how to tell a story

I am an awful storyteller. My cousin reminds me of this everytime I start to tell him a story. I fumble, forget the sequence of events or the punchline, and worst of all, I feel like I need to relay every detail of the episode. I'm plagued by an overactive conscious. I can't lie!

While reading King's On Writing this week, I kept coming back to the discussion we had at the beginning of a semester about truth in writing. As a kid, I was told over and over not to lie, the sentiment deeply ingrained in me. Now, as an adult, I can't lie even in certain kinds of writing like memoirs, which require the occasional betrayal of truth. In the beginning of the book, King confesses to the reader that his memory fails him, that he cannot remember certain details. In other momoirs I've read, the author doesn't admit to such faults but instead fills the gaps with half-truths or probabilities.

Perhaps, this is the key to good storytelling: knowing when and how to lie. Perhaps, this is what my storytelling is lacking. I focus too much on telling the event faithfully, as it happened. But, I guess, that's also the difference between a storyteller and a reporter. People's expectations for a storyteller and a reporter differ; from one they expect entertainment, from the other, the facts.

As I begin to think about my classes in the future, I think that it would be interesting to explore this issue of truth in writing further. In the meantime, though, I need to learn to lie.

losing my mind?

A friend of mine told me today that his "thing" this semester has been to forget to underline the titles of books in essays. I told him my "thing" this semester is to forget the rules for capitalization.

I've had to fill out several, and I mean several, applications and this capitalization thing is getting out of hand. For example, if I'm referring to the University of Iowa as "the university," do I need to capitalize it?

Who better to set me straight than A Pocket Style Manual?

Besides learning which univeristy the author cheers for (under common nouns the author writes "a good univeristy," cross from it, under proper nouns it says, "University of Wisconsin"), it seems to me that university did not need to be capitalized. Good thing, too! I already submitted those applications.

lightbulb!

I was thinking about grammar the other day, as I often do, of course, and it came to me: what if we teach grammar through the "one-sentence story" that was introduced to us a few weeks ago? I think that this could be considered a challenge to students instead of just an assignment. It might look something like this: learn out how to correctly construct a story in one sentence using semicolons and colons and other punctuation. One story, one sentence. Students would, like Tim Gunn says, "make it work." The students could learn grammar while also constructing a short, short story.

Anyways, I know this is short and sweet but it's been on my mind lately. What do you think?