Stories and Storytelling

Great storytelling almost, always accompanies great stories but great story telling need not necessarily mean that the stories being told are great.

Three stories that I read in the recent past which drive me to that conclusion:

1. Wedding Gig – Stephen King

2. McKabe – Paul Gallico

3. The Devil and The Deep Sea – Rudyard Kipling.

Paul Gallico is turning out to be a huge and unexpected surprise…. I always knew him as that great British story teller who gave the world that outstanding story “Snow Goose”.. but having gone through a well written autobiographical sketch of his realizing he is much much more than what I thought of him. Firstly, he is an American and not British. Secondly, he was an accomplished sportswriter for almost a decade before he turned to general fiction.

In any case my immature instincts gravitate me towards felicity in story telling over the merit of the stories themselves.

The Night of the Tiger – Stephen King and Dante

This is a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau depicting Dante and Virgil’s journey through Hell and the horrors they get to witness there…. I came to this painting through a short story of Stephen King called “The Night of the Tiger” (“It was like a tableau from Dante“). The story itself has a close resemblance to this painting although the context and setting is completely King’s own creation and has no relation to Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I have read some Stephen King in the past and can say that he writes well and holds the reader’s attention at length.. what kept me thinking was the subject material writers draw their inspirations/motivations from… King nowhere mentions this though… Another similar instance is “Clockwork” by Philip Pullman ( he drew his inspiration for that fine story from a grandfather clock that attracted his attention in one of UK’s museums. Pullman acknowledges that source)

Stephen King, Daphne DuMaurier, Ruth Pravar Jhabvala – these are some writers who write well and are difficult to categorize. They bring much more to the table than is traditionally thought to be possible in the categories the world has decided to slot them into.

Is all good writing in fiction good literature?

Is all good writing in fiction good literature?

Here is something that I have encountered today in Charles Beaumont’s story “Free Dirt“…. I thought it was a brilliant piece of writing…

” No fowl had ever looked so posthumous. Its bones lay stacked to one side of the plate like kindling: white, dry, and naked in the soft light of the restaurant. Bones only, with every shard and filament of meat stripped methodically off. Otherwise, the plate was a vast glistening plain.

The other, smaller dishes and bowls were equally virginal. They shone fiercely against one another. And all a pale cream color fixed upon the snowy white of a tablecloth unstained by gravies and unspotted by coffee and free from the stigmata of bread crumbs, cigarette ash, and fingernail lint.

Only the dead fowl’s bones and the stippled traceries of hardened red gelatin clinging timidly to the bottom of a dessert cup gave evidence that these ruins had once been a magnificent six-course dinner.”

The story too was a good one…. but there are many others that I have read which did not have authorial flourishes like the above but gave exceptional reading experience.