The Art of Storytelling

November 3, 2009

Saw David Sedaris last Friday, the night before Halloween at the newly renovated Balboa Theater downtown. The tickets were $50, and actually belonged to my lovely friend Jess, but she was sick, and her boyfriend was busy with rehearsals for a show, so they offered them to myself and Ted (and one extra ticket that we gave to Lance). Thank you Jess! I owe you big time for that.

Wowza. It was such a fun night. Sedaris, as I noted in the lobby where he was signing books, is a tiny, pale man. And actually appears much softer and sweeter than I expected. I’ve never seen him in person, only listened to his books on tape while driving, or seen his pictures in magazines or on the back of his books. I guess for some reason I had thought of him as kind of cranky and stiff, but no, he was –of course–very funny but also very warm, even in his cynicism, cut downs, and self-depracation.

And, say what you will about David Sedaris: that he’s a hack, that he is only a comic writer and doesn’t go any deeper, that he’s too dark, that he’s too flip, that he’s (as one Amazon reviewer put it) “no longer truly funny,” or repetetive, yadda yadda.

But one thing you can’t deny is that, at his best, he’s an amazing, entertaining storyteller– he really made me appreciate the art of storytelling– telling a good story. and I don’t mean the ‘writing’ part of it, I mean the reading aloud part of it, the entertaining, the performing. Pulling an audience/listeners in and making them laugh and think and gasp. That’s, to me, is the 2nd job of a writer.

Occasionally I’ll get Creative Writing Students who don’t like to read their work aloud, which is sometimes understandable because it may be in really rough, draft form, or it may be a free write that they just wrote on the spur of the moment. But there’s something about reading your work out loud that is so rewarding and enriching and affirming, whether it’s rough and underdeveloped or polished and published.

Is storytelling–the actual act of storytelling, reading your story, novel chapter, essay, aloud– a dying art? I dunno, but I know it rarely gets its due.

Seeing David Sedaris read made me want to read aloud. Made me understand why I love to do it.