There are a number of art references in this thread, which I think that is very appropriate. Because I think it might provide a different, valuable perspective (and perhaps some common vocabulary in further discussion), I’d like to reframe what others have said above through the lens of storytelling.
ERE as Storytelling
[All quotes with page numbers are from Alice LaPlante’s “The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing"]
Writing always exists on two levels:
- What happens in the world of the senses (plot, storyline, words spoken)
- What is really going on (emotional and intellectual subtext) (p 509)
Take the story of “Of Mice and Men”, for example. What
happens is that two itinerant farmhands arrive at a new farm and after a series of misunderstandings between various characters, only one of them is left standing by the end. (I’m trying not to spoil it too much) But what
happens in the story isn’t really what the story is
about. The story is
about loneliness, commitment to others, dreams of a better life, and so on. It’s a bit difficult to explain it exactly, and everyone will have a slightly different take on what it means, but few readers would come away from it saying that
it didn’t mean anything at all.
I think there are a lot of parallels between ERE and the ERE Wheaton Levels and the art and craft of storytelling.
Let’s think for a second about skill acquisition as a writer. We start with ABC’s (or equivalent in your native language), then work up to words, then sentences. At each step, more complexity and sophistication. Sentences can be basic. But they can also be quite complex creatures, rambling on and on, articulating considerably more nuanced ideas and expressions—the kinds of things that require careful construction in order to make sense. And then of course, these sentences get ordered into paragraphs and paragraphs into sections, etc. Naturally, most people have decent grasp of the basics, but as you increase in skills, you find fewer and fewer people who are truly in command (similar to Wheaton Levels). How many people walking down the street can write a really,
truly, well thought-out and beautifully rendered piece of writing?
But!--and this is a very important but—the
skill of our writing is not the same as
“what are we trying to say?” What happens in a story is not the same as what the story is about.
Writers of popular works (both fiction and nonfiction) tend to do well on the concrete side of things: they bounce their characters around from New York to London to Paris and in and out of restaurants and beds and whatnot, but somehow it doesn’t add up to much emotionally. At the other end of the spectrum you have well-meaning beginning writers whose prose is filled with intense emotions and insightful moments of clarity, or epiphanies, but which lack the concrete to make it real. It is only when we marry the two that we get truly compelling fiction and creative non-fiction. (p113)
I see the parallel to ERE here as something like this: The earlier ERE Wheaton Levels focus on the development of skills in the same way that a person learns how words and sentences and paragraphs work. When you get to the later levels, the problem fundamentally shifts away from “how do I say that? (technical)” to “what do I want to say? (meaning)”.
I think storytelling is a great lens here because it helps explain some of the muddy overlap between these problems. Things like what @J+G brings up (paraphrasing): “but why can’t a person work on both (technical and meaning) at the same time? The answer that seems to arise is something like: you can(!), and in fact, some of us have been working at the problem of meaning for a very, very long time...well before working at the technical skills. The rub is that working on the meaning part without the skill foundation is just less effective. (Not necessarily completely ineffective, just less so)
That is, you can think of it like a 2x2 grid of technical vs. meaning (these axes could be named a lot of things, but bear with me for the moment), with four different resulting storytellers:
Unskilled at rendering what happens, unskilled at meaning
Unskilled at rendering what happens, skilled at meaning
Skilled at rendering what happens, unskilled at meaning
Skilled at rendering what happens, skilled at meaning
I’ve listed these in order (ineffective to effective) of storytelling end result
as judged in the real world by readers. The middle two are the most interesting to pay attention to.
One of the problems beginning writers have is that they start out with the abstract, or the general. They want to write about love. Or family life. Or war. Or divorce. They start above the fray, rather than in it. To paraphrase O’Connor, they want to forget that we are made of dust. And things, as a result, never get off the proverbial ground.
Let’s look at some examples of the difference between the specific and the general/abstract:
General / Abstract: She was sad.
Specific: She sat in her favorite rocking chair in her room, knitting a gray scarf and weeping into the unfinished woolen stitches.
General / Abstract: My father hated noise.
Specific: The neighbors became accustomed to my father throwing open the windows of our living room and dumping a bucket of cold water on the neighborhood children who were playing too loudly near the front porch.
