“I remember back when filers were FILERS, man.”
There is a murmur of agreement around the millwright lunch table at this statement. There is a pounding fists on the tabletop. There are entreaties to hear more. Amidst this, someone nudges me and gestures at their utensils for emphasis.
“You see this here, Petersucks?” they pick up their butter knife and hold it in front of my face until I have no choice but to pay absolute attention. “Back when I was young, you could take this up to the filing room and they’d put an edge on this fucker that would cut a diamond.”
More murmurs of agreement, like we are a congregation and someone is testifying about the holy filers of the past. The ones who put edges on butter knives.
But I do not object.
Even I, as awkward as I am, know you don’t interrupt a story in the Harbor. Not ever. Not unless you want to look like some rich, city-born, uptight, union-busting outsider. Besides, the butter knife is only a metaphor for the comparative dullness of the modern age.
“You know, I used to take chains* up there, and I shit you not, when I got ‘em back those bastards would be sharp for six months.” My uncle Bruce looks every man in the face, and receives nods of solemn agreement. As he has been at the mill for over forty years he is the greatest authority on all of the mill’s history.
“You go up to the filing room now, and all you see is a bunch of machines. No craft to it anymore.” Someone else says.
More anecdotes fly across the table. So-and-so sharpened such-and-such, and it was something-or-other. Competing versions of each story are told, but nobody is out to undercut anyone else’s version, unless the criticism is also some kind of performance. Even the arguments feel like stories here, because it’s quietly understood that even if you disagree, even if you see things in a completely different way, the one cardinal sin you will never EVER commit is to halt the momentum of a story.
No. The work day is too long and too hard for everyone to constantly be working their mood up from zero. So the stories flow and change and pass from one speaker to the next. The energy is electric.
Someone cut themselves on a saw blade once and it was funny. Someone cut themselves on a saw blade once and it was sad. Someone cut themselves on a saw blade and they died, and a hush goes through the room.
And of course, all of this is only natural.
People make stories. It’s what we do. It’s how we know who we are. And when enough people are in one place long enough, after a while, the sheer amount of history compresses those stories to myths. Time turns men into, if not gods, then at least heroes. The heroes of the saw-mill were its workers and the millwright lunchroom is where I heard of their epic deeds.
Again, all this is natural and only to be expected. What is spectacularly UNNATURAL about these stories is the presentation. For without fail, the stories are masterfully recited, masterfully vivid, and perfectly toned.
These are not Hollywood stories, they are told without thought for narrative satisfaction. These are stories that evolved out of real life experiences to entertain tired men and women telling after telling. They’re like bits in a stand-up routine. Messy but satisfying in and of themselves. Somehow perfect in the pairing of their form and function.
These stories, and the oral tradition through which they were transmitted, make up a large piece of the tiny mythology of Grays Harbor county and enormous chunk of my childhood. These stories taught me how to make otherwise mundane events big, flavorful, and momentous.
These stories taught me that subject matter does not have to be extraordinary, only the method and style of transmission. They taught me that a clear an distinct point-of-view is the same as a soul and that it’s better to be embarrassed inside of a story than to not exist at all outside of one.
Let’s dissect a few.
*It occurs to me that some of you might not know I am referring to chainsaw blades, which are called chains. So, be advised.
*****
My dad and his friend Ronnie arrived at the scene of a car accident….
Or so Ronnie begins to tell me after he finds out that I’m “Petersucks’ kid.” He pauses before he can get any further along and asks me if I know everyone calls my dad “Petersucks.” I admit that I do, that I heard this as soon as I arrived on-site, but that doesn’t stop him from laughing about it anyway.
As Ronnie laughs at my father’s expense, everyone forgets for a few moments that he was ever trying to tell a story in the first place.
When he calms down, Ronnie introduces the premise of the story again.
“So me and Petersucks come across this car accident, right?”
