I realized I wanted to be a storyteller in math class. I imagine I am not the first writer who has had this revelation while wrangling with equations. However, my epiphany came not as one might expect from any dislike or confusion about the order of operations, but from my instinct to narrativize the process. There were the Odd Uns and the Even Uns, you see, and they were caught in a constant struggle. Sometimes they would join forces to reach more perfect forms, such as when 3 allied itself with 5 to round out its edges and make 8. Other times, they would cut each other down as when the factions that made up 14 split camps into 7 and 7. On a practical level, adding a narrative did not add to my understanding of a given equation nor did it change the steps I needed to take to solve the equation. But it sure did make it a lot more interesting.
While this experience made it clear to me I wanted to tell stories, it did not make it clear that I wanted to be a writer. That I owe to reading and to reading one book in particular: The Princess Bride by William Goldman. Like most story tellers, I love being told a story just as much as I love telling one. That is likely the reason I have always been such a book lover. Well, that and my parents’ decision to limit my TV consumption. Oddly enough, The Princess Bride was a rare instance where I had actually watched the film version before reading the novel. To its credit, the film shares a lot with its written source material: action, adventure, romance, and, of course, the frame narrative. What the film doesn’t have is Goldman’s cheeky mediator, a fictionalized version of himself who is ostensibly offering the reader an abridged version of S. Morgenstern’s classic tale of true love and high adventure, The Princess Bride.
His interjections highlighted the choices writers make in ways that I had never seriously stopped to consider. In one particularly humorous interjection, Goldman tells us that he has spared us from a tiresome side plot detailing the Queen of Florin packing her whole wardrobe, heading to a neighboring country, unpacking, and then packing everything back up to escort the neighboring princess back to meet her son. In another, he reports he has cut out a whole, in his opinion, incredibly boring, chapter, summing up the missing 105 pages in one sentence. In each instance, Goldman’s persona critiques the fictional Morgenstern and his pedantic tendencies. Yet, the mindful reader will recall that these are all choices made by the real Goldman. Realizing this was like meeting the wizard behind the curtain. But, rather than feeling vaguely disappointed as Dorothy does when she meets the Great and Powerful Oz, I was enthralled. Writing was so much more than just stringing words together on a page. In fact, word choice, while important, ranks relatively low on a writer’s bag of tricks.
Goldman is certainly not the first person to employ a frame narrative nor is he the first to use a fictional persona to draw attention to the art of writing and storytelling. However, reading his “abridged” text was the first time I remember pausing and really considering why someone would choose to write a story rather than, say, perform it or paint it. Suddenly I was actively thinking about all the aspects of a written work that I had taken for granted. I found myself seeking out other novels that experimented with literary conventions and/or reflected on the process of writing itself, novels like House of Leaves, Cloud Atlas, and If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler.
I also found myself revisiting poetry, finding new appreciation for the form through the works of poets such as Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and E E Cummings. All of these texts and writers go beyond just telling a story using the written word by foregrounding how literary elements such as point of view, narrative structure, and even the placement of the text itself play a part in a reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the subject. This new perspective inspired me to explore telling my own stories through writing. It also challenged me to try new writing styles and forms, including poetry. One could make the case that the poems I am so proud to have featured in this month’s edition of Litbreak owe some small part of their genesis to William Goldman.
It’s true that knowing the trick sometimes ruins the magic. But, for me, coming face to face with the wizard only inspired me to pull the curtain back farther so I could learn more, explore more, and, ultimately, find my own kind of magic.
