About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

On Pure Storytelling

5 On Pure Storytelling —for Vonda N. McIntyre [Talk delivered at the 1970 Nebula Awards Banquet in Berkeley] I think the trouble with writers writing about writing (or speaking about it) is the trouble anyone has discussing his or her own profession. I first came across this idea in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927): you’ll do better writing about something you’ve only done a little of, because you still preserve those first impressions that make it vivid, even to someone who has been doing it for years. If you write about something you have been doing day in and day out, though you would recognize those impressions if someone else were to recall them to you, you yourself tend to pass over them as commonplaces. Therefore, contemplating what I was going to say this evening , I tried to go back and capture some of my initial impressions about the whole experience of writing stories, or even my first encounters with the whole idea of stories and storytelling. The catalyst for my ideas this evening was a book I passed recently on the shelves of the Tro Harper bookstore. It was a large-sized, quality paperback, with a red cover, published by Dell: The Careless Atom by Sheldon Novick. Sheldon Novick . . . The last time I heard Sheldon Novick’s name was fourteen years ago. He was several years ahead of me at the Bronx High School of Science. There was a strange half dozen years when the Bronx High School of Science held a whole gaggle of fascinating people at once, including, among others, Stokeley Carmichael , Bobby Darin, Todd Gitlin, Peter Beagle, Norman Spinrad , someone else who is currently writing the motorcycle col- 6 Part฀I:฀Seven฀Essays umn for The฀Good฀Times under the nom de plume of The Black Shadow, and Marilyn Hacker. As I said, that was the last I’d heard of Shelley, till two weeks ago. The first I’d heard of him was several years before that. We were at summer camp. Some dozen of us had taken an evening hike from a place named, for unknown reasons, Brooklyn College , to another known as The Ledge. There was a campfire. Several marshmallows had, by now, fallen into it. We were a quarter of the way up the back of a forested hill, pretentiously called Mount Wittenburg. And it was dark and chilly. You know the situation: smoke in the eyes, your left cheek buttered with heat, your right shoulder shivering. Somebody said, “Shelley, tell us a story.” “What do you want to hear a story for?” Shelley said with disdain, and licked marshmallow from his fingers. “Tell us a story, tell us a story!” There wasn’t any stopping us. “Tell us a story. Tell us the one about—” “Oh, I told you that one last week.” “Tell it again! Tell it again!” And I, who had never heard Shelley tell anything at all, but was thoroughly caught up by the enthusiasm, cried: “Well, then, tell us a new one!” Smiling a little in the direction of the rubber on his left sneaker toe, Shelley rose to take a seat on a fallen log. He put his hands on his knees, leaned forward and said, “All right.” He looked up at us. “Tonight I shall tell you the story of . . .” The story that he told was called Who฀Goes฀There? He told it for an hour and a half that night, stopping in the middle. We gathered outside Brooklyn College the next night and sat on the flagstones while he told us another hour’s worth. And two nights later we gathered in one of the tents while he gave us the concluding half hour under the kerosene lantern hanging from the center pole. “Did you make that up?” somebody asked him, when he was finished. “Oh, no. It’s by somebody called John W. Campbell,” he explained to us. “It’s a book. I read it a couple of weeks ago.” On฀Pure฀Storytelling 7 At which point our counselor told him, really, it was well past lights out and he simply had to go. Our counselor blew out the light, and I lay in my cot bed thinking about storytelling. Shelley was perhaps thirteen, back then. I was nine or ten, but even then it seemed perfectly marvelous that somebody could keep so many...