The Wonderful Art of Storytelling

Most likely, your first thought is of books when you read the title of this blog post, but I’m here to tell you that “Storytelling” has a much broader and important meaning!  For a start, a simple relating of events is an instance of storytelling, and no doubt this was the first kind of story in mankind’s history.  When it was a significant event, the story was told over and over, probably embellished along the way, until it became a legend, myth or folk tale.  

Music has been an integral means of conveying a story throughout history, and many stories – factual, legendary or simply fanciful and for entertainment value – have been related by means of ballads, tunes and rhymes.  In Medieval times, minstrels roamed the countryside singing their stories, spreading an heroic tale or poetic fable across the land.  

Minstrels were like balladeers who sang stories.

Others developed the art of speaking to narrate a story, adding emphasis, dialogue and suspense to entertain as well as convey a story of some kind.  Often, a story had a lesson, a moral or point to teach and remind listeners of the importance of behaving a certain way.  

A more sophisticated form of storytelling is the drama or play in which actors participate in conveying parts of the story, in particular the emotional aspects of individual characters in the story.  And just as a theatrical play has a writer and director, so does the modern version of a dramatical play, namely the film.  

Finally, there is the written story, and this comes in many lengths, shapes and genres, from a very short story to an epic series.   The story can have a moral, a lesson in history, a concept of philosophy or human psychology, or simply be an artistic display of words.

The reader can become immersed in the lives of other people, thereby broadening the reader’s knowledge and understanding of how different people react and deal with life’s problems and challenges.   The reader can also be led to deeper self-understanding by relating to a particular character in a story.

Image by luankblo on Pixabay

Not only can a story relate an historic event for various purposes, but when the story conveys the mentality and culture of its time and place, it is like a time-capsule.  The reader of an old book, or the viewer of an old film, can be transported back to a time when the general world view and mentality were different, as well as the manner of speech and colloquial language.  Rather than dismiss an old story as outdated, it could instead offer valuable insight into the development of society and challenge one’s own opinions on certain issues.

just one of many books from recent decades 

containing "social commentary" reflecting

 the decade in which it was written.

Unless your next story is purely for light entertainment and relaxation, you might like to look for the moral, concept or insight it offers, and let it enrich you.  Do you agree with the actions and emotional responses of the main characters?  Why, or why not?  Does the viewpoint of a character from a past time period annoy or offend?  Why, and why was that viewpoint not offensive at the time?  

Whatever format and age your next story will be, may it be a personally rewarding and satisfying journey!

Good vs Bad - Too One-dimensional?

Most of us know that every good story must have an outstanding villain or two – how else can the characters be challenged and drawn out accomplish, overcome and attain happiness for the readers?   And if not a person, then certain circumstances act as the obstacle, problem and challenge for characters to overcome, otherwise there would be no story to tell.  But I believe readers have moved on from the fairy-tale basics of plain good versus plain old evil, and villains (or problematic circumstances) can no longer be one-dimensional to satisfy today’s readers.

This is good, because real life is anything but one-dimensional, and people are hardly ever completely good or totally evil, so unless you want to escape into a fairy-tale world for a while, characters and/or circumstances should also have various layers and dimensions.  The classic definitions of protagonist vs antagonist have become blurred, but rather than confuse readers by undermining what is “good” and what is “bad”, a good story nowadays leads the reader to come to his or her own conclusions, and this is a much more rewarding and satisfying result.

I’ve been reminded of these points again just recently after watching a couple of my favourite TV series again, namely Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Haven.   In Buffy, for example, the traditionally evil vampire called Spike goes through many ordeals and transitions until he comes out as the hero and saviour of the world in the final episode.   Haven has the winning formula of three characters which each brings something different into the mix according to their own perspective.  One of them is Duke, a petty criminal but actually not such a bad guy when you get to know him better.   Like Spike, he, too, sacrifices his life to save everyone else in the second-last episode of the show.

Without directly thinking about such shows or books with similar storylines, I found myself also creating a “bad guy” who ends up saving all the “good guys”.   His name is Goram, and he first appears as Beacon of the Night, his formal Atlan name, in the first book, Rhuna, Keeper of Wisdom.  He’s already showing signs of rebelling against the Atlan way of life by trying to grope and seduce Rhuna, but some 20 years later she meets him again in Ancient Egypt where he has switched sides completely and is the leader of the Black Magic followers of the Dark Master.  But by the end of book 3, Rhuna, The Star Child, however, Goram has actually saved the Atlan people who had to flee Egypt, and at the end of book 4, Rhuna: new Horizons, he does something even more extraordinary to rid the ancient world of the Dark Master’s influence.  Needless to say, just like Spike in Buffy and Duke in Haven, their actions didn’t come about on the spur of the moment, but rather developed subtly over time with a series of challenging events. 

