Author ~ Writer ~ Storyteller

We are the words, and they are us...or are they?

Sep 04, 2023

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium! Find my fiction at the Bibliotheca!

Recently at a local On Purpose Woman meeting here in Tallahassee, I had the privilege of listening to an oral storyteller give us an introduction to her craft, along with a story that she has told over the years for many different audiences. It was entertaining and very moving, and it made me think of my father, a son of Appalachia, who was a wonderful storyteller.

One important point she made was about the words that we use, specifically how the word “storyteller” has become generic. We use the word to describe anyone relating a story in any format, whether that's a novel or an oral story, or a movie. We say, that was some good storytelling. We might even say that author, director, songwriter as a fantastic storyteller.

She lamented that “storyteller” has become so watered down, and while I sympathize, there is a good reason for it.

Sure, there is a point where if you use a word in enough situations and under a big enough umbrella that it loses all meaning. I don't think we're there yet with the word storyteller, but sitting there listening to her talk about being a storyteller brought to my mind the words that we collectively use to describe what we do, and what we are:

Author
Storyteller
Writer
Artisan
Craftsperson
Content creator

There have been attempts over the years to codify the definitions of some these terms, but in my experience, those attempts are mostly focused on gatekeeping: You can't be an author unless you have published a book! Oh, wait, you can only be an author if you've published a book that was printed by a traditional publishing house. Oh, hold on, you can only be an author if you've published a book printed by a traditional publishing house that can be bought in a bookstore! …and on and on and on.

I agree that there's a lot of messiness in that whole situation, but I think it reflects one of the unintended consequences of the ongoing changes in technology (and specifically publishing technology), which is that these words will become even more squishy and undefined. The reason we use “storyteller” now as a stand-in for “the person who created and/or related the story” has less to do with disrespect than it does with the impossibility of accuracy, which in turn circles back around to the technology involved.

We all know that a writer is someone who writes. But what constitutes the act of writing these days? What does it mean “to write”?

The word writer fails to make any kind of sense when you look at it from a modern perspective. For instance, I originally dictated this essay into a digital recorder, then I transcribed the audio using otter.ai, then I cleaned it up and made edits.

At what point was it written?

Obviously, words like “writer” continue to be used because, generally speaking, if you say you're a writer or an author, then people get the idea that you are some form of what is now called “content creator.”

But it leaves out the fact that often, writers these days are also podcasters, video producers (tiktok or youtube), and an unholy mix of marketing expert, graphic designer, copywriter, and website manager.

We write, in various ways, then spend a lot of time doing other things that contribute to our ability to write stories so are required in order to claim being a writer (much less an author) despite all those things being not writing.

But there are limits to language, so if I were to get too esoteric, then it wouldn't actually be explaining to anybody what I do, and I'd have to fall back on “oh, that term? That old thing? It means I'm a writer who writes books and shit. And while I do write books and shit, I also write novels! And while I do publish books of my novels, I also publish a lot of other things on a variety of platforms and also write in a lot of different places online, and I host a podcast, and…and…”

The technology has changed enough that the words we commonly used have been disconnected in a lot of ways from what they originally meant. That's okay, even if it feels like we are drifting at sea sometimes. After all, that's how language works. “Typewriter” used to mean the person using the typing machine; then it meant both the person and the machine; now we only use the word to describe the machine. No one these days is a typewriter, we just use them (or we used to, anyway). These shifts reflect the culture and technology as they changed.

I think it leaves open a big, broad field of possibilities for people like me to define ourselves outside of the boxes that people want to keep pushing me into. I tell stories. I tell them orally, I tell them digitally, I tell them on the printed page, I tell them in fiction, and I tell them in nonfiction.

That's one of the reasons I switched to calling myself a storyteller rather than an author or a writer or, God forbid, a content creator. Even my nonfiction work, such as this very essay, is a form of storytelling for me.

Apologies to oral storytellers everywhere for co-opting a term that has historically represented them!

But, I like to think that it's my legacy, since I am the daughter of two very good oral storytellers in the grand storytelling tradition of the South. Maybe I'll eventually find a better description that honors them and my work and actually describes what I do these days as “a writer.”

But for now, I think that I like “storyteller,” at least until the technology changes up again.

Who knows what new words I’ll become then.

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