The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin is a fascinating essay. Perhaps it is most fascinating for me because I feel that it is itself a story. I really love that about it. Most of all, I love how he structures this piece. I love how each new subject builds upon the previous ones without necessarily following it logically. This is wonderful collage at work and I’m impressed by it.

In addition to form, I love his arguments about the novel. As wonderful as novels are, they are a flawed medium. It comes entirely from one person’s solitary imagination and can never truly enter the lives of others, but that is exactly the goal of telling the story, of writing the novel. The other problem with the novel, and this has become even more problematic today, is how it is dependent on the printed format. Yes, now we can get it on our Kindles and iPads, but it still looks like a printed book. And yet we no longer live in that world. The online news doesn’t look like a newspaper, does it? I’m very interested in the concept of creating multimedia stories.

Like Benjamin, I worry about the information given in writing. He’s right, information can’t really transcend the time. But there is some type of information in writing that can. It’s some sort of information about the soul, I think. But how do you define that? It’s impossible. Like he says, we read to experience death. This is true, but don’t we also read and write to experience life?

What are we trying to tell people when we write?

Why do we need to tell each other things in novels with purpose?

Why do we write novels?

Where is the novel going?

Why do we write?

Why?