A few more people hear him this time, but it seems Ronnie can’t help but keep interrupting himself. He pauses for a moment to dig through his lunch box like he’s remembered something about its contents he’d previously forgot.
The lunchbox is empty.
After yet another false start, Ronnie says he remembers me from back when I was “just a little fucker no bigger than this.” He holds his hand to his knee to demonstrate. He almost starts his story again, but then he stops to slap my arm.
“But who am I kidding, you was born a big little fucker, weren’t you?”
My prodigious birth weight of 11lbs 3oz is a well known fact at the mill. I admit that I was a large baby. Ronnie laughs and pokes me in the stomach.
I realize Ronnie’s been purposefully interrupting himself to build suspense. I also realize that EVERYONE is now listening. Ronnie had been “working the room.” I feel like an idiot.
I pretend to be offended at the belly-poke and everyone else laughs. I now understand my job in this story isn’t to take this kind of criticism seriously but to help get the energy moving along. I’m just Ronnie’s excuse to tell this particular story, so I lean forward and make sure to look interested, even though I’ve probably heard this story before. And it works, everyone else is eager now as well. They’re warmed up, and I can tell that Ronnie has selected this as the perfect moment to begin.
“So anyway, me and that dumb fucking ox Petersucks… well, you know how he is the big angry bastard… was out driving and we come across this car accident, right?”
It’s the weekend and we’ve got people from the production crew pitching in overtime to do maintenance. That’s why Ronnie is there. The lunchroom is packed and no one cares if we take extra time so long as we aren’t egregious about screwing off on the company’s dime.
“So you know, we figured people might be hurt and all that shit, so me and Petersucks get out to help.”
Ronnie is chronically short of breath. If he talks too long he starts going red in the face. But when he tells stories, this is not a hindrance at all. He uses his lung condition like a sonic drill. He’s timed his breaths to reinforce one another. He’s got all of his punch-lines situated with the rhythm of his lungs. The truly incredulous always happens at the end of a sentence, when Ronnie can’t quite finish the thought. I can tell it’s taken him years to get this good.
“Anyway, it was fucking hot as shit out, over by Swanson’s, my pants was riding up my ass ‘cuz of that tiny goddamn car I used to have and that sonofabitch Petersucks is all grumbling….”
Ronnie doesn’t HAVE to finish the thought, because what he’s conveying is a sense of bewilderment. A sense of surprise on the periphery of the world, and it’s better that he’s too out of breath to articulate it perfectly because what we fill into the provided space is better anyway. He’s got us doing part of the work for him, not that we’ll ever even notice until he’s done.
“We were right about to the first car and….” Ronnie coughs, “…this giant fucking Down Syndrome guy comes out swinging a shovel at us!” Ronnie stands up, making his eyes wide and bewildered, so that we can transplant his present face onto the story-Ronnie that’s all in our heads. Ronnie even crouches over his chair like he might make a run for it.
“Petersucks is telling him to put it down, put it down you dumb fuck, but that fucker wasn’t about to listen so he…” Ronnie takes a half-breath, not enough to get him all the way back to full, “… throws that fucking shovel right at us…” it’s remarkable, like gunfire the way he’s doing this with his breath, making every half-sentence tense and it all seems natural because that’s the way he talks, “me and Petersucks throw ourselves to the ground… and the fucking thing hits a brick wall… right behind where we was standing… and I swear to God it digs into the side of Swanson’s two fucking inches deep.”
Ronnie’s puts his hand up, spreading his fingers apart, showing everyone how far the shovel went into the wall.
“What’d you do?” someone asks.
A perfect amount of time passes before Ronnie exclaims:
“Got the fuck out of there! Fuck that shit!”
Then Ronnie collapses back in exhausted laughter, sweat pouring down his face like he’s just run from someone throwing a shovel at him, and everyone howls. More importantly, everyone loves and feels closer to Ronnie.
I’m not a gifted spoken story teller like Ronnie, so all I can do is pull apart his methods and try to figure out how to apply them to written word.
