Being A Better Writer Or A Better Storyteller? Which Is More Essential For A Successful Novelist?

Why not both? Edgar Allan Poe was both and look how he turned out.

 

As asked, the question implies that there's a difference. But a good storyteller is one who makes the events seem to be happening as the story is presented. And the techniques of storytelling used are a direct function of the medium. Record the words of the greatest verbal storyteller who ever lived and you'd have something a reader, and publisher, would reject in a page, because verbal storytelling is a performance art, that carries facts in the words, emotion in the tone and delivery, and punctuation in expression, gesture, and body language. None of them are reproducable on the printed page. The same goes for the techniques of film and stage.

Who cares if you have an amazing plot, if the writing doesn't force the reader to turn the page? No one will ever see more of it than that first page.

People come to us to be entertained, moment-by-moment. They're not there to learn the character's history, and that he loved or hated his fifth grade teacher. They want story, not history, They want to know what's gone wrong and what the protagonist, their avatar, is going to do about it with the reader's help. If we fail to generate that mindset in our reader, and do it quickly, they'll lose interest and we wasted the time it took to type and edit the story.

At the halfway point of our story othe reader can only guess at how it's going to come out. And they're not thinking about it other than in general. If they're still with us it's because they care about our characters. They want to know what they're going to try next and if it will work. They want to know what will go wrong, so they can worry about their new friend—because readers feed on uncertainty. Give them a lesson in the character's history and they'll yawn. Make then say, "Oh my God...what do we do now, and you have them hooked.

Give your plot, start to finish, to a successful writer and they can turn out readable prose that will keep the reader turning pages till "the end." But give the plot of a pro's next novel to the average new writer and the result will be rejected in less than a page, because they can't yet write well enough to involve the reader. They may have the capability to become the greatest writer of their generation, but till they learn to write well, that's only untrained potential.

So the answer to the question is: Writing well comes first. We learn only general skills in our schooling, and most of us come to writing for the printed word believing that writing is writing, and that we already know our compositional skills, never realizing that the ones we learned are designed for nonfiction. That's the first problem to address.

 

Well, we did have Paganini and several other virtuoso violinists, praised for their technical prowess, yet from what I've observed, working with a few violinists, their instrument doesn't lend itself to extended runs of 16ths at 160bpm, whereas there are plenty of amateur guitarists on YouTube who can do that, even using alternate picking instead of tapping.
The point of my comparison was the "technique" vs. "listenability/readability" mentality, especially since, not to name names, but I've read some books by obviously technically adept writers, but whose stories were just... well, boring (the literary equivalent of Spyro Gyra). Not that I'm an authority on the subject, but I just don't enjoy reading well executed pieces where nothing really happens, whereas I've been entertained by books written well enough, even if they break a bunch of "rules," but that told a great story (and of course by books that were technically brilliant and told an amazing story, but those are rarer), not unlike the aforementioned LOTR (which probably wouldn't be published nowadays unless it was first slaughtered into 80k).
I just look at all of it, literature, music, visual arts etc. as art with plenty of parallels when it comes to their execution, it's just the medium that's different.

Oh, and I could mention my homies, Children of Bodom: they have plenty of joint guitar/keyboard solos and I daresay the keyboardist needs to maintain his chops to keep up with Laiho's shredding. In fact, the same could probably be said about the early Mahavishnu stuff with the McLaughlin/Hammer guitar/keyboard duo. Now that I think about it, the same probably applies to McLaughlin/Jean Luc-Ponty (later Jerry Goodman) playing plenty of fast guitar/violin runs and if you listen to their individual solos/improv, the violinists don't really play any faster than McLaughlin.
So I wouldn't say that playing fast on the guitar is somehow more remarkable than playing fast on the keyboard/violin, even if the latter two instruments would be easier to play faster as a beginner (I've no idea, haven't discussed this with pianists/violinists). When we're talking about pros, though, there's generally no real difference at their top speeds (though I'd wager violinists who could top Michael Angelo Batio's speed are very few... if they even exist).
After all, the guitarist's left hand does pretty much the same exact thing as a violinist's or a pianist's and there are limits to how fast a human can move their fingers on a fretboard/keyboard/neck, so when we move beyond beginners and into the realm of blazing fast, there's no real difference between the instruments.

