How to Write to be Read

First learn from the lies you tell yourself

Three Reasons to Write

You can tell a tale to yourself, for your own amusement, or to help you understand something that baffles you, or to remake some past event in your own mind. This, I think, may be the start of all talespinning: the tales we tell ourselves must tie in with how our minds work. Our dreams are tales we tell ourselves. Memory is a tale we tell ourselves to fit past deeds into patterns, to know how to act going forward, to recast the past so as to feel better about ourselves and what we’ve done, or so as to blame others, or so as to feel once more the pleasures of happy moments that are gone. In one sense, when we do this we don’t ‘tell’ anyone anything, so it might not count as a ‘tale’ at all. But it must be part of the act of talespinning, a form of composing, redrafting, and editing in getting ready to tell others ‘our side of the story.’ And of course the line here between ‘true authentic memory’ and outright fabrication is a blur. Men can talk themselves into believing anything, and do it all the time.

You can tell a tale to someone that you know — one or more men you mean to affect with the tale in some way. This, I think, is the way the first true tales were told.

You can tell a tale for other men that you don’t know, men you have never met before. Men such as strangers at the caravanserai, watering-hole, or marketplace.

We must set the tales we tell ourselves apart from the two other sorts of talespinning, although we should bear in mind that every talesman is as well a part of his audience and that this sort of talespinning is ever-present, even though it may play only a small part in the art.

Learning to Talk

I think we learn how to tell tales on this path, in order:

1. We talk to ourselves, and try to convince ourselves our lies (or our way of seeing the way things took place — is there a difference?) are true.
2. We talk to others we know, to convince them our lies are true.
3. We tell our lies to strangers.

So first we learn what ‘works’ when we talk to ourselves. But we are complicit in our own lies, and so we have for our audience one who is only too glad to take our word at face value. We are moreover given to such fantasies, for the very fact that we choose to pass the time with them. We then learn that when we calk to others, the tales that work so well for us start to fray and pull apart. They ask us questions we had not thought of; they have doubts where we had none (we didn’t want to doubt); they may find our tale unfunny, unpleasant, dull, bland, confusing, uninteresting in the parts that most draw laughter, interest, amusement, or pleasure in us. And yet we know these people in our audience, so we have a good idea of what their tastes are. We know their lives, homes, and what they have gone through in the past. And so we begin to see how some tales fit some audiences more than others. ‘This is a story he will like, I must tell him about it, but she wouldn’t care for it at all.’

In this way, as we tell tales to the different men and groups of men that we know, we begin to form the first notion of general rules of talesmanship. These are the parts of tales, and the art of tales, that affect all men to some extent in the same way.

So when we tell tales to men we don’t know, we will find two sorts of settings. In the first place (before the means arose by which we could pass our tales to unseen audiences indirectly) the talesman sat before his audience. He saw them, heard them, and he passed quick judgment on them before he began his tale. What sort of men were they? What had their lives been? What mood were they in at the moment?

As the teller spins his tale in the face of his audience, he gleans more and better knowledge of them. He can see where they shift and look away and start to lose interest in the tale; he can see where they lean forward, give their whole heart and fall inside the tale. He can hear them laugh and see them frown and smile and sweat. And there are other means men in a crowd use to pass signals among themselves, and so a mood slowly takes hold on them all.

In the end we come to the modern world of the past few centuries. New means of telling tales have come to us, and ways that we can tell tales to men we have never looked upon. We lack those signs and that awareness of our audience that older talesmen knew.

The Way

The way, then, to learn how to write to be read, is to learn from the three former stages of talespinning, and cast out from them what we have learned, make use of it for this way too. We learn from the lies we tell ourselves, how to lie to those we know; from the lies we tell those we know, we learn how to lie to strangers whom we meet.

And then we must make the next leap, the last and greatest, and send forth our tales to the unknown crowd. To win hearts here we must use all that we have learned in the stages that have gone before.

(Composed with pen on paper Friday, March 7, 2008)