One of the Best Storytellers I Knew Couldn’t Read or Write

What Storytelling Really Is

This post is part of my series How to Start a Writing Practice: A 7-Week Experiment. Read the full series here.

I have a confession to make.

I got all A’s in English class without ever really learning grammar. I didn’t know an adverb from my elbow. Just like I got kicked out of music class because I would “never be able to play anything if I couldn’t read music.”

I now make my living as a writer, and I play three instruments.

I still can’t read music.

AI can tell a story. But it can't tell your story.

Grammar is a wonderful thing. But I’ve seen it stop so many people in their tracks when they sit down to write a bio or a website. They worry about sounding professional. About getting it right. And a lot of people deal with that by asking AI to write for them. Which is totally understandable. It’s scary to try to describe yourself and worry about sounding dumb or getting it wrong and having it hanging out there for all the internet to see.

But the result is often a page full of perfectly correct sentences that tell you absolutely nothing about the human being behind them. There may be a picture of someone smiling at you, but after scrolling through the whole site you still don’t know who they are. Because there’s no story.

Honestly, I probably would have used AI in high school just to get teachers off my back. But then I never would have had the chance to develop my own voice. And your voice is the thing that actually makes people lean in and listen.

The power of being yourself

Glenn was about eighty when I met him. His family had lived in coastal North Carolina for generations. His father was a moonshiner and pilot-boat captain. His mom trapped beavers and sold the untanned pelts for $25 apiece. Good money in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Glenn fixed cars.

He had the thickest southern drawl you’ve ever heard and used old English words like commode for toilet and brogue for accent. He read the signs in the wind and the birds and could predict the weather better than the news.

He also had an understanding of human nature that rivaled any social scientist.

One rainy afternoon he walked into my store, his trademark toothpick dangling off his lower lip like an anemic cigarette.

“LIL GIRL!”

He always called me that. And he always yelled because he needed hearing aids.

“I got me a quandary!”

“What is it, Mr. Glenn?”

“Big city man came to me. Said his car weren’t runnin’ right. Said the brakes gone bad! Took it to another feller who said they was fine. But he was strung up tight ‘bout it! Pacing the floor, face all red, worrying his mustache off with his soft Yankee fingers.”

He winked at me. He knew I was a Yankee too, even if I “didn’t act like one of ’em.”

“So I told him I’d look at it. And lil girl, weren’t nothin’ wrong with them brakes!”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I told him he was right. Them brakes was bad! Said I’d have to keep his car a few days.”

“Then what?”

“I gave him his car back and he drove it around and said it was all better!”

“What’d you do to it?”

“Shoot girl! I parked it in my garage for a few days and let it fix itself!”

“Did you charge him for it?”

Glenn pulled the toothpick from his mouth and looked at me over his glasses.

“Lil girl, you can’t charge a man for fixin’ his head. And that’s the only thing I fixed.”

Then he grinned.

“Man took me to dinner with his wife and kid. I made me another Yankee friend and got a steak dinner outta it! I’d say that’s a better deal than a dollar.”

Glenn was rowdy, raucous, morally questionable at times — and also deep, wise, and incredibly generous. He was complicated.

It's okay to be complicated

Grammar, punctuation, and spelling, though important, are almost inconsequential when it comes to telling a story. Of course we want our writing to sound good. Smart. Polished. That comes later.

For the sake of your writing practice this week, consider them banished.

If we force convention on the unconventional, we might miss the poetic curl of wind wrapping around the fencepost outside — and what it’s trying to tell us about the dream we had last night.

First, let the story out. Let it breathe. Let your inner storyteller use a different kind of grammar. Let yourself be complicated.

Glenn didn’t know a dangling modifier from a muffler clamp. But when he spoke, people leaned in.

He wasn’t interesting because he was correct. He was interesting because he was himself.

So let your inner Glenn speak.

Your practice

For one writing session this week, pretend “correct” writing doesn’t exist.

Write just like you’re telling a story out loud to a friend. Exaggerate. Ramble.

Is it spelled descision? Deciscion? Or decision? Who cares! Leave it.

Welcome! weird punctuation. 

If a sentence runs off the rails entirely, even better.

Your only job is to let the storyteller in you speak. You can always clean things up later. You might be surprised what shows up when you stop trying to sound correct and start sounding more like your uncorrected self.

This essay originally appeared on my Substack newsletter Sensitive Matters.

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