life

The Storytelling Life

August 27, 2010 By Mark 4 Comments

If you are interested in telling stories I want you to do something for me. I want you to protect that desire from your friends, your family, your peers, your online acquaintances, the literati, the critics, the publishing world and, most importantly, you.

If you decide at some point that storytelling no longer interests you that’s fine. What’s not fine is to think there’s some metric by which you must measure success. And the last possible metric you should measure success by is money.

I’ve been paid for my storytelling skills more than once. I have been and am a professional writer. But the storytelling I’ve done that has made money is only part of my storytelling life. The epicenter of that life, the core of my storytelling drive, is the mystery and promise of the blank page. It has been that way since I was a child, and I have protected that core from every assault waged against it.

I have not, however, always put storytelling first. For much of my adult life I put relationships ahead of my desire to tell stories, and I have no regrets about that. To do anything else would have been unthinkable to me. If life is short, and it is, then it’s for damn sure too short to be spent satisfying an itch while the people you love go wanting.

There were of course times when I was frustrated. And there were times when I could have written but I wasn’t supported in doing so. But even during the worst of it I didn’t feel as if I had to make a final decision one way or the other. I didn’t have to choose precisely because I never intended to let storytelling go. What I want you know is that you don’t have to choose either. [ Read more ]

Why the Internet Rocks

August 5, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

I was out and about conducting business today, when I happened past a storefront that had some interesting art in the front window. On closer inspection the images turned out to be part of a work-in-progress graphic novel, and I was taken by what I saw.

I didn’t have time to loiter, however, so I looked around until I found a URL for the artist. Unfortunately, while I had a pad of paper, I’d forgotten a pen so I couldn’t write it down. Because I don’t use a cell phone or PDA or electronic placenta of any kind I had to rely on memory to remember as much as I could, and I did my best.

Five hours later, when I finally got around to trying to look up the URL, the ol’ memory banks were pretty much empty. But here’s the thing. In less that three minutes I was still able to locate the artist’s site with this basic search.

But enough about me. Here’s Laura Lee’s site.

Enjoy.

— Mark Barrett

Where Stories Come From

June 8, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

Many moons ago I found myself in a bar called Green’s Grocery just outside of Nashville, attending a wedding reception for an old friend of mine. After wishing the newlyweds well I found an empty chair and struck up a conversation with a very nice man who turned out to be an accountant. When he asked what I did for a living I told him I was a storyteller. His eyes widened a bit as if I had confessed to alchemy.

From that moment it was little more than a hop, skip and jump to the question that every writer is asked sooner or later: where do you get your ideas? It was a question I’d been asked before, but until that day I had never fully realized that the human ability to invent stories or cobble them together out of life events is not universal.

As I talked with the man, and struggled to explain how ideas came to me, it became clear that he had never had the same thing happen to him. The more I tried to abstract the process, or explain it by using analogies, the more he insisted that the kind of narrative genesis I had been familiar with since childhood was simply foreign to him. The absurdity of the thought almost convinced me that he was pulling my leg, but it was obvious that he wasn’t. He simply did not think that way. [ Read more ]