What Are the Rules? Part 2
by Alan Irvine

n my previous article I examined the idea of the rules of storytelling—not the "how do you do it?" rules, but the "how does this really work? What makes a telling good or bad?" rules. I started to sketch out the foundations for the rules, what they should address, where they might be rooted. I ended by suggesting that one important starting point is the distinction between literature and storytelling, between the printed and the spoken word. It is that distinction I want to examine now.(1)

Literature and storytelling are closely related artforms. Both use language to relate stories, often the same stories. As storytellers, we frequently draw on print sources for the stories we tell. Favorite stories often get written down and printed in anthologies. So close are the ties, in fact, that we sometimes forget that literature and storytelling are different artforms, each governed by different rules.

The differences begin with the basic fact that in literature the words are printed on the page and in storytelling the words are spoken out loud. Although this may seem so basic, so obvious that we hardly need comment upon it, in fact, this basic distinction has important consequences.

Printed and spoken words must be processed by the audience (readers vs. listeners) in very different ways. Reading is essentially an active process. Although the content, the story, is controlled by the author, the actual act of receiving the information (reading) is controlled by the audience (reader.) The reader reads at their own speed—going faster or slower as they wish. If a passage proves difficult or confusing, the reader can slow down, even stop periodically to think about what they have just read. They can go back and read a passage again and again until they feel they properly understand it. Conversely, the reader can speed up. If a passage is easy to understand, the reader can read through it quickly. If a passage is dull or irrelevant, the reader can quickly skim over it and move on. Indeed, the reader can even jump around within the text, ignoring the author’s order and inventing their own. Readers may skim a text, stopping only at the "interesting" bits; they may read the end of a story first. More significantly, if the reader becomes confused by something; for example, if they can not remember who a certain character is, they can flip back through the text, hunt for sections that clear up the confusion, reread those sections, and then jump back to where they left off. They can even stop reading, go do something else, and return days later to resume the story at exactly the same part where they left off. Readers, in short, completely control how they receive and process the content before them.

Listeners, on the other hand, are essentially passive. Such a statement may initially strike us as odd, if not downright wrong. Storytellers frequently stress the interactive nature of storytelling, the audience’s involvement in shaping the story. But while the audience does actively affect content, the way they receive and process that content, (listening) remains essentially passive. The listener has no control over how they receive information. The speed at which the listener receives the words is set by the speaker. If the speaker speaks too fast too follow, the listener can not simply listen faster to keep up. Nor can the listener skim over the boring parts; they must sit through them, held captive by the speaker. If the listener grows confused, they can not simply pause and think about things for a moment and then resume where they left off. The story will have moved on without them. Pauses, spaces for thinking are all set by the speaker, not the listener. Furthermore, since words are ephemeral, spoken then gone, listeners can not re-listen to a confusing passage. Nor can the listener jump around within the story, refer back to the beginning of the story, listen to the ending first. The listener is held captive by the teller.

These differences in basic processing have important implications for the artform. For one thing, a written story can be much more complicated than a spoken story, for the reader can slow down and sort through the complications while a listener can not. The flashback, for example, is a relatively complicated narrative device, a sudden jumping around in time, presenting important information out of its proper order, breaking up the ongoing narrative flow to do so. As such, it requires the audience to do considerable work to establish how the flashback section fits with the rest of the narrative. When they encounter a flashback, readers can pause to readjust their view of how this passage fits with what has gone before, can re-read and review the flashback and other materials if they do not immediately grasp the connections between sections or if they are confused because they initially missed the break in chronology. Listeners can not. If a listener misses the break in the narrative, misses the fact that the narrative has jumped back in time, they are often simply confused and lost. Consequently, most spoken stories unfold in simple chronological order, avoiding the many non-linear techniques used in literature because chronological order is the easiest for listeners to follow, given the mechanics of listening. In another example, author and storyteller Sarah Ellis has remarked that starting a spoken story with dialogue does not work; it confuses the audience.(2) Yet written stories often start out so with no such problems. Of course, the reader has the visual clue of quotation marks to tell them that this first line is different from what follows. The reader can then pause after the first line to decide how it fits with what follows. The listener, however, has no such luxury. They have no way to tell that they should not interpret these first lines as part of the narration, as being told by the narrator. By the time they have heard enough of the story to realize that the first voice was a character’s voice, not the teller’s voice, they can not go back and listen again with the proper frame of reference. The confusion, once created, can not be uncreated. The teller, then must always be concerned about their audience, for if the audience gets lost, confused, bored only the teller can correct the problem. The writer, on the other hand, has a greater freedom, knowing that each reader can set their own speed, sort through their own confusions, even set the story down and grab a dictionary to look up an unfamiliar word. Readers, in short, can take care of themselves. Listeners, however, must depend on the teller to go at the right speed, to clear up confusions, to identify the unfamiliar.

