The Storyteller

As you may know, I've spent the better part of three years working on designing and coordinating a rather large building in Illinois. The fact that this building is material and now fully sized is a bit odd for me to think about, considering I've never even seen it.

If you think about architects as storytellers, its not too far off the mark. The craft of an architect is to describe a building, or in other words, to tell its story. It's a work of fiction that emerges into reality and begins to change how the story is told.

A client comes to us with a particular genre in genre in mind, and maybe a little bit about each of the major characters, and asks us to make a complete story. We do our research, brainstorm, read other stories that have been written about the same characters or genres, flesh out the characters a little more, and come up with a general storyline. If the client likes it, we start to rough out the tale. It can be a lot of writing. Some are short stories that can be written in a few weeks. Others, such as the tale I am writing, are sweeping epics that can take many writers many years of work.

At the very end of a lot of writing and revisions, we have a complete story filled with details. Some of the details are very boring, and so you don't spend so much time on them. Others hold the whole plot together so you can spend a lot of time working on these tiny details that can change the entire outcome of the story.

When the story is more or less done, you give it to a Reader. Not a reader like you or I, but a Reader more like a military strategist or a banker, who can read your story and tell you how many trees your dark forest needs, or if the palace dungeon is big enough for the dragon. Here it gets stranger, for the Reader takes the story and reads it to the Villagers. The Villagers come from all over and have many trades and roles, and they proceed to coax the story to life, using their own brand of magic different from the magic of the Storyteller or the Reader. More strangely, as the story unfolds in real life, it is not quite the same as you remember writing it.  Sometimes the Villagers interrupt the Reader and tell him, or her, "no, no, it isn't like that at all!" and often times there are subtle differences. Sometimes the dark knight fights with an axe instead of a sword, sometimes its raining in the real world when it was snowing in the story, but the major plot points remain: the black knight always wins.

The Villagers also ask many questions about your story, details you forgot to include, or what never even occurred to you- what color was the fallen squire's shield? Was that distant castle made of limestone or marble? Was the the great tower a hundred and seven or a hundred and seventeen feet tall? Just how deep is that cave? Most oddly, the story itself begins to play a role in its own telling. The monster whom you originally wrote to devour only children appears in person and tells you that really, he prefers maidens. While inventing regal colors of the elvish infantry, you're constantly dodging their stray arrows.

The storyteller spins the tale while the Reader reads, and the whole time the Villagers rush about, pushing and pulling and prodding the story to life. At the end, all stop work together, and the story is has turned to a history of an event which is real.

This is partly why architecture has such an attraction to me- there's something so potent and surreal and nearly magical about the process of calling something into existence which was formerly in your mind. Not ever having been to the site of where my story is being told, seeing photos and talking to construction workers is a bit like Tolkien getting letters from the Hobbits.