thinking out the challenges we face. Refugee Eye is a home for personal narratives and a bridge between worlds. We spread awareness and spark creativity.”

Co-editor Lara Aburamadan said in a McSweeney’s interview, “We’re attempting to capture images that bring authentic experiences to the refugee policy debate at a time when the international community’s ability to respond to these crises is stretched thin. We hope to refute the stereotypes about refugees, spread empathy, and help lead the next generation of refugees by meaningfully contributing to local issues on the ground in our countries of origin and the U.S.” Her co-editor and co-founder is Jehad al-Saftawi.

The website will soon add an E-Zine. The site is looking for volunteers to help staff the gallery exhibit and to contribute their stories to the E-Zine. Interested parties can learn more at info@refugeeeye.org.

Jehad al-Saftawi said that “Conceptually, Refugee Eye is the experience that refugees like us undergo when moving from everything they have ever known into a totally new environment, all in search of a sense of belonging.”

They have stories to tell us.

—Malcolm

Writers want to sweep you up into their stories

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn magic, storytelling, writing

“Magic doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine — to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.” – David Abram, “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology”

An ancient campfire beneath a fetching moon. Trees standing close, listening to a storyteller spin out a tale that captures the imaginations of those sitting around the fire so completely that the listeners see no boundary lines between themselves and the characters within the story. Truly, there is no outside at this point, no separation between the words and the trees and the moonlight and the derring-do of the far-away people whom the storyteller conjures into the world of that very moment.

As Wikipedia says, “Through the telling of the story people become psychically close, developing a connection to one another through the communal experience. The storyteller reveals, and thus shares, him/her self through his/her telling and the listeners reveal and share themselves through their reception of the story.”

Creating such shared moments is more difficult in a book because the storyteller and reader are worlds away from each other physically until or unless the words are strong enough and vibrating powerfully enough to dissolve the illusion of physical distance. When the book works for a reader, the experience becomes as powerful as the campfire scene where all is connected.

To be sure, the connection between writer and reader depends not only on the skill of the writer, but the a reader’s (often) long-time experience with books (how they work), the subject matter, the reader’s state of mind and (probably) physical comfort. When conditions are optimal, the reader is swept up into the story as though s/he is sitting with the storyteller next to a fire in a quiet forest or within cabin’s sweet shadows.

Books for prospective writers try very hard to teach us what we need to do while researching and writing to ensure that conditions are optimal. My approach–which doesn’t necessarily work for all writers–is that the writer must first be swept up by the story and its characters before s/he can produce a novel that sweeps up readers in the way David Abram suggests.

No matter how a writer connects with his/her story, getting those conditions right takes practice. Nobody sounds like Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz, or John Coltrane the first time they pick up a tenor sax. Nobody writes like Stephen King, John Hart, or Neil Gaiman the first time they pick up a pencil or sit down at a computer. All of these people evolved into the people they became. 

Time seems to fly while writers are becoming comfortable with words, plots, techniques, character development, and magic. In a world where many people want everything right now, it’s difficult to submit to the necessity of practice. Even the wizards at Hogwarts needed to practice their spells. So do storytellers dreaming of campfires and writers dreaming of books and short stories.

After that, the magic begins to work behind the scenes and become second nature to the man or woman with the pencil. 

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the magical realism series of novels that begins with “Conjure Woman’s Cat” and ends with “Fate’s Arrows.”

 

In the jingle jangle morning

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn authors, imagination, storytelling

The song has a bright, expansive melody and has become famous for its surrealistic imagery, influenced by artists as diverse as French poet Arthur Rimbaud and Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. The lyrics call on the title character to play a song and the narrator will follow. Interpretations of the lyrics have included a paean to drugs such as LSD, a call to the singer’s muse, a reflection of the audience’s demands on the singer, and religious interpretations. – Wikipedia

Bob Dylan released “Mr. Tambourine Man” in March 1965 in his “Bring It All Back Home” album when I was at the last place I wanted to be (college), tied down, I thought, by an ancient canon of learning that was taught and graded in an ancient style of “education” that did not meet my needs nor my temperament. What would have met my needs would have been saying “to tell with all this” and then telling Mr. Tambourine man “I’ll come following you.”

Five years later, Gordon Lightfoot released a song with a similar intent, “Minstrel of the Dawn” on his “If You Could Read My Mind” album when I was–once again–in the last place I wanted to be (the navy) freshly returned from Vietnam and a war I did not support then serving (ironically) on the staff at the navy’s boot camp where I helped prepare others to go to the place I just left. I soon became a conscientious objector and left the navy having become a convert to the minstrelsy of the “Minstrel of the Dawn” in the jingle jangle of a new morning.

Because of my belief in dreams, I am nothing if not impractical, and heavily influenced–actually under the spell–of these two songs for a lifetime, and while I cannot duplicate the quality of the songs, much less an old-time Troubador, I have always infused their spirit and spell in my work. That is to say, I lead my characters astray and want to hypnotize readers into following them–as Lightfoot says–“While the old guitar rings.”

Some have said Mr. Tambourine man is about losing oneself to drugs, a notion that Dylan denies. Like most writers, I’m dealing something more dangerous than drugs: words and stories spun into haunting and irresistible dreams. If the government ever figures out the truth about stories, they’ll either ban them or heavily tax them.

If you read fiction, you know that stories are written to make you “forget about today until tomorrow” while trying to “get into things more happy than blue.” There are side effects to such stories that are more dangerous than those attached to Fentanyl and Oxycontin: addiction to freedom and dreams. I’ve been prescribed Oxycontin at least three times and never got addicted because stories were always a much great temptation.

