And Now I’d Like You To Clap For Me

and tell me I’m wonderful…

After the seventh or eighth of these sort this morning in amongst just a handful of beautifully crafted stories, I admit that I am discouraged and ready to pull out my hair. It’s like needing to sort through a hundred pieces of junk mail while looking for the wedding invitation or the birth announcement …or perhaps a royalty check.

I have never aspired to be junk mail. But secretly I have ached, longed even …for decades, to become if only momentarily the wind that can lighten or even lift the wings of another, transport some reader toward those moments of hope and wonder, tears and laughter, bliss or horror the way other storytellers have offered those things to me.

Stories you see are magic and they deserve tellers as good and true as they.

Great storytellers work hard

and smart,

they labor and fight like hell

to quiet that niggling need,

that ignorant urge,

to step in front of the story they’re attempting to tell,

to get in the damned way,

to make it about them.

Great storytelling,

best I can tell,

means that even when the story seems to be about you

it isn’t.

It is always about the story.

Preening,

asking one’s audience,

to lend you their precious attention,

then offering them piffle and self-serving nonsense,

humble-bragging and passive pleas to be celebrated…

for doing something difficult or new,

for some recent achievement they fear no one will notice…

That may be the deal some have with their readers,

the level of adoration they seek,

but that’s not writing, dear!

And that’s not storytelling.

It’s a sense of entitlement.

A form of audacity.

That’s watering down the soup.

In the end no one can control what another may or may not say when it is their turn to step up to the microphone. Attendance at any wedding reception or memorial service, or class reunion will re-prove the veracity of this, again and again. People say and do the damnedest things. And somehow, when given a microphone and a lit up stage, they sometimes just can’t help themselves.

They have their rights, no doubt, as you have yours…

and I have mine.

But stories have their rights, too.

How wondrous it can be then when someone rises to the challenge,

finds a way to weave a tale without getting in the way,

when they thread the needle and shape the words, and do a story justice;

a gust of wind across outspread wings that sends the reader soaring…

It is always about the story.

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