General / Abstract: She had a drinking problem.
Specific: Three times a week she opened a bottle of white wine, not even chilled, and drank it from a coffee cup until it was dry. She brought the cup into the bathroom and would continue sipping even as she brushed her teeth. (p109)
The problem is analogous to the painter who is filled with emotions and ideas that they want to express, but lacks the technical ability to make the brush/colors do what they want. So the best that they can render on canvas is a crude frowny face. That said, I don’t want to downplay the meaning development that is going on in such a painter—that is very real and very important, and might begin very early. But without the ability to render it, it remains incomplete in some way. I do think there is
some progress happening, though, and that might manifest later on by not being the limiting factor when other, more technical hurdles are eventually overcome. Imagine a developing storyteller who has an amazing story that has been brewing in their head for a long, long time, every nook and cranny of it explored, every rock turned over…when they finally develop the skill set to be able to vividly render that story, what is to stop them?
The flip side is the case where a storyteller is very good technically (they have an amazing vocabulary, construct lively and vivid sentences, are quite convincing with their use of language), but simply don’t have any story within them to tell. Not to themselves, and not to others. Maybe they get stuck somewhere in the murky inner realm, and can never end up crafting a story that moves beyond ‘entertaining’ to being ‘meaningful’ or ‘moving’ or ‘powerful’. They have nothing to guide them beyond socially-prescribed motivations or superficial pleasures. This is a major problem, probably very common, and maybe even more difficult to solve than the 'artistic soul' in need of better technical skills. For some, they've already long since dealt with 'meaning' in their lives. For some, they'll get there in time. Some aren't ever going to get there, whether they try earnestly or not. ERE isn't going to provide meaning--it isn't
that kind of philosophy. I have, at times, banged my head against the walls of these forums, not fully understanding/recognizing that simple fact (and Jacob has rather patiently pointed out that maybe I should stop giving myself a concussion).
It’s an apparent contradiction, and there is nothing more common than for a beginning writing student to say, “I want the reader to identify with the story by imagining the first car he or she ever owned, so I’m not going to describe this car in detail.” No. It’s one of the mysteries of writing that in order to evoke a universal reaction or emotion you must use the tools of specificity. (116)
The devil is indeed in the details. And in all the little choices that a storyteller makes in order to convey both what happens and what it means. It’s so damn personal, and there are as many ways to tell a genuinely good story as there are storytellers. The thing about ERE is that each level can be described using abstract/general/theoretical language...in a way, it kind of has to be, but at the same time, it cannot be implemented generally or theoretically. You can’t put your money in “exponential growth”, but you can put it in a specific CD product at a specific bank offering a specific rate. You can’t create “system”, but you can use the wastewater from your downstairs shower to water raised beds #2 and #3 where you grow the lettuce in your back yard. It is important to point out, though, that the specifics do look reeeeeally similar at the earlier levels, e.g. details of a CD product or bank account or SP500 index fund. They look so similar that it is easy to just generalize them. But at later levels, all the details of a system start to look veeery specific and one-off indeed.
Which brings us to Levels 6-7-8-9, where the skills revolve around meaning-making. (I might be off a level...feel free to correct me. Tentatively, I’d argue that storytelling Level 6 might be something like masterfully rendering a rather standard story (e.g. a canonical love story) that is technically and emotionally solid. Level 7 might be masterfully rendering a story that
comes from you. Level 8 would be a good graphic novel--different media working together in tandem, different artists coming together to tell a shared story that they both help render. Anyone want to take a stab at Level 9? If the answer is crowdsourced Harry Potter fanfiction, my head is going to explode
)
What makes a story meaningful to you? What story do you want to tell? Do you have the skills to render it, both technically and meaningfully?
In addition to @jacob’s observation that there simply aren’t a lot of examples, I’d go further and argue that it is going to be extremely difficult to generalize among/between the examples that do crop up. It’s like reading a great book and then figuring out, “What makes this a
good story?” One needs to know about what is meaningful to oneself, what is meaningful to others, and be able to understand and work with those meanings from a vantage point outside of them. [I am aware that I have just made an argument for the incessant personality typing and "color coding" on the forum, even though it still annoys me
]
Anyway, I hope this helps. Correct me where I'm wrong.
