Why the Best Storyteller Award means everything to me
Years ago, I was inspired by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. He was a newcomer at the San Francisco Writers Workshop, writing what he believed was an obscure story about boys in Afghanistan. Every morning before he went to work as a physician, he wrote a few pages of what he called “my little story,” before he heard the footsteps of his toddler coming to interrupt him.
He never imagined The Kite Runner would become a global phenomenon translated into 42 languages, but when it did, he focused his fame to rescue the people he cared about. He and his wife Roya, an attorney, founded the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit, to support Afghans. His second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was about a humble Afghan woman.
I realized that writing blockbuster books was Khaled’s secondary goal. His primary goal was to draw the power of western attention to the suffering of Afghan people. Every story he told served that goal.
I had to ask myself, “What is the point of telling a story? Is it to acquire renown? Or is it to make something good happen in the world?”
How would you measure whether you were a good storyteller?
By that time I had a few achievements under my belt. A thriller that sold a movie option to Warner Brothers. A funny biology book about sex translated into 18 languages. I had even achieved artistic satisfaction with a literary novel about the meaning of life which I privately considered sublime. Suddenly, it all seemed pointless.
What is the point of telling a story?
Stories were told long before books and bestseller lists. Homer didn’t strum his lute for profit, though the listeners who memorized his stories would pay him to tell them again and again.
The greatest storytellers create a founding myth upon which civilizations are built. Whether your sense of meaning is a religion, ideology, or family, it’s a story, even if it’s only your personal story of discovery, struggle, and striving for redemption.
Great authors like Khaled Hosseini tell stories to move people’s hearts to serve a good cause. Good causes are served by nonprofits like the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, born from a story.
Once I saw that re-founding civilization on the sea will solve the problem of monopoly governance through the power of variation in selection, I realized I had to tell stories to inspire free people to make seasteading happen as quickly as possible.
That’s why I accept the Free Cities Best Storyteller Award on behalf of all our donors and volunteers who have supported our vision for free societies on the sea.
The seastead prototypes floating now would not have happened without you.
