Well, I certainly can't deny that. But it takes more than absolute mastery of the English language to tell a good story. It seems my literary abilities are inversely proportional to the length of the result. Which is to say, the longer I run on, the more I suck.
I'm capable of a devastating one-liner and an undeniably decent paragraph. I draft a competent interoffice memo. My three-page essay starts to hurt a little, for both of us. And this year I participated in the National Novel Writing Month, squeezed out 688 atrocious words of rambling, smelly fiction and then had myself a five-alarm nervous breakdown. (Do people still have nervous breakdowns, or am I a sweet old-fashioned thing?)
But then it occurred to me that I have told pithy stories...hundreds of them. I've probably written down every goddamned thing that ever happened to me, probably many times over...in short, pointless posts on usenet newsgroups and bulletin boards and emails. Sayyyy, maybe short and pointless is the key!
My Uncle Alf had a stroke that messed up his spontaneous language centers, so when he tried to say, "good morning" he was apt to say "fuck you!" instead (we're pretty sure he wanted to say "good morning"). But he could recite poetry, because memorized speech lives in a different part of the brain.
Maybe the long-story-telling center of my brain is similarly gefukt, but I can spit it out in short barks and pantomime. Maybe if you gave me a big ol' stack of post-it notes I could put together something to compete with Will and Ariel Durant's eleven volume Story of Civilization. Except in short barks and pantomime.
Let's find out.