Were the events that amazing? Not really. A man with Down’s Syndrome threw a shovel at my father and Ronnie one day. They ran off. Put that way, it’s pretty mundane… but it FELT exciting when Ronnie talked about it. Conversely, one of my aunts had a helicopter crash in her backyard… on TWO different occasions. But to hear her talk about it is one of the most boring experiences in the world. Excitement and tension are ALL a matter of presentation.
The trick of it was how Ronnie made the story reflect his personality. How he made it TRUE instead of just factual by injecting a bit of his soul into it. Ronnie didn’t recall forensic details. No. He put us inside the head of a young Ronnie, let us live for a moment through the eyes of a sort of Ur-Ronnie, and then when he was done playing with our brains threw them back at us. He turned the story into a chance to show something about himself and who he was.
Ronnie also didn’t let his story linger or grow inside a vacuum. He brought it out to his audience, worked with his audience, and made us play together like an orchestra at symphony. He made his audience an active participant in telling themselves the story. Ronnie knew how to be “engaging” for those who want a more succinct term.
*****
Eric is narcoleptic and has trained himself over years to fall asleep for the few seconds it takes each log coming into his saw to actually reach the blade.* He likes to tell stories with twist endings. He does it all the time. But you NEVER see the final twist coming, and it ALWAYS catches you by surprise, because he ALWAYS nods off in the MIDDLE of the reveal.
You’d think it’d be frustrating, but he’s got it timed out perfectly.
Eric gives you half a beat to fill in the rest of the reveal yourself and JUST enough information to figure it out. Because he’s trained himself to tell stories that way, and because this reflects the way he speaks normally, the reveal always hits you like a ton of bricks. His tone is such that the reveal could literally come at any time and there would be no visible cue he as to even indicate when that might be. He puts you on the edge of your seat with suspense.
On another long weekend lunch, Eric decides to tell a story.
“I was talking to Harry’s boy down at the….” doesn’t matter where he was, so he’s fallen asleep. Of course, he starts awake again just when you think it might be safe to talk. His timing here is as impressive as it is when he operates his saw.
“Well, you know old Harry, I ain’t seen him in….” Doesn’t matter how long it’s been, so long as we understand it’s been a while. Again, the tension lingers. Has Eric fallen all the way asleep? No, he’s waking back up.
“So me and Harry’s kid start shooting the shit and the next thing you know….”
What? What’s the next thing we know? People are paying attention now, filling in others on what has come before if they weren’t previously listening. Eric’s glasses are skewed on his face from leaning on his hand when he opens his eyes again.
“I said, really? I can’t believe that. They never told him. I mean, you know he was twenty-five years old, I just assumed….”
WHAT? What’s missing? What did you assume?
Eric falls asleep so long he’s almost snoring. It’s torturous. Before anyone can become distracted by something else, right at the point where we’re practically furious, he starts awake all of the sudden and for him it as though no time has passed at all.
“Felt real awful for telling that to him. Poor kid thought Harry was his dad. Kid never knew he was….”
He falls asleep and looks like he’s going to stay that way. Everyone is confused for a moment, until the realization hits us all at more or less the same time.
Adopted. Adopted. Adopted!
Eric sleeps straight through the adulation.
I mumble a lot, and I get intimidated by being overly personal with people I don’t know extremely well, so I can never do what Eric did. Well, unless I’m having some kind of manic attack which does occasionally happen…. BUT I can pick his story-telling apart and incorporate it into my writing.
What did Eric do that was great?
Eric perfected the tease. He wasn’t afraid to let people get frustrated before giving the reveal. He didn’t even mind if you were pissed off, so long as you were emotionally invested somehow. He could take any kind of emotional response and channel it into his story somehow. He had an ability to read a room that I know I will personally never have in interpersonal situations.
