Beginning a voyage into the land of the solitary talesman
I would like to continue to explore one of the topics I touched on yesterday – namely, what it means to tell tales when no one hears you.
I don't believe that I've seen any texts or textbooks or even any articles that discuss this. Everything that I read about the craft of writing assumes that the writer wishes to be read. He wants and needs an audience, and desires either fame or fortune or both.
And yet (as I noted yesterday) all of us talesmen begin our careers without an audience. As children, perhaps, we make up tales and stories, daydreaming fantasies to get us through the day. Moreover at a more basic level, we all dream – and every dream is a story we tell ourselves. Many people carry on diaries and journals as a means of self exploration and psychological healing perhaps.
We also tell ourselves tales without even realizing it. I mean by that that we reconstruct the events of our day that most trouble us, and narrate to ourselves a new version of events which makes the good things better, and justifies our actions while vilifying the actions of our perceived antagonists and enemies.
Most of us who wanted to be writers were in the beginning voracious readers. We read and enjoy so many stories that we began to want to tell our own stories, which would combine all of the elements of the best tales that we love, while correcting all the flaws that we thought we saw in them.
The plight of the solitary writer is one that I think will be touching more and more of us in the near future of America. This is a country which boasts of fewer and fewer readers and more and more writers. It is a country whose literacy rate is declining, and his people admit in nationwide polls that they read for pleasure less every year.
Just look at the numbers – hundreds of thousands of books are written, fewer and fewer are read.
Who is the Lonesome Pine?
He is most likely not a `he' at all – most likely the Lonesome Pine is a woman. I presume this is so because more women than men read fiction and so it's likely that more of them enjoy tales and would therefore want to tell them. I will not speculate on any basic psychological differences between men and women although it stands to reason that they do exist because the structures of our brains differ between men and women. But I imagine that there is a lot of common ground that both men and women Lonesome Pines share.
The Lonesome Pine stands on a bluff in the wind high above scrub country in the late afternoon, in the last light of day. It looks out over the distance, trembling slightly in the wind, and it imagines what might have been in that barren landscape far below in the distant past or in a possible presence or in a potential future.
The wind whispers through the needles of the Lonesome Pine. And no one hears those whispers but the Lonesome Pine itself.
The tales you tell yourself may serve all the general purposes of tales you tell to others. They may amuse, entertain, shock, excite, thrill, chill, arouse, exasperate, taste bitter or sweet. But they may do more.
The process of telling yourself tale is an interactive one. You are constantly gathering feedback, both as reader and writer, both as composer and audience. The reader in this case knows everything that the writer knows, just as soon as the writer knows it. It is therefore difficult to surprise the reader, without attempting to play tricks on yourself (perhaps unconsciously).
I wonder: does the Lonesome Pine need the illusion that he has an audience? Or does he need to face the truth, that he doesn't have an audience, and never will.
I don't know the answer to that one. I'm going to have to think about it for awhile and contemplate this whole issue a good deal longer.
(Composed by dictation Sunday 21 September 2008)