I wouldn't compare pieces like LOTR or HP to Bieber, which, indeed, is well executed crap (he's got the top song writers and studio musicians working for him/his label, after all). If you look at early performances by the Stones or Deep Purple... I'm sorry, but they fucking sucked. Their songs were great and eventually they did get their performances together, but by then they had already gotten huge audiences for their music, i.e. they "made it" while they were still quite amateurish as performers.
Or perhaps we could compare technically adept writing with a poor story to a lot of incredibly well played and harmonically complex jazz (say, bebop) and a great story written well enough to any of the musical greats whose material and technical skill is just good enough, but whose music touches people, stirs something in them. I dunno, I see the parallels, but maybe that's just my own (delusional?) viewpoint.

I'd say you are grossly over-simplifying the process of writing/composing/arranging good music. I know it may seem simple (throw in a nice, catchy melody, a dramatic chord progression, add some cute girl to sing the rhymes, and voilà), but it really isn't. A musician might argue the exact opposite: all writers do is put words on paper, big whoop, anyone can do that. But that, of course, would just show his/her limited understanding of what goes into writing as a craft.
And when it comes to affecting the audience, how is it really different? As far as I've understood it, both, good songwriters/composers and good story tellers want to stir emotions, make their audiences feel something, preferably what they want them to feel at a given time, and I'd say both can accomplish just that if executed right (how many of us can listen to [just listen, not see them perform it] Exile by Slayer and come out feeling jolly, rainbows and unicorns?).

Sure, if you're just strumming E, G, A, E on a badly tuned acoustic and call that songwriting, then I'd say writing is a far more sophisticated and demanding craft.

First, Western music has only eight notes, that's all, so whatever can be done with them, has already been done decades, even centuries before, just in a different way, so musicians/songwriters face the same limitations in that regard.
Second... with music, you have to know your theory (the grammar of music), understand harmony (appropriate metaphor), write lyrics that touch the audience (insight into the human condition), use appropriate arrangements (theme), and actually say something with your music (seriousness of purpose/depth). And this is all without going into actually performing a piece, all of these things need to be executed well by the time you start recording... actually, by the time you give the song/composition to the musicians who need to record it.

But this is just how I see it and I may be biased, having been around music and musicians since, well, I was born.

 

My father was a violinist, and he could easily play faster than me on the guitar on my best day. And by the time I was in high school, he was only playing about twice a year (always on our family Christmas concert, though - he wouldn't miss that!), while I was busting my ass learning my guitar every day.

I know there are some amazingly-good writers whose stories bore me, too. And there are amazingly-fast guitarists who bore me, too. (Honestly, I can't listen to most of those narcissistic boobs - they're not musicians; they're racers. Malmsteen? Really? He's boring at any speed. Batio is probably the fastest guitarist I've ever heard, and I never bother listening to him because he's got nothing, it seems, to say to me, no matter how fast he says it. The only one of that crowd who impresses me is Eric Johnson, because he's a musician first and a technician second.)

I've never heard them, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were really the other way around. In my teens, I played keyboards as well as guitar. Playing fast scales on a keyboard instrument is dead easy. I haven't even touched a keyboard in more than five years now, but I bet I could sit down at a piano today and play faster scales than I ever could on the guitar, even on my best day, especially if I had to go more than two octaves. I'm not saying I was a slow guitarist, either. I never got as fast as Di Meola and the like, but I could keep up with, say, Steve Howe of Yes pretty easily back in the day, and for a time I could match Larry Coryell.

I thought Goodman was Mahavishnu's first violinist, and Ponty came along later. Oh well - neither here nor there. But it strikes me that you're matching up some of the world's fastest guitarists against some fairly pedestrian (in terms of speed) violinists and keyboardists. Not fair!

Ah, but it's not the left hand that slows a guitarist down (at least it isn't in my case - YMMV). It's the right. Lots of people can play fast the way Alvin Lee did - picking only every fifth note or so. I thought that's how everybody did it, until I heard Al Di Meola and had my thirteen-year-old mind blown.

I think this entire discussion, though, is bearing out my statement that the guitar is not well suited for playing fast. That's why people tend to equate speed with virtuosity on the guitar. That really isn't the way it is with many other instruments. Each instrument has its own technical limitations, and virtuosity on a given instrument equates, more or less, to how well the musician overcomes those limitations. I also used to play the flute (I would still, if I had one), and I could easily play fast on it, but I was amazed when I first heard someone - I think it was James Galway - use the circle breathing technique (a technique of breathing in through the nose while out through the mouth - it allows the flautist to play seemingly forever without stopping for breath).

