Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from “Reading Blind” by Margaret Atwood (©1989 byMargaret Atwood). It was originally published as the introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1989.

Our first stories come to us through the air. We hear voices.

Children grow up with a web of stories. We listen before we can read. Some of our listening is more like listening in, to the voice of the adult world, on the radio or the television or in our daily lives. Often it’s an overhearing of things we aren’t supposed to hear, eavesdropping on gossip or family secrets. From all these scraps of voices, from the whispers and shouts that around us, even from the silences, the unfilled gaps in meaning, we patch together for ourselves an order of events, a plot or plots; these, then, are the things that happen, these are the people they happen to, this is the forbidden knowledge.

We have all been little pitchers with big ears, shooed out of the kitchen when the unspoken is being spoken, and we have probably all been tale-bearers, blurters at the dinner table, unwitting violators of adult rules of censorship. Perhaps this is what writers are: those who never kicked the habit. We remained tale-bearers. We learned to keep our eyes open, but not to keep our mouths shut.

Two kinds of stories we first encounter from our idea of what a story is and color the expectations we bring to stories later. Perhaps it is from the collisions between these two kinds of stories—what is often called “real life” (and which writers greedily think of as their “materials”) and what is sometimes dismissed as “mere literature” or “the kind of things that happen only in stories”—that original and living writing is generated. A writer with nothing but a formal sense will produce dead work, but so will one those only excuse for what is on the page is that it really happened. Anyone who has been trapped in a bus beside a nonstop talker graced with no narrative skill or sense of timing can testify to that. Expressing yourself is not nearly enough. You must express the story.

Perhaps all I want from a good story is that children want when they listen to tales.

They want their attention held, and so do I. I always read to the end, out of some adult sense of duty owed; but if I start to fidget and skip pages, and wonder if conscience demands I go back and read the middle, it’s a sign that the story has lost me, or I have lost it.

They want to feel they are in safe hands, that they can trust the teller. With children this may mean simply that they know the speaker will not betray them by closing the book in the middle, or mixing up the heroes and the villains. With adult readers it’s more complicated than that, and involves many dimensions, but there’s the same element of keeping faith. Faith must be kept within the language—even if the story is funny, its language must be taken seriously—with the concrete details of locale, mannerism, clothing; with the shape of the story itself. A good story may tease, as long as this activity is not used as an end in itself. If there’s a promise held out, it must be honored. However is hidden behind the curtain must be revealed at last, and it must be at one and the same time completely unexpected and inevitable. It’s in this last respect that the story came closest to resembling two of its oral predecessors, the riddle and the joke. both, or all three, require the same mystifying buildup, the same surprising twist, the same impeccable sense of timing. If we guess the riddle at once, or if we can’t guess it because the answer makes no sense—if we see the joke coming, or if the point is lost because the teller gets it muddled—there is failure. Stories can fail in the same way.

But anyone who has even told, or try to tell, a story to children will know that there is one thing without which none of the rest is any good. Young children have little sense of dutifulness or of delaying anticipation. They are longing to hear a story, but only if you are longing to tell one. They will not put up with your lassitude or boredom. If you want their full attention, you must give them yours. You need a sense of urgency.

Urgency does not mean frenzy. The story can be a quiet story. But it must be urgently told. It must be told with as much intentness as if the teller’s life depended on it. And, if you are a writer, so it dose, because your life as the writer is only as long, and as good, as the story itself. Most of those who hear it or read it will never you, but they will know the story. Their act of listening is its reincarnation.

From listening to the stories of others, we learn to tell our own.