Storytelling advice from a dead Irish writer you’ve probably never heard of
“I know now that four fifth of Balzac’s sixty-odd volumes are far from being works of genius. Would all that Stendhal churned out fit into an eight-foot shelf? Would all of it that is worth while fill a two-foot shelf? Story after story by Maupassant is journeyman stuff. I can now reread only the Chekhovs that I have ticked off on the contents pages. And can anybody living, other than some rare student, lay his hand on his heart and say he has read all of George Sand?”
You don’t need many stories
Seán Ó’Faoláin wrote only 90 short stories over his long career (he was a rough contemporary of James Joyce—they were both active in the 1920’s and 1930’s—though Ó’Faoláin, who died in 1991, outlived Joyce by half a century). In his foreward to The Finest Stories of Seán Ó’Faoláin, he writes that “When I got down to the business of writing I found that half the art of writing is rewriting, and I would be happy if I achieved two hundred words of lapidary prose in a day.”
His most lapidary prose may appear in the foreward itself. The stories come off as tidy and old-fashioned, but the self-reflection that introduces his life’s work serves as a sober reminder to storytellers in earlier stages of their careers: “I have learned in my thirty-odd years of serious writing only one sure lesson: that stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask. And that takes so much time! Oh, dear! Why do they tell us in our youth that there are twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, and fifty-two weeks in a year? Balzac, indeed! I shall be content if half a dozen, if even three or four of my stories that have taken thirty years to write are remembered fifty years hence.” Those words were written in 1959, so you can judge Ó’Faoláin’s success for yourself. But his point is well taken.
Make the few count
If you don’t need many stories, how can you be confident with the few you do need? Begin by thinking of the situations that come up over and over again. On a personal level, it could be telling people where you’re from, what you do for work and for fun, why you live where you live. On a professional level, it could be telling your organization’s Signature Stories or Origin Stories, or stories about products, mission, and vision. Do you have memorable stories that resonate for these most common situations that come up the most often, or are these missed opportunities to build meaningful connections and share your purpose?
When you’ve got a story polished and ready to be told—a version that you know works well—you don’t need to constantly change it. You may update it, depending on your audience (or a change in taste or social mores), but for the most part you can rely on Aristotle wisdom: “The excellent becomes the permanent.” If you’re looking to tell stories that endure, you may not need to have that many—but you should make sure they’re excellent.