Now for something completely different….

This week’s Book Challenge.  By me.  Wow am I tired.  But here goes.

When I was young, engaged, and still trying to prove to myself and my intended that I am a deep and profound person, I picked up a copy of “The Year’s Best Short Stories” (or something like that) at the airport to read on the plane ride home.  I read the whole book, put it down, and felt completely dismayed.

I didn’t get it.

The stories seemed disjointed, jarring, and sometimes just downright weird.  I thought my misunderstanding and nonappreciation of the genre was my fault, a basic failing of my very scientific education to grasp good literature, especially good storytelling.  I decided not to waste my time on short stories again.

Then I met O. Henry.

For the Book Challenge for this week, I picked up a copy of O. Henry stories that, having been turned off by short stories in the past, I never finished.  It has lain around in my book shelves for years.  Imagine all that good storytelling, just sitting there, wasted.  It’s practically a crime.

It was interesting to compare O. Henry’s stories with the others I read–Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,  along with a few of her short stories; Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer (sorry, my book group picked this one); Enemy Women, by Paulette Jiles, a Civil War historical novel. 

All of the books were enjoyable, although the writing styles were incredibly varied.  (Seriously, did Meyer’s editor not see the thousand and one adjectives going on there?  All those synonyms for Edward’s “golden” “ocher”, “topaz”, “honey” colored eyes made me want to scream.  And who on earth really knows that the color “ocher” really is?) But all of the books started from something that existed before them.  Kate Chopin’s feminist writings were, to be sure, radical for her time (1899), but she started with the basic premise of a woman performing her duties as society dictates.  Twilight had 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to hook onto. (And you can be darn sure that the similarities of the two were not lost on those of us who cried with Buffy when Angel left town. And vampires don’t have to have ocher colored eyes to be sexy.)

Paulette Jiles came up with some original characters (I have to confess, I couldn’t finish this book because it starts out with a family being ripped apart and other talk about slaves having their babies taken from their breats, and as I did most of my reading while nursing a newborn, I just couldn’t stomach it.), but again, she used actual events of the Civil War, a conflict so intense, so far reaching, and, frankly, so well documented that it’s not much of a stretch to create a dramatic story out of it. 

I’m not saying these other books were bad.  I’m saying they took an existing paradigm and went with it. 

O. Henry, on the other hand, seemed to make something from nothing.

He tells a story from the viewpoint of a 10 dollar bill.  Another story is about a bandit switching identities with the sheriff so his mother won’t find out he’s a good for nothin’ no account. And that famous Mormon/Seminary film story about the sick little girl who waits for the last leaf to fall so she can die too, but the leaf doesn’t fall, so she lives, except it’s not a leaf at all but a painting by an old artist who subsuquently dies because he was out in the storm, painting the leaf on the wall? Yeah, not written by a CES flunky after all.  O. Henry wrote that story, and it’s a good one, too.  Much better than that run on sentence I just used to describe it.

Perhaps I am giving O. Henry too much credit.  Perhaps there is nothing original under the sun.  Even Shakespeare, after all, borrowed heavily from Plutarch, Thomas Moore, and actual historical events.  But whatever O. Henry was borrowing, he sure made it look like his own.  

He also proved that short stories don’t have to be weird or particularly profound.  They can be fun, light, and witty, with twist endings that surprise the reader.  And his characters are dynamic, sketched in just a few pages.  Somehow, his short descriptions of  his artists, his cowboys, his nervous husbands triumph over Meyer’s excrutiating physical desciptions of her vampires.  Maybe good storytelling also includes leaving something to the reader’s imagination.  After all, one of the scariest books I’ve ever read is Stephen King’s The Shining, and that’s because of the picture of the hotel I have in my own head.  Tip: Don’t ever read that book in the dark (shudder).

So I am glad I did the Book Challenge, just so I could discover O. Henry, and to realize that failing to understand those other stories was not because I’m not profound.  I just hadn’t met a great storyteller yet.

What do you think makes a great storyteller?  For that matter, what makes a good story? Does a good story have to come from nothing, or can a good story simply retell  a bad story in a better way? 

For the record, I am also no longer trying to prove I’m deep and introspective.  I admitted to DH early on that I wasn’t nearly as deep as he thought I was.  He informed me that he never did think I was all that deep, and basically married me because he thought I had nice legs.