The Campfire Method of Storytelling
An author is only as good as how they treat their readers
As any semi-experienced scribe knows, writing isn’t a science. It’s more like sorcery.
Writers spend half their time staring at a blank page (or the back of their eyelids) trying to conjure stories out of thin air. Other times, they’re attempting modern-day alchemy, struggling to turn indecipherable rough drafts into polished pieces that will earn them an audience (or, more importantly, income.)
In other words, writing is difficult, sometimes maddeningly so. There’s no roadmap that will guarantee you success, and luck seems to play just as big a role as talent, diligence, and tireless self-promotion. For every moment of pure inspiration, there’s a dozen more of misery, self-loathing, and pure frustration.
And the horrible truth is, readers don’t care about any of that.
Readers don’t care about how much you struggle.
They don’t care how many times you’ve had to beat back writer’s block just to finish a single sentence.
And they really, really don’t care about how creative, original, or “unique” your work is.
Readers just want to read a good story.
Nowadays, a reader’s time could be spent enjoying a dozen other things more immediate than the written word. Which means the time they spend reading your work needs to be worth their investment.
Readers first
To take a reader-first approach to writing, it’s helpful to think back to when you heard your first campfire story. Or, barring that, any intimate, cozy experience where someone you knew told you something interesting.
Chances are, that story, secret, or bit of gossip was alluring not just for its content, but also for who was sharing it — and how.
What makes stories interesting to readers isn’t necessarily their novelty. Originality can certainly be an advantage, but it’s not an essential part of the equation. Stories are thousands of years old, and any new book or article you pick up has probably been conveyed in some way or another before. Maybe even long, long before.
At the end of the day, it’s a story’s flavor that makes it stand apart. That is, the how, rather than the what.
Think about the campfire again. The way the flames crackled and hissed. The shadows dancing on the storyteller’s face. Perhaps a distant crash of thunder, or an eerie footfall out in the woods.
The writing-as-campfire-story metaphor centers itself not on questions of vocabulary, plot, or characterization. Those are all important, of course. But equally so is the organic and often undefinable pleasure of telling someone something in a way that no one else can. These qualities — specifically, authenticity and intimacy — are at the core of the campfire approach.
Intimacy: Treating the reader like a friend
Here’s another memory exercise: remember being in high school or college, and having something you wanted to share with your friends? A great anecdote, maybe, or an interesting movie or TV show you wanted to talk about? Or perhaps it was something as simple as a joke?
Now — do you remember how you told them?
Most likely, there’s a time in your life when you really sold something to someone you knew in the form of a conversation. And because they were your friend, you treated that information with special care. You knew your delivery was going to be just as important as the content, and because these were friends and/or family you were dealing with, it was incredibly important that they’d be excited, thrilled, delighted, or feeling any number of exhilarating emotions one gets when they hear something really interesting.
That’s what it means to treat the reader like a friend. It’s as if you’re letting them — and no one else — in on a secret. It’s treating them special.
J.D. Salinger, author of high school staple Catcher in the Rye, has an excellent line on this very subject:
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”
As writers, we lose sight of this important aspect of storytelling, because we’re often moved to tell our story, our way. Our words represent our creative expression, and dammit, we’re going to express ourselves the way we see fit.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you want readers to respond to your art, you have to meet them halfway. They can’t immerse themselves in your world unless you open the door and show them the way (and be the best damn tour guide you can be.)
In other words: be friendly.
Authenticity: Write like you speak
As a writer, developing your voice is easier said than done. It takes work (most likely, thousands upon thousands of written words) and time (letting your writing marinate so you can return to it with fresh eyes), not to mention lots of actual reading to know where your taste lies.
Even then, it won’t be complete. Like that old adage about art, finding your writing voice is never finished. Yet find it you must. Nothing sinks a writer faster than sounding like everyone else, or trying to write in an unfamiliar diction cribbed from some bestselling author.
Your voice is what makes your writing singular, and as messy, uncomfortable, and unpleasant as it is to carve something identifiable out of that boulder in your head, it’s essential to becoming a better storyteller.
Instead of belaboring this process, try the direct approach: write like you speak.
For many writers, this is common sense. For others, it sounds completely bonkers.
“How,” you might ask, “can I do my high fantasy epic justice, if I try to write it conversationally?”
The answer can be found by cracking open Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, as epic (and acclaimed) a fantasy novel that’s been written in the past twenty years.
Without spoiling too much, Rothfuss’s masterpiece is told entirely from the point of view of a barkeep recounting his life story to a traveling historian. In other words, a conversation. In taking the conversational approach, Rothfuss enriches the novel’s epic qualities by disguising stuffy wordbuilding, magic-talk, and other rote fantasy checklist items with a humanistic, down-to-earth style.
Writing conversationally follows logically from the campfire method’s first rule, since we’re treating our reader like someone we know. Without that authenticity — that is, your story being told the way you would tell it — the writing will fail to connect. Readers, as it turns out, are pretty smart. They can sniff out when authors are stretching themselves, or pretending to write in a way that doesn’t come naturally.
That doesn’t mean you can’t gussy up your writing here or there, adding flourishes and color where appropriate. But the key is authenticity. If it doesn’t sound like you something you’d say — especially to another human being — re-write it until it does.
