The talent to be a spell-binding storyteller is rare. I suspect that Homer was one of those talents. I have known a couple of talented story-tellers, but most people who try to tell a story just bore you unless it's less than two minutes long.
The ability to write down a story seems to be much more common. Film scripts, short stories, novels, plays are all constantly written but rarely published or performed. It seems to me that written stories do not need high-level wordsmithing to be successful, but high-level wordsmithing can turn the simplest story into art. Shakespeare, for example. Good plays and good TV scripts can do fine with simple conversational dialogue if the tale has a good engine and cool characters.
When I think of wonderful written storytelling with mediocre wordsmithing, I think of people like Tom Clancy and Robert Parker. When I think of extraordinary wordsmithing with uninteresting stories, I think of Updike. When I think of current transcendent prose, cosmic imagination, truthful expression, giant intelligence, knowledge, and life experience - and simple stories raised to the level of art, right now I think of Mark Helprin. Perhaps because I am in the middle of his collection of short stories, The Pacific and Other Stories.
Especially his story about Ralph, the possible baal shem tov, but the story about falling in love on the Staten Island ferry was soul-piercing too. Over the years, he has opened my eyes to many things which I will not recount now.
But back to story-telling. Much of TV writing is formulaic. It has to be. I think The Sopranos was brilliant TV, great story-telling. So was Downton Abbey even though that was more of a chick thing.
For those who are filled with stories to tell, but are not naturals like Mark Twain, there is a now-classic book: The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller by John Truby. It's not a formula except in the broadest sense: he just tells you how all successful stories work. It is like a textbook.
Can the wordsmithing be taught? I dunno. I doubt it, given that the talent is rare and life is short.
Is that how you see it?