Eric didn’t even mind burying the reveal in the middle of a story, or leaving off a definite reveal at all so long as your perception changed somewhere along the line. Eric was like a magician telling you to pick a card any card at all… then guessing your card wrong. And while you were standing there smugly grinning to yourself about how smart you were to pick an unguessable card you didn’t realize Eric wasn’t trying to do a card trick at all. Eric just wanted a cover for what he was really doing, which was going through all your pockets.
And boy didn’t you feel mind-fucked when you realized what was actually going on.
Misdirection, frustration and anger are valuable tools. Sometimes it’s the right choice to make a reader furious at you or pissed at a character. Or use clunky awful dialogue. Your job as a story-teller, as I’ve said before, isn’t simply “show don’t tell.” I think that’s simplistic, surface-level bullshit. Your job as a story-teller is to “Commune.” You want to make people feel connected to something. Granted, that’s more often done by showing not telling, but true Communion goes so much deeper than a clear image. It’s the touching of two souls, the personifying of the Other, and the one source of water in the desert of our existence.
Bring your audience INSIDE the story, pissed off, happy, or however else you can get them. Then CHANNEL and CHANGE those emotions in some way that makes your reader feel like you were playing around with their brain by the time they get done. The WORST thing you can do is leave someone feeling like they were going through a checklist, marking off the pages, until they could put the book down and be done.
MOVE someone in whatever direction you possibly can.
*Eric is one of the fundamental reasons I believe that virtually any handicap can be worked around. If your life depends on it, your body will figure out how to do some amazing shit.
*****
My dad’s best friend is named Dutch.
He’s one of my favorite people in the entire world.
I love Dutch because without fail, at some point or another when he’s telling a story, he will have an emotional explosion on something like the scale of a supernova. Everything Dutch says before the explosion is like waiting for the fuse burn up on a stick of dynamite. Necessary and suspenseful, but ultimately unimportant. Yet merely being in the presence of such an event is more cathartic than just about anything.
I take lunch one day with my father and Dutch in the mechanic’s room.
“Yeah, yeah, you wanna hear a story about your dad Andrew? Huh, Andrew you wanna hear a story about your dad? I’ve got a story about your dad. You wanna hear a story about your dad? Hahaha, oh I bet you want to hear a story about your dad.” Dutch rambles off at a thousand words a minute.
The point of Dutch telling a story isn’t to construct a narrative, or surprise you, or even get you involved. The point of Dutch telling a story is to work himself into a raging inferno, while you sit back and bear witness to his enormity of his feelings.
“Yeah, you want to hear a story about your dad you goofy little fuck!”
Dutch is grabbing me by the bicep while my father groans at the background, not even daring to speak. Dutch is one of the fastest people I know, not only verbally but mentally. Trying to get a word in edgewise when he’s worked himself up is like trying to shoot a quick draw in the chest when he can see you coming and has been tipped off an hour in advance.
“Oh yeah, I’ve got all kinds of stories about that dumb fucker! You know I do! You know it! Guess how long I’ve known your dad, Andrew. Guess how long. Guess. Come on. Guess, Andrew. Don’t just sit there and look dumb.”
“Forty years?” I say.
“Forty motherfucking goddamn years I’ve known that fucking ox! Jesus Christ that’s a long goddamn time! Forty years. Godfather to his goddamn kids, at every last one of his nine-thousand fucking weddings, and I’ve had to sit looking at his stupid face at this fucking place every day ever since he came here.” Dutch slams the table while my father attempts to look out a window.
“Do you know the hell he’s put me through, Andrew? The unimaginable, awful hell he’s put me through?” Dutch roars.
Dutch doesn’t even wait for me to agree, he just nods aggressively to himself, as if what he’s said is so true and I’m so dumb I couldn’t possibly agree with it enough to give it the validation it deserves. I also love Dutch because he’s confident.
“Did you hear about this last month when he called me from the fucking gas station? Oh you gotta hear this one, Andrew. Do you know what he did! Do you! Dumber than a hemlock stump I swear to Christ!”