So, we are seeing deeper dimensions and layers of the antagonist who, in many cases, turns out to do a particularly good or heroic deed.   Maybe it’s much more rewarding to see the ‘bad guy’ do good in the end out of love or some other deeper motivations, than seeing the good guy do the predictable heroic stuff!

Names for Characters - Why so important?

What’s in a name?  A common question with answers that run surprisingly deep.  Names are like brands or images, and a name that’s easy to remember, stands out or has a nice ring to it immediately have a positive effect on those who hear or read the name.  Why else do many celebrities (and authors!) change their names if their real ones are hard to pronounce, sound strange or even funny? 

My own experience with a different surname really drove this point home to me quite dramatically, and here's the story:  I grew up with a Russian-sounding surname which no one could pronounce, so I spent the first 25 years of my life spelling it over and over and over again.  But then, when I was married to my first husband whose surname was Taylor - hey, presto!  I was suddenly very popular and well-liked, and even received compliments such as "nice name!" from a complete stranger when I introduced myself on the phone while at work! 

Nowadays, I'm happy with my second husband and his name, Underwood, which I gladly use because it's much easier to spell and pronounce than my maiden name!

With this in mind, I always consider the names of my characters very carefully, and it was an extra challenge because the setting is fantasy – or alternate history at best, so a common name like Bob or Jane just wouldn’t do.  We all have a mental image of what a Bob or Jane would look like, just as we connect an image to most other words and names.  A name determines our identity, so it's a big deal to create a character and a name to make a whole new identity with whom the reader can identify.

Although there are some great websites that generate character names of all sorts, I found that they didn’t help me at all, and so I come up with my character’s names the old-fashioned way:  just thinking, jotting them down and tossing them around in my head.  Sometimes I change a letter or two to see if the name sounds better, and then just thought about the “feel” of the name – what kind of personality the sound of the name conjures up in the mind.    When I feel reasonably happy with a new name, I google it to make sure it isn’t already “taken” by some other author or film-maker, and if it’s reasonably uncommon or even has no google search results, I’ll take it!

This is the approach I used for ‘personal’ names like Rhuna.  But in world of the Atlan Empire (Atlantean Empire) people had a more complicated formal name by which they were known (I made that bit up – but how knows what it was really like in Atlantis?!) such as Keeper of Wisdom.  This idea just came to me one day when I was thinking of how to make Atlan names stand apart from every other name, and it seemed to fit perfectly.  Atlans are given a formal name or title when they have shown a certain trait or quality.  Hence names like Guardian of Harmony, Resolver of Disputes and Wanderer of Plains.  But some names are less precise such as Softness of the Clouds, Peace of the Valley and Melody of the Dawn.

Once the characters are created and named, they have a tendency to take over their own destiny as the story is written.  This is because the characters are given certain basic traits (which often match their names) and as events unfold, I have to consider how each character would react to this event depending on their personality.  I think it’s important to keep the characters true to themselves and let them grow and change as the story unfolds, just as it would be for real-life people who are constantly growing and changing as they go through life.

Sometimes, certain characters have actually determined the outcome of a sub-plot due to their own individual view of a matter, and many times, when I’ve had to consider the next steps in a story and how each character would be affected, would they feel and react, I’ve been shown several alternate paths the story could take.   So I really must give some of the credit to the characters who have come alive on the pages of RHUNA!

Villain vs Antagonist

Long before I started writing anything, I heard the saying that "every good story has a good villain" - or perhaps that should be "...a bad villain"?!  In any case, I took it to heart as I planned my first novel, and this is what I came up with:

The Dark Master, as he is called, who wears a black robe and causes ripples of terror to pass through the idyllic and utopian communities of Atlan, where the heroine and protagonist of my novels resides. 

Although The Dark Master sounds like a Fantasy cliché, I decided early on that he should be a real and complex character, like the others in my story, and not just a "bad guy" for the sake of having a villain.

In the world I've created for Rhuna, my protagonist, the Dark Master has a name like everyone else, and was a normal citizen of a peaceful society.  His name was Gatherer of Sage, and he was a Herbalist who began to dabble a bit too much in Alchemy and other unknown elements.

His quest to achieve things believed to be impossible or unattainable drove him to rebel against the restraints of society and the criticism by his peers, and before long he was no longer a respected Atlan Master wearing the traditional white robe, but rather a dark one to express his defiance:  hence the moniker, "the Dark Master."

At some point I began to think of the difference between a plain, outright villain, and an antagonist, and realized that some of my other characters, who were basically "good guys" were also antagonists because their viewpoint, opinion or actions brought on a conflict, a new situation and consequences that my heroine, the protagonist, had to deal with.

Now that I've decided what motivated The Dark Master to become such, and what still drives him on, he is no longer a faceless, menacing villain, but a formidable personality that can even be respected or understood to a degree. 

What do you as a reader think about a villain/antagonist you can relate to, or who has depths and dimensions like the good-guy characters in the story?