The Storyteller

If, after I am gone, I am remembered beyond my family, I would like it to be as a storyteller, because there is something very special about being able to weave a tale which captures people's attention. I have probably succeeded twice, in the short stories which won major British competitions - The Crossing, which won the Bridport short story prize, and Bendera Beach which won the Royal Society of Literature's VS Pritchett prize. Both those stories will have been read, and I hope enjoyed by a large number of people.

When I had the aspiration to become a great writer I built a website about myself. The only page that was any good was the one in which I tried to think about what made a storyteller. This is what I wrote:

Storytelling is an inheritance as old as Man. It goes back to our birth in Africa, to the evenings when dusk drew across the bush and small groups of our ancestors huddled close round the fire. Hemmed in by the deepening darkness and the sounds of the night – a leopard coughing high in the kloofs above their campsite, the sudden snort of a buck – they craved distraction from their fear before they could sleep; and they needed to settle the dust of the day’s events. “Tell us a story,” they would beg. “Tell us….”

Just as there were some who excelled at hunting, so there were the articulate few who spun the most imaginative stories; but, while hunting was something far older than man, storytelling, the imagination it required, the organization, the sense of timing, and the ability to remember, was something uniquely human.

So the first storytellers told of the animals that watched from the surrounding darkness, they told of the origins of the tribe, they sought to explain the place of man under the great night sky. They became far more than mere raconteurs, they forged the basis of culture, of philosophy and religion. Future storytellers sat at their feet, absorbing their ideas, later to embellish them as they grew up and, in their turn, passed them on.

Storytelling holds great power, the power to sway people. Storytelling can capture those that listen as surely as a trap. As audiences grew so storytellers wielded greater and greater influence. Storytellers, after all, are the people who articulate collective experience, who act as the intermediary between the physical world and their audiences. They became priests, philosophers, orators, politicians, news reporters, television programme makers, bloggers; but today’s fiction writers, sitting at their computers, are the ancient storytellers’ most direct descendants.