The Art of Storytelling

I think about this often when a movie is remade, and I am never against a remake. The new movie is most likely going to be bad and even if it is good it won't be as good as the original. Few remakes are. Scareface is one exception that most people would point to as a newer version better than the original. There are a few others but that is the one that I can grab off the top of my head. The big thing to me is that I do not understand the difference in remaking a movie or making a book into a movie. It is the point of storytelling.

Think back to the cultures of the past where little was written down and storytellers traveled from town to town. Perhaps in one town the story ended with the brave warrior saving the princess and defeating evil, but in the next town the details changed and there was no princess and the evil ended up only vanishing instead of being completely defeated. It was a small change and perhaps it was because the storyteller couldn't remember the ending he told in the last town or he felt the different town needed a different ending. There was nothing fixed about the story and any details could be changed.



Now we live in a world were things are written down and saved for prosperity. We think of a finished story as finished and this is the way it is and the only way it can be. How many times has someone told you the book was better than the movie when the reality is the book and the movie are different versions of the same story told through different mediums and important in their own ways.

I don't like to think of a story as something concrete, and time makes us think in that way too, I believe. How many times has the tale of Romeo and Juliet been retold, updated for a new society? Retelling the story is saying that we think the themes are important and timeless and a new generation should understand the lessons in the story more than the story itself. That in many ways is the point of storytelling. The art of it, and that is why at times I confuse myself.

The project I am working on now has rules. It is 100 days of writing and whatever I am writing is finished at the end of the day. I can't go back and edit it. Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, and worked on it his entire life. To him it was never finished. It could always be updated and edited and made better. That is how all stories are, but when we write them down and say we've reached the end and say they are done we take something away from the story. We take some bit of the art out of it.

I look at my poems as disposable snapshots of the world. The way I see thing recorded like a Polaroid. Made to be looked at and then tossed away never to be thought of again. I am showing people, through words, something that I saw or experienced and I understand for the most part they are meaningless. They are the nonsense I see around me every day. I don't know why I enjoy writing things or why I am angry at myself for not writing about certain events of the past. I consider myself a method writer. I have to be in a place, have a thought, and transport that thought to paper within a matter of days.

There was a wild Richmond night when I was out with some friends drinking. It started to rain and we ran down the abandoned streets late at night/early in the morning. We ran and tumbled and threw each other into the streets. We knocked over newspaper stands and broke tree branches and then we hopped in a car to drive home stopping to get pizza on the way. When we were almost back to my friend's apartment he jumped out and ran home. When we caught up to him he was sitting on the floor with his fist bleeding and the glass of his kitchen cabinet broken.

I guess I can write out some things without having had to immediately have experienced them. I need to improve on that. Dredge my mind for interesting stories of the past. I am at day 40 now with 60 left and everyday I am more and more afraid of what happens when I run out of things to say. What happens when I go through a day and experience nothing? Can I trust myself to close my eyes, travel back in my mind, and pull out something interesting? This I do not know, but I do know that I am creating travesties by forcing my work to be finished in a day, and I am fine with this.

These are the rules I made and they are the rules I will live by. In the next project I can work to edit everything every day and it will never be complete until I publish it. Only I can't ever publish it because it will never be complete. Sometimes we may not like the rules of the modern world, but they are the rules we have to exist by or we will never exist.