Anyway, all this is a giant threadjack, as I still think the musical analogy is kind of weak when applied to the subject of this thread (What was that, again?). Apologies to people bored by this kind of talk ...

I think I'm only somewhat - not grossly - oversimplifying the songwriting process. At the risk of sounding like a crusty old geezer - oh, what the hell, read this in crusty-old-geezer voice: "I've been writing songs since before you were born, sonny! I understand the process!"

I think my definition of songwriting differs from yours. You seem to mix what I call arranging into the definition of songwriting. For me, the song is an abstraction - nobody ever actually hears it. It consists of lyrics, melody, harmony, and rhythm, and even those are highly elastic in their abstract space. Nobody hears a song until it's been arranged and performed. Arranging and performing are not part of songwriting to me. But that's a discussion for another thread, if we ever choose to go down that road.

You didn't just compare the number of plots to the number of notes, did you? You couldn't have - I know you're way too smart for that! Oh, in Western music (at least music this far west - I'm in California, remember) we have twelve notes, not eight.

Yeah, me too! Just shows you how people with similar backgrounds (in a limited sense, anyways) can differ.

It's been fun, T, but maybe we should let other people back into the discussion now.

/threadjack

 

8 notes... yeah, face palm. Shouldn't write anything at 5am. But yeah, enough OT although it would've been fun to carry on in some thread dedicated to the subject (comparison of different art forms, songwriting etc), esp. since it's rewarding to "pressure test" your own views with someone who also knows the subject matter but comes from a somewhat different background (I even had an explanation for the comparison of the amount of notes to the number of plots, but that's for that potential future discussion). Anyway, it was a hoot, but over and out for now, it's way past my bed time.

 

This depends on how you define a good writer. I agree with the sentiments that one cannot be a good story teller if you can't 'tell' the story. Good story tellers are good writers, but not necessarily technically excellent writers.

Twilight and 50 Shades were both poorly written as far as writers would critique them. Too many bit lips and inner goddesses in the latter, and not the most interesting Bella in the former. But both captured the attention of a lot of people with the storytelling. So were the authors poor writers?

By some standards, yes, and other measures, no.

 

I don't think you can entirely separate the two. Writing is communication, and part of being a good writer is presenting the story in a way that holds the reader's interest, and stimulates the reader's imagination.

I suppose there are aspects of writing beyond good storytelling, such as technical aspects like proper spelling and punctuation. So good stroytelling is a dimension of good writing, rather than the other way around. You can be a good storyteller without being a good writer, but I don't think you can be a good writer of fiction without being a good storyteller.

 

Cog is right, the question itself is dodgy: a good writer makes a good story teller...not the other way around. You could write about something mundane (apparently) and tell an interesitng story...it's about perspective and particularity...check out Carver or Chekhov: they write about small stuff yeat very meaningful stuff...the devil's in the details

 

My assumption here is that we're defining a good storyteller as a person who has a good story to tell. If we define it as a person who tells a story well, then it's pretty much the same thing as being a good writer.

A good writer can tell any story in such a way as to make it readable. A poor writer can make a good story unreadable. Maybe that's a good way to state it.

 

I think both are important but I believe that it also comes down to the individual.

I read to be entertained and to learn new things. I don't care whether an author uses fancy techniques or proper punctuation (Well, I'd PREFER it but I've read amazing works with quite a bit of mistakes) because for me story telling is a much more important skill.

Story telling can also be branched out to oral story telling and different forms of art where writing has little to no meaning.
Writing is only good for writing.

When I write, I want to TELL a story and gain an audience who says "I liked your story, thank you." and not "I enjoyed your story but your writing expertise titillated me."
As long as something is legible, I am pleased.

In a sense; I listen to music because I like the beat, the melody moves me, or the lyrics speak to me.
I do not listen to music because of the complexity of the piece or of the mathematical genius that went to it.

 

But I go with writer...

 

I am amazed with the different opinions and points that everyone is putting on the table with their responses. I'd love to sit back with all of you and discuss this over a few beers or glasses of wine.

 

a poor writer simply writes poorly, no matter how good a story s/he has to tell...

a poor storyteller either hasn't got good enough stories to tell, or tells them poorly, no matter how well s/he can write...

there are a good number of bestselling authors who write poorly, but tell stories lots of people want to read [king/myers/brown and their ilk]...

and there are brilliant writers whose stories and writing styles only appeal to a limited readership... many of those are nobel laureates whose books don't sell in numbers even close to the 'most popular' authors'...