Lesson
60
The
secret to storytelling
My entry drew on an experience chauffeuring a semi-famous person around Ottawa, but in the story, I became Dave and my guest was Morley. The show picked it as a runner-up. Many people heard my name announced, listened to my story read on the air, and assumed I had won something. Several asked how I managed to imitate McLean so closely.
“I know the secret of the Vinyl Cafe,” I would say. “Just take
real experiences from wherever you can and then squeeze them into the
ever-so-sweet Dave and Morley format--easy.”
Now, all you have to do is repeat the
process hundreds and hundreds of times, over decades, and in a way that
resonates whether as text, radio broadcasts, stage performances, or
presentations on rolling trains. That’s all Stuart McLean did. Easy.
With enough pharmaceutical support, I
might have maintained this delusion through the first two Vinyl Cafe Leacock Medal books, but not the third.
The first two were pretty well rooted
in the Dave-and-Morley soil. The third book, Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe, which took the medal in 2007, presents
a different collection, which, more often than not, features a protagonist that
is neither Dave nor Morley. A few stories follow their children: teenaged
Stephanie, who comes of age as a tree planter; and Sam, who navigates
schoolyard sports.
But most revolve around previously
peripheral characters: Dave’s mother, Martha; Italian neighbour Eugene; Carl
the retiree; Kenny Wong; and Mary Turlington for the requisite Christmas story.
The book was promoted under the “Secrets” theme with the pretense that each
character had a secret to hide. Most of the secrets are mild embarrassments
that beg forgetting, but they can be Vinyl-Cafe
funny and maybe, together, they show the progression of McLean’s skill as a
fiction writer.
Even admitted fans of the radio
program find the stories predictable and confess that part of the appeal flows
from the comfortable normality of it all. This perception likely caused many of
McLean’s writing students to assume that he had a predictable, learnable
pattern.
He’s been pretty open about it all and
acknowledges that, particularly as a fiction writer, he spent years trying to find
an approach on which to build his Dave and Morley franchise. As someone who
regarded himself as a journalist, McLean started out writing his stories by
interviewing people, conducting research, and then pushing his material into a
fictional framework: not too much different from my 300-word CBC contest
approach.
Yet, by 2007, too many sober people
were touting McLean as a great storyteller and creative writer to attribute it
to such a technique alone. If he did achieve such greatness, his persistence
and the experience of those hundreds of stories in hundreds of venues probably
played a role in it. McLean also had a couple of other forces working on his
writing hand: his humility, with its associated willingness to learn; and his profession
as a teacher, with its obligation to observe other learning.
The poor student who failed in high
school became, during a short sojourn from CBC, an instructor at Ryerson
University (then Polytechnical Institute) in 1984 and later the director of the
broadcast division of its School of Journalism. Eventually, Ryerson granted him
status as a tenured professor. Trent University also picked him as its first
Rooke Fellow for Teaching, Writing, and Research.
It’s pretty hard to evaluate others
without evaluating your own writing, and it’s pretty hard not to want to walk
the talk when you have students closely watching you, as a high-profile prof.
Still, as I read this latest McLean Leacock Medal book, I was still searching
for a magic-bullet secret to his success.
Finally, the answer jumped out, not from
his book, but from his Secrets
promotional tour.
When being interviewed, McLean always,
always tried to divert the questioner from the subject of his new book, his
show, and his life. He wanted, more than anything else, to tell another story.
It’s impossible to watch Stuart McLean on stage or listen to him speak without
sensing that this is a person who just really loves stories. Oh, yeah--and
Christmas.
Writing Exercise
Think of the
stupidest thing you ever did. Then tell the story with generosity and with Dave
or Morley as the protagonist.