Three Cheers for Good Old Storytelling
When something big happens in my life I find I can’t talk about it until I have cobbled together a new narrative about what happened and have made a start at fitting the new experience into my greater life story.
Humans seem to be compelled in this way. We don’t let our experiences wash over us and disappear, instead we mull, we question, we try to learn so we can do better 'next time.' Most importantly, we offer the story of our hard-won wisdom to others. One reason that I think so many people yearn to write fiction is that we are all of us already storytellers. Social interaction between human beings largely consists of telling our stories to each other, from ones as trivial as the trip to the vet to those as profound and painful as caring for an ailing parent. There are happy stories I love telling, and others I don't love telling, but I will share when I think the listener will be responsive. Telling my own stories is energizing and illuminating especially when good listeners ask penetrating questions that make me dig deeper and think harder about the experience I am relating.
Stories, the ones we make up wholesale and the ones we fashion out of our own lives, hinge around times of flux. Something has happened, is happening, or is about to happen that we know will change some hitherto stable part of our lives. Traditional non-experimental narrative fiction focuses on that flux, on the messy intervals between one steady state and the next. These moments are intrinsically fascinating to all of us because the outcome is never fully certain. We declare (somewhat arbitrary but logical) "endings" to the specific completed events within our stories--the couple leaves on their honeymoon, the divorce papers arrive, the long-awaited death is accomplished-- knowing full well that the story doesn't really end there; it will keep on going and going until there are no more people. Nonetheless, to use a knitting term, we bind off, cut the piece of yarn, and are done with that part of the story.
Writers and readers will never tire of writing about and reading new stories because while the same basic things happen to all people time and again, the details, settings, customs, and ethical issues are always changing. The scandal of the child born out of wedlock a few generations back, means very little to us now. The fact that this is no longer a scandal in most of western society is from having those stories of the hardships and misery of those ostracized women made public and we can, I think, thank writers who tackled the telling of those stories for helping to shift the tide of prejudice into understanding and acceptance. Today's emerging stories address different issues, some that we swept under the rug in our day and others, ideas we never even considered. Tomorrow there will be challenges that will surprise our own children, the unexpected and unforeseen that will create new patterns and new designs.
Humans seem to be compelled in this way. We don’t let our experiences wash over us and disappear, instead we mull, we question, we try to learn so we can do better 'next time.' Most importantly, we offer the story of our hard-won wisdom to others. One reason that I think so many people yearn to write fiction is that we are all of us already storytellers. Social interaction between human beings largely consists of telling our stories to each other, from ones as trivial as the trip to the vet to those as profound and painful as caring for an ailing parent. There are happy stories I love telling, and others I don't love telling, but I will share when I think the listener will be responsive. Telling my own stories is energizing and illuminating especially when good listeners ask penetrating questions that make me dig deeper and think harder about the experience I am relating.
Stories, the ones we make up wholesale and the ones we fashion out of our own lives, hinge around times of flux. Something has happened, is happening, or is about to happen that we know will change some hitherto stable part of our lives. Traditional non-experimental narrative fiction focuses on that flux, on the messy intervals between one steady state and the next. These moments are intrinsically fascinating to all of us because the outcome is never fully certain. We declare (somewhat arbitrary but logical) "endings" to the specific completed events within our stories--the couple leaves on their honeymoon, the divorce papers arrive, the long-awaited death is accomplished-- knowing full well that the story doesn't really end there; it will keep on going and going until there are no more people. Nonetheless, to use a knitting term, we bind off, cut the piece of yarn, and are done with that part of the story.
Writers and readers will never tire of writing about and reading new stories because while the same basic things happen to all people time and again, the details, settings, customs, and ethical issues are always changing. The scandal of the child born out of wedlock a few generations back, means very little to us now. The fact that this is no longer a scandal in most of western society is from having those stories of the hardships and misery of those ostracized women made public and we can, I think, thank writers who tackled the telling of those stories for helping to shift the tide of prejudice into understanding and acceptance. Today's emerging stories address different issues, some that we swept under the rug in our day and others, ideas we never even considered. Tomorrow there will be challenges that will surprise our own children, the unexpected and unforeseen that will create new patterns and new designs.
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