Dutch takes center stage in the way only the youngest child of a blind piano tuner and a former nun possibly could.
“Dutch, it wasn’t that–” my father begins.
“THE FUCK IT WASN’T!” Dutch shouts, standing up, pointing his finger.
I’m laughing, but it hardly matters. Dutch doesn’t perform for me. He performs for himself. Like Sinatra commanding the audience to obey.
“Having a peaceful day watching the goddamn television, minding my own goddamn business, and guess who calls me up because he forgot his fucking wallet to pay for gas at the gas station! Jesus Christ, Andrew! Guess who!”
“My dad?” I say though tears.
“Oh Elizabeth! I’m coming Elizabeth!” Dutch clutches his left arm and feigns a heart attack while he screams at the sky, “Oh take me now Jesus Christ of Nazareth! Strike me dead and take my poor tired soul to heaven! You bet your sweet fucking ass it was your thick-headed, ape-brained, goddamn dad!”
My dad begins to scratch his head and bite his tongue, but he doesn’t interrupt. This is the Harbor, and the way you know someone they are your friend is by how much you’re willing to let them insult you. My dad and Dutch would die for each other.
“Forgot his credit card at the gas station! Can you believe it? Fifty-two fucking goddamn Christing years old and he fills his car full of gas he can’t pay for! And oh yeah, you had to buy that big expensive piece of shit SUV, didn’t you, you stupid motherfucker? Dumber than a hemlock stump! Did you listen to your friend the fucking goddamn mechanic? Oh no! You KNEW better. You wanted that great big fancy expensive piece of shit that cost $60 just to fill up the fucking tank!”
“Then what happened?” I prompt.
“Well, since I love this dumb ox like a boy loves his deformed puppy I took my ass down to that stupid gas station! And I asked this idiot very nicely if he’d remembered to take his medication so everyone would know he wasn’t all there in the head, and I paid for his gas like I was his fucking father! Oh Elizabeth! I’m coming Elizabeth! Save me from these idiots! Dumber than hemlock stumps!”
I have never got a word in edgewise with Dutch. I expect to die with that always being the case and I never expect to MEET anyone with the ability to talk over him.
Dutch has taught me the importance of commanding an audience with pure confidence. Sometimes the most important thing you can do in a story is sit someone down for a nice little chat, strap them to their chair, and scream in their face.
You’re the story-teller. YOU are in charge. Sometimes you get to tell your readers how it is after you’ve established a relationship and your expertise. You get to drown them in emotion. You get to flood them with what you want a story to mean. You get to be the boss who doesn’t even tolerate questions.
You have to establish a relationship before you do this. You need to build a rapport, lay down some history and groundwork, but this can be a very effective tool. Especially if it represents a sudden shift in mood and style. It signals to readers that “HEY, THIS IS IMPORTANT NOW AND IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY YOU’RE AN IDIOT!”
Unfortunately, when you do this, you also need to not suck. You need to be pretty damn good at your craft because this can blow up in your face pretty quickly. But when you’ve established a history and an emotional background to blatantly command you can have an effective tool in your arsenal.
*****
I could go on and on with this, but these three “bits” give you a pretty representative sample. Your story telling style should match your personality, and on some level what you are “about” as a human being. And trust me, if you are a human being, you are “about” something whether or not you realize it or not, because having an “about” is an integral part of being a human being.
Be honest, remember that telling a story is about touching souls not simply running through a checklist (although that’s also important), and develop a voice. A powerful and distinct voice will cover a multitude of sins. Retaining a reader’s perspective while writing is as pivotal as involving your audience in the story
More importantly, learn from everyone and everything you come across that has any sort of narrative component. What made it work? What principle operates at its center? What kind of story-telling did you encounter in your formative years?
I had my family and the mill-workers of Grays Harbor County. You had something too. What was it? How did it impact you? How did those stories operate?
If you can answer that, you’ve gone a long way toward figuring out your own artistic voice.
