Jeffrey Archer writes in praise of Arthur Conan Doyle in this week's Time Out:

'I've learnt ...that you must tell the story and make the reader want to turn the page. It's a gift, by the way. You can't explain it.Conan Doyle had it, full stop. You can have writing lessons; they even seem to have them at London University! But what you can't have is storytelling lessons.'

What does he mean? Is he right?

Sheila

I think it's about as much of a gift as anything else in writing: some are born with it whole, quite a few have some of different kinds and degrees, some have none. You can improve on your talent in any area of writing to some extent, and teaching can help, but you can't make a brilliant storyteller out of someone with no instinct for it at all.

Emma

Well they always say about Jeffrey Archer (or should that be, Jeffrey Archer always says it about himself?): he's not a great writer, but he can tell a good story. I suppose if you're not a particularly accomplished writer, it frees you up to concentrate on the story; or maybe you just have to tell a darn good story to get into print.
As for whether it can be taught, that rather presupposes the writer chooses the story, rather than the stories choose the writer. (ok, I've obviously been reading far too much Jasper Fford)


- NaomiM

For me, the story is always the boss.

I think it would be nice if I could write lavish prose, and have people say, "Oh, Tarquin, I thought the imagary and his use of a multiple narrative were simply too too divine." But would that make people want to read (and more importantly, enjoy) my work? Probably not.

Dickens, Leonard, King, Burroughs - pure storytellers, and therefore in my opinion, great writers.

Don't know if it can be 'taught', but you can learn it by reading, reading and reading.

Don't know if it can be 'taught', but you can learn it by reading, reading and reading

.

Agree. Would you add Bukowski to your list?

I've only read one of Jeffrey Archer's novels. I was on holiday in Austria, going through a bad time with my partner and I was desperate. I'd read the books I'd brought but found 'Not a Penny More, not a Penny Less' in the hotel. It was a real page-turner, with a fast-moving plot and some really high-class locations. It was perfect for my situation, but the style was awful. I never read another.

What I think can't be taught is a kind of sensitivity to the language - the rhythm of sentences, and knowing which words go together. I think that's acquired from listening and a lot of reading.

Sheila

Ther are a lot of very good authors who have little idea of plot, but it doesn't seem to matter judging by the number of excellent plotless novels out there.

<Added>

...or so I've heard.

Well, I'm not so very bothered about a fast-moving plot, myself, as a reader - more interested in characters, and in prose that is a joy to read. Probably why I've never managed to get past a chapter of a Jeffrey Archer!

As to whether these skills can be learned, I think anything you absorb yourself in and practise you'll improve at, but maybe some people also have a natural gift - more of a baseline to work from, at least. Conan Doyle is certainly pretty unique.

Rosy

Jeffrey Archer is a proven liar, so we shouldn't really believe anything he says. I remember seeing a TV documentary focusing on him as a writer (rather than on any other of his dubious attributes) in which Salman Rushdie revealed a conversation he had had with Jeffrey Archer. One of Archer's early books had been criticised for relying too much on coincidence (a flaw in the storytelling?). He asked Salman for some help on this - what exactly did the critic mean, how could he work on this aspect of things, etc, etc... Rushdie told the story to show that Archer was someone who cared about the craft side of his work and was prepared TO LEARN... It reflected quite well on Archer, and revealed an almost touching naivete. But jump forward several years and Archer makes a sweeping statement about how you cannot learn storytelling - when he had himself sought and taken lessons in storytelling from a Booker Prize winning author mate.

Yes, now I remember it did have a lot of coincidences. It also had a lot of half-sentences and even some spelling mistakes. However, as I said, I was desperate.

I wondered about that story-telling mention - whether it was an ironic reference to his own inability to sort fact from fiction. I'm often guilty myself of gilding the facts when making an argument or telling a story ,so I can't say too much.

I think Conan Doyle is a good story-teller but when Archer mentioned John Buchan as 'his natural successor' he lost me there. I think the setting and the side-kick add a lot to the Sherlock Holmes stories.

As for plotless books, last week I re-read Lewis Percy, by Anita Brookner. No real plot to speak of, and the character is always more or less the same - Lewis was just a male version of all her heroines. Maybe he was a bit more bloodless - he married a woman with agoraphobia because he thought it would be nice to have a wife whom you could be sure would be at home when he returned from work.I laughed when she turned out to be very boring and he took to writing books of an evening. It was such a treat, though, to read so many well-turned paragraphs. I think she won a prize for a novel once.

I do expect a thriller to make you turn the pages, though. I once read Gorky Park in a spooky cottage on my own and I kept reading even though I was terrified already.

Sheila

One of Archer's early books had been criticised for relying too much on coincidence (a flaw in the storytelling?)

- apparently not as far as Pullman is concerned. His Dark Materials Trilogy relies heavily on 'coincidences'.

I suppose the crucial thing is whether the coincidences enrich the story or make it less credible. In some genres, coincidence adds to the atmosphere. In others, you want everything to be realistic.

Roger, I think you're being a little harsh to suggest JA is lying about this. Yes, he's a known and proven liar, and I'm not defending him. But it does depend what you mean by storytelling. You could mean story structure and plotting, or you could mean the ability to keep a reader hooked and turning pages, which some can do and some are less good at.

Verbally, for instance, some people have that natural ability to tell a joke and everyone listens even if the joke is crap. Other people may have good material but can't tell it right to get people's attention or amusement.

Personally I think of storytelling as that natural ability to string things along in an entertaining manner. I think of plotting and structuring as a much more practical task, and something different.

Deb

Jeffrey Archer comes in for a lot of flack from the snobbier elements of the literary world on the basis that his style is that of a self-conscious six-former. But he is, as he quite rightly points out, a gifted storyteller. Personally, I think he sits at one end of a spectrum: great story, not much style and not much characterization.

The other end of the spectrum is all character, no story - the balls-achingly tedious award-winning Contemporary Literary Fiction, in other words.

Sir Jeffer's characters may be thin, but at least I don’t feel like ramming my boot six-inches deep up their self-satisfied, self-absorbed bumholes every time they utter an angst-ridden sentence.

Best
Sion

As Stephen King says in On Writing:
All writers must also be great liars.
ergo, good storytelling relies on being able to string together a whole series of what are basically lies, derived from the writer's imagination. If you have someone incapable of telling a lie - just as snowy made the point about telling a joke - they are probably also going to be poor storytellers, because the reader simply is not going to suspend disbelief long enough to get through the book. - those are the books that get thrown against the wall in disgust and frustration while the reader cries out 'tell me a good lie; I want to believe it is the truth'.

- NaomiM

<Added>

apologies, deb, I meant you, not snowy.

I don't mind being confused with Snowy... so long as you don't confuse me with Jeffrey Archer...

Deb