Musing, Storys, Storytelling, and the Power of Narrative.
Ultimately that's more title than I was planning on having text for, but I really have been thinking about all of them.
I'm sitting in my acting class right now, and my teacher just demonstrated some basic stage combat, and it began to occur to mesome of the differences between our storytelling and what we understand to be real life. I already have a list of collected tropes from previous contemplation/conversation:
-fiction has to make sense, real life doesn't.
-fiction has a clearly defined time frame, real life does not. (exception being life viewed as from birth to death, where time frame is clearly defined but too long to be viewed as a whole, bringing me to--
-fiction "hits the high points," in that everything is relevant to the underlying story. Real life is often wildly irrelevant.
-in (some) fiction, the manner of telling serves the story. In life, even compulsive narrators like me have power to change the story only in how we tell it-- the result attempts to serve us, not any underlying ideal, and as a result is often less clear.
My current thoughts lately have been yeilding, if not more, at least corrolary expressions.
- Life is random. This statement will be assumed to be true for the purpose of this proof, ignoring all notions of god, destiny, or other unproven powers merely for the sake of simplicity. If life is random, then all connections made between apparently unrelated events are made after the fact by the person making them. This means that even things that appear to be relevant at the time may not actually be so.
- as the narrators of our own stories, we do not have complete control over events, but we do have control over "spin". WE CHOOSE HOW TO INTERPRET EVENTS. For some of us, that dead coyote is a disgusting piece of roadkill; for some of us it's one heck of a bad sign, but we are the ones that choose. Choose carefully, as it won't affect random events, but it will affect your choices and state of mind. Fiction is full of bad things happening to people who listen to false oracles; this is not wrong.
-fiction has to be derivative of life. The other way around doesn't work. The act of making good fiction is the art of distilling real life down to it's most powerful components (along with artificial colors, flavors, and seasonings) and we take the derivate of a derivitive at our own risk. On the other hand, fiction is not LESS IMPORTANT than reality, any more than whisky will get you less drunk than beer. (like alcohol, truth to excess can be an unsalutory experience; like a glass of red wine regularly can be good for the heart, truth is vital to life.)
I'm sitting in my acting class right now, and my teacher just demonstrated some basic stage combat, and it began to occur to mesome of the differences between our storytelling and what we understand to be real life. I already have a list of collected tropes from previous contemplation/conversation:
-fiction has to make sense, real life doesn't.
-fiction has a clearly defined time frame, real life does not. (exception being life viewed as from birth to death, where time frame is clearly defined but too long to be viewed as a whole, bringing me to--
-fiction "hits the high points," in that everything is relevant to the underlying story. Real life is often wildly irrelevant.
-in (some) fiction, the manner of telling serves the story. In life, even compulsive narrators like me have power to change the story only in how we tell it-- the result attempts to serve us, not any underlying ideal, and as a result is often less clear.
My current thoughts lately have been yeilding, if not more, at least corrolary expressions.
- Life is random. This statement will be assumed to be true for the purpose of this proof, ignoring all notions of god, destiny, or other unproven powers merely for the sake of simplicity. If life is random, then all connections made between apparently unrelated events are made after the fact by the person making them. This means that even things that appear to be relevant at the time may not actually be so.
- as the narrators of our own stories, we do not have complete control over events, but we do have control over "spin". WE CHOOSE HOW TO INTERPRET EVENTS. For some of us, that dead coyote is a disgusting piece of roadkill; for some of us it's one heck of a bad sign, but we are the ones that choose. Choose carefully, as it won't affect random events, but it will affect your choices and state of mind. Fiction is full of bad things happening to people who listen to false oracles; this is not wrong.
-fiction has to be derivative of life. The other way around doesn't work. The act of making good fiction is the art of distilling real life down to it's most powerful components (along with artificial colors, flavors, and seasonings) and we take the derivate of a derivitive at our own risk. On the other hand, fiction is not LESS IMPORTANT than reality, any more than whisky will get you less drunk than beer. (like alcohol, truth to excess can be an unsalutory experience; like a glass of red wine regularly can be good for the heart, truth is vital to life.)