Richard Butchins's Blog: Angels stand corrected... - Posts Tagged "great-expectations"

Are blog posts short stories? I suppose they are, almost everything is a story. People use them all the time to communicate pretty much everything. " I'm sorry I'm late the traffic was terrible." is a story. Questions are the other thing we use. "How are you?" questions are an invitation to tell a story narrative is everything to humans. A good narrative will take us somewhere unexpected and in an inventive and unpredictable way.

I often think of Great Expectations by Dickens as a fine example of this. It's a masterful use of narrative and surprise to make a clear societal point. Though he had to change the ending because people were unhappy with his original ending which was considered too bleak.

The same thing happened to Collodi after he wrote Pinocchio (originally entitled "The Story of a Puppet) Pinocchio is hung from a tree at the end of the tale. It seems the strange concept of a "happy ending" has power and one that I run into all the time. Listen up folks nobody lives happily ever after.

I have been asked to contribute a short story to an anthology to be published... actually I have no idea when, but I have one and it doesn't have a happy beginning let alone a happy ending.