I’m a sucker for books about how to writestories, novels, poems, plays, whatever. I’ve got two or three shelves full of them. I guess I keep hoping someone will show me The Lazy Man’s Way to becoming a success in the writing game. Unfortunately, reality keeps rearing its ugly head. They all say the same thing. You have to discipline yourself, work at it every day like you are being paid by the hour, and forget about Inspiration and Divine Guidance. Those fairy gifts may come to you sometimes, but not at your coaxing or pleading. And sometimes they just never figure out where you live. It’s just a job, you don’t know what you’ll get paid, you don’t even know if you’ll get paid. Yuck! But the good news isfinding stories to tell is not quite so hard.Back in 1996-97, my acting career was not keeping me as busy as I wanted, so I decided to get serious about storytelling. I wasn’t hoping to make money at it yet, but I thought if I could find some good stories, it might be fun. Where should I look for them? I started to go through libraries and haunt bookstores (new and used). There were collections of folk stories like those by the Grimm Brothers. There were folk tales from Ireland, England, other parts of Europe and from America. There were myths and legends from everywhere. There were also plays, poems, songs, and stories that were not from oral traditions, but which might be adapted. And of course, there were my memories of things that happened to me, to my kids, to other people around me.
There were lots of stories I read and didn’t think they were right for me. There were some I tried telling a few times, and dropped because I didn’t feel I was bringing them to life the way I wanted. There were some I liked to some degree, but I thought they needed rewriting or maybe a different ending, so I tried some of that. And there were a few stories I did not use at all as they were, but they suggested other ideas which became new fiction. None of this process of building up my story repertoire happened in the heat of inspiration. I would edit and write and write again, going through four or more versions before finding one that satisfied me. But little by little I added to my own collection, and in 1998, I published a book of my favorites, Old TalesNew Tails.
As it turned out, there were eight stories in that book. Three of them were variations on a Grimm tale. My favorite of those is The Four Musicians of Nashville. In the original tale, The Brementown Musicians, there are a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a cock, and they are going to Bremen to start new lives as musicians. In my story, I made the donkey a Tennessee mule, I called the cock a rooster, and had them head for Nashville. I also gave them a song to sing and wrote a new ending that gets a laugh. And instead of grouping them together as “the animals,” I gave them individual personalities to make them more interesting. Those kinds of changes have been well worked out by Disney. Remember his Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In the Grimm version the dwarfs were just seven little men. But Disney gave them seven personalities and gave them a song to sing.
I tinkered with or rearranged other stories to help them connect with listeners. You can do it too, if you give yourself permission to do it wrong a few times before you get something you can live with. The stories are out there, but look at them as suggestions, as unpolished jewels waiting for your touchwaiting for you to make them your own. No, it’s not as easy as falling off a log. You do have to have to put out some effort to make old stories into good old stories, but it could be worse. You could be trying to write a novel!
