Stephen King and Story-Telling

Shakespeare, Stephen King, and Steven Spielberg all have something in common (and, no, it's not their slight superiority complexes).



My mother, a speech language pathologist at an elementary school, assesses and corrects various language issues and disorders in children. A conversation with her today revealed that one of the biggest challenges her students faced was story-telling. They had difficulty recalling details and sequencing events to form coherent scenes and ideas. While this sort of impediment is expected in children with language disorders, a surprising number of people struggle with this skill into adulthood. I'm sure everyone's met a person who is simply incapable of telling a decent story (telltale signs include excessive use of the phrase "and then" and a lack of an ending).

Telling a story isn't just an essential tool for social interaction and workplace communication: it's also what has propelled those few writers to stardom. So many writers, in the universal struggle to churn out a best-seller, forget what the key element of a novel, essay, or novella is: a good story. Something with a coherent beginning, middle, and end. Even unpolished or otherwise bland prose can scintillate if it is bolstered by a strong story. After all, the art form in itself (writing, drawing, music, film) strives to tell a story. That's the overall purpose of art, but in no art form is story more important than in writing.

Think about Shakespeare. Stephen King. Steven Spielberg. Their stories, which build upon basic or universal concepts or ideals, are the stories we still think about today. No literary critic is going to put Shakespeare and King on the same pedestal, because Shakespeare is perhaps the most revered writer in human history and King is the self-proclaimed "literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries" (what most people don't know is that Shakespearean work is littered with sexual innuendo and is rarely quite as grave as most high school teachers make it out to be). Regardless, these two men (along with Spielberg) have made names for themselves by writing good stories. Even their flimsiest premises and most outlandish plots have been saved simply by their ability to tell solid stories.

I'm not asking you to write the next The Shining (which, despite being somewhat bloated and at points relying too much on King's famous italicized motifs, is masterful story-telling) or Julius Caesar or E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (even though Spielberg is the director, he play just as large a role in the story-telling process as the writer). I am simply asking you to pursue the art of story-telling with me.

First of all, a story has a coherent beginning, middle, and end. We have established that. It doesn't matter if you're attempting to write a trilogy of novels or an essay. Things happen in a sequential order. Things happen for a reason. You are telling a story for a reason and if you'd like to write something nice, make sure that reason is a good one.

For an essay or even a dreaded DBQ, it is important to select the examples or ideas you'd like to include and write your stories around them. This will dramatically decrease the drama of trying to organize your ideas. Writing an outline is always a good idea: even something basic and skeletal will provide you with a solid foundation for any paper. Insert your examples into the outline and all you have to do is write around it for whatever reason you are writing it in the first place. Whether it's for persuasion or academics or, in the case of a DBQ, no good reason, it's your job to make these examples interesting. You have to tell the story in a way that is not only coherent, but interesting. While that typically involves the use of strong vocabulary and complex sentence structures, it is also important to include interesting things and write the facts that have been facts for so many years in a new way. Even if you just rephrase it, it will seem fresh and organic to readers.

That's all a story really is: retelling something in a new way. The story of two people meeting and falling in love has been told so many times that some of us have, frankly, grown quite sick of it. Yet we insist on telling it and retelling it, reshaping themes until we come across something just different enough to seem entirely new. Only a good story-teller can make something old-- romance, life, death--seem new again.

As someone who specializes in short stories, I can verify the importance of telling a story well in a short amount of time. Even if you plan on writing an eight-novel saga, you only have so much story material to work with that inevitably gets padded out with extraneous materials and subplots (to quote my father, Stephen King has "never met a subplot he didn't like"). A film series runs on a single story. A short story is simply its larger siblings-- the novels, films and long plays-- without the subplots.

So how do we write good stories? We look inside ourselves. We look out of our windows. We watch TV and go to work or school and draw upon our unique experiences for subject material. Everybody has a different life and a different perspective that lends itself to the impossibly expansive range of story variations available to us. So if you're a struggling writer who believes they don't have a story tell, quit comparing your endeavors to those of your heroes and look to yourself. The kid you saw at the grocery store is a story. The friend you had who moved away without telling you is a story. And if you tell it well, it will be the kind of story you'd pick up off the shelf and read yourself.