Money-wise, the street value of stories is less than the street value of Fentanyl and Oxycontin. However, I should mention that there’s no cure for stories. It won’t matter because, in your jingle-jangle mornings, you’ll be too far out in space to want one.

—Malcolm

Click on my name to see the stories in my bag.

 

 

 

 

 

To all who come here

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn storytelling2 Comments

I appreciate it. Your presence has made 2019 a better year and it needed to be better.

Wikipedia Photo

Those of us who tell stories–in books, at parties, around the dinner table, or even in blogs like this one–hope that some of the stories will connect with some of those who have come to the storyteller’s place.

Even the storyteller knows not the ending of a story when s/he begins telling it, just as now I am typing this line with no idea what line will follow it.

Is it luck? No, I don’t think so because one thing has become clear over time; stories know where they are going and just need somebody there to serve as a channel to allow them out into the world.

You have your stories, too, even if you don’t put them in books or blogs. Maybe they’re about your life or maybe they come unbidden from your dreams and your imagination. To all who hear and read your stories, the stories and the listeners/readers are gifts.

From the universe perhaps or from your heart and soul.

—Malcolm

What’s your story?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn storytelling, writing

Sometimes “what’s your story” is a bully’s taunt. Sometimes it’s a provocative inquiry on a first date. More or less, it means “who are you and/or what are you doing here?”

We spend our lives writing our stories. We’re not always aware of the plots or even the themes. We stack up dreams and hopes like cordwood, or even denials and excuses. Perhaps our stories are more transparent to spouses and friends than they are to us. Not all of us can be read like great novels even though we’re impacted by the tales we discover in books and the memories of others shared around a quiet drink or a backyard barbecue.

If one looks at our stories with the combined eye of a mystic, a shaman, a conjurer, an alchemist, and a quantum scientist, the tapestry of the world’s people becomes a little clearer. We see synchronicities rather than coincidences. We toss out the idea of fate, if not destiny, and maybe on nights when the moon is bright and the flowers and birds are quiet, we glimpse the whole of the world’s stories.

As an author, I like to think that the stories in books–fiction and nonfiction–enlarge our perspectives and help us change course or re-dedicate ourselves to the course already chosen. My quantum view is that every story that can happen, will happen in one universe or another and that we can follow the chains of events that best meet our developing needs for the plots in our own stories.

Reading and listening and observing in a spirit of hope and wonder are so necessary for our progress, it’s difficult to understand why a lot of people don’t read or listen or observe. Have they chosen to close their lives off from the world and/or from themselves? I don’t know, but the result of whatever they’re doing doesn’t seem healthy–or helpful to the world.

I see studies from time to time showing that kids benefit from parents who read to them as well as growing up households full of books. Nonetheless, stories are everywhere and if we’re not finding them on the printed page, I hope we’re finding them in films and paintings and TV shows, and what others tell us whenever we ask “what’s your story?”

The world appears to me as a grand storybook with countless chapters, millions of characters, unlimited locations, and possibilities that expand outward at lightspeed. The fate of nations and peoples and justice and Earth itself has not yet been determined because many of us are writing blind or aren’t aware that the daily scenes in our personal stories contribute to the story of our planet. We’re all linked like the characters in the pages of a well-written novel; I think we’ll like where our combined story goes if we realize this and live accordingly.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of Conjure Woman’s Cat.

 

‘Haints in the Woods’ excerpt

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn hoodoo, storytelling

“Haints in the Woods” is one of nine short stories in my recently released collection Widely Scattered Ghosts. Here a brief excerpt featuring characters from my novel Lena:

Praise the good Lord, as the deacon would say, for Pollyanna chose that moment to drive her grey Ford truck through the busted section of the wrought iron fence into the back yard. She wore her favorite green capri pants, black blouse, black slingback sandals, and a wide smile that showed off her new black lipstick and matching nail polish.

“Young people,” whispered Eulalie.

Pollyanna came up to the porch with an Alligator Supreme orange crate chuck full of who knows what covered over in butcher paper.

“Did you see a soused sinner riding his hinny back home?” asked Eulalie.

“Why, is one missing?”

“I was just telling Lena that I think Willie’s sharing jelly and juice with some dusty butt miles away from where he’s supposed to be.”

Pollyanna set down the orange crate. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Sex and booze with a ho,” Eulalie said.

“Holy shit.” Pollyanna slumped down into the sagging couch with a fading smile. When Eulalie handed her the Mason jar of shine, she wasn’t shy about drinking her fill.

“I ain’t really po’ moufin’ my brand-new husband,” said Eulalie. “I’m hopin’ he is a soused sinner today.”

“I know I’m repeating myself, but holy shit.”

“Beats bein’ among the dead. I threw the bones an hour ago, and they said he’s with the dead. Then Lena went lookin’ for him on a spirit journey, and she saw nothin’ but ace-of-spades blackness. As you white folks sometimes say, we’re on tenterhooks.”

Copyright © 2019 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Tempting you with words and tambourines

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn fiction, storytelling2 Comments

Like Gordon Lightfoot’s “Minstrel of the Dawn” and Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” storytellers are always tempting you to follow them, as though through faerie rings, to the farthest reaches of tall tales, music, and imagination. We can’t promise you’ll return the way you were when you left the everyday land of logic, but you’ll find yourselves reborn in just the way the god of your heart intended.

For temptations from my website, I invite you to click on this picture:

 

–Malcolm