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During 42 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon) for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, it has always been paramount to be able to TELL A GOOD TALE, and this is now highlighted by a new book about one of the greatest storytellers ever: Robert Louis Stevenson.
Telling a good, accurate story is absolutely essential.
I have always concentrated on real-life events, and if these are not told properly (in a way that draws in the audience) then you may as well give up.
In the old days if you didn’t give the story enough ‘top spin’, then the News Editor might say it’s boring, but if you gave it too much there could be legal problems.
This is tricky, but in fiction (which I would contend is proper writing), there is another level of difficulty.
In Robert Louis Stevenson we have this dilemma in abundance, which is now put centre stage by a new book about him.
Few writers have the genius to create a mythic story that each generation reimagines for itself, yet Stevenson did so twice.
In “Treasure Island” he perfected the sort of thrilling high-seas yarn that movie studios still produce.
As for “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (his publishers added the “The”), every sinister tale of a violently divided mind stands in its long shadow.
Stevenson not only wrote myths: he lived one, and this too, arguably, is a good background for a decent storyteller.
Born in Edinburgh in 1850, he defied chronic illness, sailed the oceans and died in Samoa, aged just 44, shortly after local people had honoured their tusitala (storyteller) with a lavish banquet.
With his superbly crafted books and mercurial, magnetic personality, Stevenson always inspired devotion.
His marriage to Fanny Osbourne, an intrepid, pistol-toting Midwesterner, is “a story of deep and lasting love” according to his biographer.
Stevenson worried that those tools served a lowly trade.
I would suggest otherwise – the ability to tell a good story whether in fiction or fact is a NOBLE one.
He was born into a dynasty of engineers and lighthouse-builders, until story telling in literature lit his true path.
He abandoned religious faith (I have none either, and this background obviously helped him to tell his stories), but in contrast he felt that he had done a terrible thing.
“Treasure Island” made Stevenson a celebrity, and it had begun with him drawing maps of an imaginary island and inventing stories about it.
As for “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, part of the plot came to the author in a nightmare, while a lot of my ‘intros’ come to me, bizarrely, out driving or even in the bath!
I would never pretend to be in the league of this writer.
Journalists and authors do, however, hold one thing in common: THE ABILITY TO TELL A GOOD STORY!
Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press; 584 pages; $35 and £25
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when good storytelling was vital) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – how accusations by Welsh star Wynne Evans (described as embittered in a UK paper), of drug use by a Strictly Come Dancing contestant being spurned by the BBC, emphasise once more executives’ REFUSAL to answer questions about a string of extraordinary scandals which have engulfed the huge corporation.
