My Top 10 Jeopardy Categories Would Be:
Chinese Folk Legends
1930s Crime Novels The Sandlapper State OMG!Ubuntu! 21st Century Pirates Gridiron Greats Nerdism 2012 At The Movies Conspiracy Theories People I Read:Nick Hornby
Zadie Smith Douglas Coupland Jack Kerouac Seth Graham-Smith Erle Stanley Gardner Max Brooks |
THE ART OF STORY TELLING
I am from South Carolina, where storytelling is still a popular art. In fact, I remember the very instant I decided that I wanted to be a story-teller:
I was sitting on the front porch of my grandparent’s farmhouse, and my grandfather was telling the story of how he and my grandmother got married. “It was 1943,” he began. “I was walking down the street, with nothing much to do, and I ran into this army recruiter who was asking people to join up and go fight the scourge of nationalism. And, that being a very noble thing to do, I agreed. So I went to the sign-up place, and filled out the forms, and some guy was asking me a lot of questions: How old are you?, Ever had such-and-such diseases?, so on and so forth. Then he asked: Are you married? And I, in turn, asked: Why do you ask? And he said: Well, if you’re married, you get paid more. So I got up and said: I’ll be back tomorrow. “Now, I'd been courting your grandma for a few years and had no doubts that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but her parents, her father, mostly, didn’t really like me much. So, when I got to her home, it was kind of late, and instead of knocking on the front door, I went around to her window and knocked. She woke up, opened the window, and I explained that I was going to join the army and that married soldiers get paid more, so she agreed and climbed out the window. We went over to the preacher’s house and woke him up and he married us on his front porch. I took your grandma home, helped her climb back in, then went back to my house, and the next day I joined the army. We didn’t tell her parents about what we’d done until I got back, a year later.” I looked over at my grandmother and asked, incredulously, “Is that true!?” She smiled and sipped from her glass of iced tea and answered, “Ain’t no story that can’t be made better with a little exaggeration.” I've been a writer ever since. |