Conversation

I’d really like to read a book titled “seeing like a storyteller.” How do you walk around with an eye open for story fodder? Like Douglas Adam’s’ biscuits story. How do you sensitize yourself to this kind of dramatic potential in milder instances?
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Women do this all the time. Observation, context, shaping, telling. Men call it gossip. When a man does it, hey a novelist, raconteur, commentator.
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This is to misunderstand gossip. Gossip has a bad press. Gossip is narrative. It can be malicious but it always part of a narrative. Gossip weaves families and communities into a coherent story.
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my point is, you may understand a lot about your social milieu through gossip, but it's not sufficient to define what I'm talking about... that takes a different kind of observation. There's nothing gendered about it. Gossip can be *one* kind of raw material for such observation
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Gossip is to seeing like a storyteller as fruit bowls are to seeing like a still life painter. Anyone can put fruit in a bowl or eat a piece of fruit out of a fruit bowl. Not everybody can see it in a way that leads to a great painting of a fruit bowl. I sure can't.