Storytelling as second nature
The editor’s job: finding the big stories in the little details
Michel de Montaigne once wrote ‘Every [wo]man has within [her]himself the entire human condition’. I’m no philosophy graduate, but I always took this as we’re all pretty complicated — a fairly subpar observation for a renowned French Renaissance philosopher.
Lately, though, I’ve started thinking, this quote actually gets at the way we point our lens at the world.
Maybe, whether we realise it or not, we’re looking for the intrinsic human story. Maybe, we’re building these stories as we go, categorising our world with stories in mind.
And maybe, if we look hard enough, all our stories are thematic juggernauts.
In April, I was given the chance to work with photography student Stefani Giordano. The collaboration, as part of a cross-disciplinary assessment, saw students in RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing program assigned as the editors of photobooks produced in the Diploma of Photography and Photo Imaging.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, honestly. In the brief, Stefani had described her project using phrases such as ‘essence of life’ and ‘identity’. I worried these phrases might be placeholders — the image of a story in a house of mirrors.
To be fair, Stefani isn’t a writer. She hasn’t been taught story theory. Expecting some elaborate conceptual framework, or a complete narrative arch from her, is a bit like a photographer expecting me to explain why Leica is superior to Canon.
A good editor knows it’s best to go in with a trowel, not an excavator.
I can’t do what Stefani does. She shouldn’t be expected to do what I do.
Don’t get me wrong though, I was excited too. Working with a photographer meant it was unlikely I’d end up debating the removal of a split infinitive or the overuse of parenthetical phrases.
There’s a reason some writers dread going to their editor: in a way, editors are plumbers unearthing the piping. A good editor knows it’s best to go in with a trowel, not an excavator. But sometimes, we have to say to a writer, just chuck the baby out with the bathwater. This is a hard sell to the average writer because each word can be that baby.
With a photographer, I felt at least certain they’d have faith in what I do.
When Stefani and I met for the first time (over Microsoft teams), I was reassured by Stefani’s passion for her Grandparents — the subjects of her photobook. But still, I kept wondering how that passion could be translated into a story.
In editing, we talk a lot about scope and focus. While Stefani’s focus was clear, the thematic scope, for me, wasn’t. The photos Stefani had shown me were evocative, intimate and beautifully captured, but as a series, they felt disparate.
A few days passed, and I had to head to Sydney for Sydney Writers’ Festival. At Melbourne airport, I picked up a copy of Rick Morton’s My Year of Living Vulnerably. I read a significant chunk of the book before and during my flight. At its heart, the book is about Rick trying to rediscover love.
There’s a reason some writers dread going to their editor: in a way, editors are plumbers unearthing the piping.
Midway through the book, I started thinking about Stefani’s photos. There were images of her grandparents kissing and going to the park to play on the swings. There were a couple of images at Easter dinner, where her entire family came together at her grandparents’ house for a huge Italian feast.
It hit me like a bolt from the blue. Love. Love and the translation of love through Stefani’s family. It was the central concern—the primary theme. She’d chosen to photograph her grandparents because, the same love they’d shown her, she aimed to give back through her photographs.
This was about a legacy of love. In this case, a legacy that spanned generations and countries. When Stefani’s grandparents met in Melbourne, having separately migrated to Australia, they bought together two Italian families. They were bonded by a shared history and a shared love for life.
In Maria Tumurkin’s This narrated life, she reflects on the assertion in Joan Didion’s essay The white album that ‘we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five’.
Essentially, Joan is saying that as humans we create stories to glean meaning in our lives. While Maria is a sceptic in the school of stories are everywhere, man, she does concede that ‘the telling of stories is a human compulsion…’
I’d like to go one step further: storytelling is in our DNA. Early on were taught the intrinsic value stories have in our ability to interpret the world. So ingrained, sometimes we don’t even realise that we’re writing stories as we go.
I’d like to go one step further: storytelling is in our DNA.
As Jack Hart writes in Story Craft, ‘respected scientific researchers… have argued that storytelling has uniformities that suggest an evolutionary basis…’ Essentially, for survival, we use stories as a sense-making tool. Perhaps this was the case with Stefani, who subconsciously saw the big picture in the small details.
After landing in Sydney, I spent the night looking over Stefani’s first draft. I began to see the relationship between the photographs like I hadn’t before. The entire time Stefani had been focusing on the idiosyncrasies of her grandparents, she’d actually captured an intimate story—a simulacrum of their shared journey.
Jack Hart writes, ‘A sharp eye for story comes from understanding that its basic ingredients are universal and learning how to spot them in the real world.’
Stefani’s lens, in search of small acts of joy and humanness, provided the essential threads. I was the one who couldn’t see that. My job was as simple (and as complicated) as helping to braid them together — to bring her ideas to the forefront.
Sure, in the end, the process involved some complex restructuring and clear narrative direction, but the major parts were already there. Setting. Tone. Mood. Pace. Distinct characterisation. Glimmers of chronology. A beginning, middle and an end.
Christopher Cyrill, editor for Heat magazine, wrote in Turning a story, ‘My job [editing] basically is to carry away the sand while the author raises the object.’
Stefani reminded me, that when we focus on the intimate in art, we find the human angle. And inside the human is the universal — the capacity to capture the big stories wherever we go.
Sometimes all an editor has to do is to shrug off the sceptic and open their eyes.
