🚀 go-pugleaf

Jo Beverley writes: "We're all writers. There's a scale running from
storyteller to poet, and we all fit on it somewhere. The storyteller uses
words at their simplest to spin a yarn that will capture the reader and make
her blind to everything, _including_ the words. <snip> The poet, (remember
this is extremes I'm describing) is not interested in story except perhaps
as vehicle for what she really wants to do, which is play with words,
rhythms, images, moods, symbolism. <snip> As I said, each author has a place
somewhere on the scale, and I doubt any successful authors are at the
extremes, but in popular fiction, the megabestsellers are, I think, toward
the storytelling end because most
readers read for the stories."

Anyone who is a pure storyteller or a pure poet and does that well, is a
person of gifts. Great storytelling is no less an art than great writing,
though I don't think storytelling receives as much honor as the poetic end
of the spectrum.

I agree with Jo that most writers fall somewhere on the spectrum. I always
thought my natural bent was toward the poetry end of things (though my
poetry is truly abysmal <g>), mainly because English is my favorite toy. I
play with words *all the time.* I could more easily stop breathing than stop
worrying about the rhythm of sentences.

So, before I got serious about romance writing, I thought I could never be a
fiction writer because I couldn't tell stories. Even then I knew it was both
a talent and a skill, and I was convinced I didn't have enough of the former
to develop it into the latter <g>. But I decided to try romance writing
despite that, mainly because I'd reached the point in my life when I coudn't
not write anymore.

It never occurred to me to write stories that didn't include storytelling;
it never occurred to me to write stories about wordplay and metaphor and all
those things at the extreme end of the spectrum. If I was going to write
stories, I wanted them to be able to move and transport and delight people,
the way my best-loved books move and transport and delight me. So of course
I had to tell stories, I had to become a storyteller as much as a person who
plays with words.

Of course, once I got going, I recognized that I tell stories all the time,
the chief one being the story of my life, which I tell to myself every day
<g>.....


I still play with words and metaphors and images--I really can't help
it--but I try to do it as cleanly and quietly as I can. I want the words and
images and metaphors to be so much a part of the story that it's part of the
experience; I want everything to make the story as real as possible, without
making it obvious that that's what I'm doing. Whether or not I've succeeded
is a question I can't answer .....

Katy Cooper, madellio@email.msn.com
THE PRINCE OF HEARTS, Harlequin Historicals, May 2000