The Death of Storytelling

The storyteller has become so important nowadays that the story itself is irrelevant.

I always knew Ernest Hemingway was a misogynistic great white hunter and philanderer who liked whiskey and smoking, and many of his books had a misogynistic great white hunter in it, busily smoking and guzzling whiskey on his way to philander. But Hemingway managed to make his stories about something larger. I never knew which of the kids in Stephen King’s IT was Stephen King himself, but it didn’t matter. His stories were so good and so varied they seemed to have been written by a gaggle of writers instead of just one man. John Irving was in fact a prep school rich kid like John Wheelwright, but A Prayer for Owen Meany is still one of the best books ever. Toni Morrison was a black woman for sure, but she was neither Sethe nor Denver in Beloved.

Just so you know I’m not dumb, I KNOW John Grisham was a lawyer. But all of his legal thrillers were not just about the lawyer. The protagonist-as-avatar for the author was the reporter, not the subject.

All that has changed.

Who you are now matters more than the tale you’re telling. With the advent of social media platforms and self-publishing venues, everyone can finally tell their stories. But more often than not, the story is about THEM. The curators of these tales (the ones who control what content has prominence on these pages) had to find some way to make distinctions amidst the tsunami of material and unfortunately they chose the writer instead of the writing.

A one-legged, gender-confused person of color’s story is automatically preferred to that of a boring Midwestern suburban dweller, even if it’s just about that time they went to the grocery store to get applesauce. A victim of trauma, regardless of severity, is given a platform, even if they only use it to talk about their unique experience of victimhood that no one else can relate to. A twenty-something boy who quits his coddled existence to find his life’s purpose alone in a jungle has no shortage of willing outlets for his whiny petulance, elevating his struggles to prominence as if he was the first person in human history to discover doubt and conflict. The saga of the fifty-something woman who tosses her blob of a husband out of the house as the first step in her journey of self-discovery (followed by wine, yoga, and the warm embrace of the sisterhood) is somehow more compelling than that of the blob who got kicked to the curb for reasons never fully explained, because they should have been self-evident.

Celebrities get book deals because who they are matters far more than what they have to say. “Publishing,” in whatever form it takes, is about getting distracted, short-attention-span eyes on their pages so they can sell advertising.

In this new realm, there are no stories of an old man versus a fish and the sea. There are no tales of noble quests for higher, selfless purposes. Storytellers no longer cast a lens over the world. Instead of the point of a story being “look at that,” it has devolved into “look at me.”

The few gatekeepers in control of the content we consume have abandoned their responsibility to filter out self-conscious, self-absorbed, self-centered writing. We eat what we are served, and this is the only thing on the menu even though our town is full of restaurants, each claiming to offer unique fare that ultimately all tastes the same.

There was a time when the purpose of storytelling was to shine a spotlight on some previously unknown or ignored part of the world or the human experience or to cast the glow of a searchlight, looking for truth or justice or injustice. Or a magnifying glass, to educate readers and expand their worldview by presenting knowledge they did not have, to spark an interest in a subject they had never studied.

Now the spotlight, the searchlight, the magnifying glass, and the lens have all been replaced with one of those brightly-lit makeup mirrors in which the only thing visible is the hideously magnified face of the author.

The platforms that allow for all this free expression need to start from a different point on the compass. Like the TV show The Voice, where the only way you get through is by being able to sing—not your looks, not your personal story, not what country you’re from, not the color of your skin or your raft of congenital illnesses or your political affiliation or your sexual preference or whether you eat meat or seeds or plants. If you can sing, you’re on. That’s it.

Storytelling should be about the story, not the scribe.