But if writers have greater freedom, they also have less control. Although a writer may devote considerable time and energy over structuring the content of a story just so, they have no way of making sure a reader receives that content in a fashion consistent with the writer’s intentions. For example, an author may write a ghost story with the idea that the reader will read it all in one sitting, in a quiet, dark room, late at night, with no distractions so that the fear and suspense build steadily throughout until the final, shattering climax. But if the reader insists on ruining the story’s effect by reading just one paragraph at a time while sitting in a brightly lit coffeehouse with the expresso machine roaring and a baby screaming at the next table, the writer can do nothing about it. The storyteller can. The storyteller does have control over the complete experience of the story. The storyteller can decide that this bright, noisy coffeehouse is simply not the appropriate setting for a ghost story and opt to tell something else or even not tell anything at all. In less extreme circumstances, the storyteller still controls the experience. Even before the telling begins, the teller sets the audience’s expectations through their introduction of the story, the order of stories in the program, the choice of setting, sound, and lighting. The very clothing the storyteller wears begins to shape audience expectations the minute they spy the storyteller on stage. The storyteller decides when and where and how the audience experiences which stories.

The storyteller also controls much more of the information the audience receives. An author controls the words of the story and nothing more, not even the physical appearance of the words on the printed page. The storyteller controls not only the words, but the emphasis, pacing, rhythm, volume, accent—all the elements of vocalizing those words, plus the physical and visual aspects—gesture, stance, movement, use of space. Since the storyteller uses far more than just words to communicate, they can convey information much more efficiently than the writer. The teller can, for example, speak dialogue in a character’s voice or move as a character does, eliminating the need for additional words to describe those things. This places an additional burden upon the storyteller, of course, because not only do they have to choose the most effective words for their story, as the writer does, but they must also choose the most effective gestures, movements, expressions, tones of voice, and then decide which words are no longer needed and edit them out. The result of this added work, however, is added power, for each moment of the performance will convey much more information than the words alone could carry.

All of this emphasis on sources of information leads us to yet another critical distinction between literature and storytelling. The written story is something separate from its creator. When the audience reads the printed page, the author disappears. The reader does not hear the author’s voice, the expression and tones it carries; the reader does not see the expression on the author’s face, the gestures and movements of the author’s hands and body; does not see if the author has a trustworthy face, or fidgets nervously while presenting the story. All that exists are the words. If the words carry any inflection, tone or expression, the reader must provide them. But the expression the reader provides may bear little, even no correspondence to the writer’s expression. One of the great difficulties with writing satire, for example, is that many readers provide a serious tone to the words, and consequently think the story is to be taken seriously.

The spoken story, however, can not be divorced from its creator, for the teller is standing right in front of the audience, speaking the very words they are hearing. The gestures and expressions that shape the audience’s experience of the story also serve to link the story to the teller. The audience’s perceptions of the teller will shape their perception of the story. This limits many of the storyteller’s choices in constructing and performing a story, for the story must be one that the audience coming from that particular storyteller. For example, a written story can utilize more formal language and grammar than we would ever expect to hear in a person’s speech. That formal language is separate from the writer, is not coming from their mouth, but is sitting separate, on a printed page. But to hear that same formal language spoken out loud jars the audience. They know people do not usually talk like that, and so can not accept such language coming from the teller. The audience sees the teller as a person and expects the teller to sound like a person, not a book. The teller is always an integral aspect of the story and can not separate themselves from it.

This leads us to our final distinction. The written word is fixed. No matter how many times an author rewrites and revises, at some point they reach a final version, the version that gets published, distributed, and read. And that becomes the final, official version. If, 10 years later, the author decides there was a better way of telling the story, they can not go back and change it. The storyteller can. The spoken tale is ephemeral, vanishing as soon as spoken. The next time the teller tells the tale, they must start again from the beginning, re-creating the tale word by word, gesture by gesture. And in that act of re-creation the teller can change the words, the gestures, the dialogue, the very plot. The story remains fluid, always changeable, always new. Indeed, spoken stories can never be fixed in a final, official form, for a storyteller can never exactly duplicate every word and gesture, every tone of voice, every pause, every breath that makes up a performance.

We find, then, a number of critical distinctions between written and spoken stories. With the written word the audience (reader) controls its experience of the tale, reading at a rate set by the reader; with the spoken word, the artist (teller) controls the audience (listener)’s experience, presenting the story at a rate set by the teller. With the written word, then, the artist has little control over the audience’s experience, whereas with the spoken word, the artist retains a great deal of control. The written word exists separate from its creator. The written story is fixed, permanent, but the spoken tale changes with every telling.

Do these distinctions lead us towards any rules, any governing principles that distinguish good storytelling from bad, principles that can guide us in developing our stories and performances, our skills as artists? I believe they do, and will take those up in my next article.

1. Specifically, I want to compare literature and live storytelling. Audio and video recordings of stories offer significantly different experiences than live performance, so different that we could argue that recordings constitute an entirely different artform, distinct from live performance.
2. Paper and Air panel discussion at the Toronto Festival of Storytelling, February 27, 1999.

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