The Inherent Worth of a Story

I'm both writer and reader, so I understand that what's interesting to a writer isn't necessarily so to a reader. Many writers, myself included, create exercises for themselves that sometimes turn into novels, but these aren't the ones that will be remembered, or if that's too big a word, enjoyed. The best work any writer does is what naturally comes out of him and a reader can sense that immediately. But that said it is possible for a writer to have a story that is so abstract, obscure, oblique, or out of the mainstream, that it won't appeal to that many readers no matter how well written it is.

I was walking around tonight and simply realized that the reason love stories are so popular is that it's something inherently of interest to people, that they must not be able to talk about enough to get out of their system, given the private nature of love, but we all want to read love stories. In fact, I'm sure there's a story out there with more inherent worth than a love story and why most books, movies, etc., try to throw one in at some point, even if that is not what the book is ostensibly about. I'm not sure what the number two story would be but it would probably be about work, parenting, a trip, a war story, or something else that people want to read. Maybe one about baseball.

The thing is we've told each other so many love stories at this point that there really aren't that many more to write. There is room in the world for other kinds of stories, but one would have to question the inherent worth right off the bat, and by that I don't mean artistic worth, but how well it would relate to the public. You could write a great book about socioeconomic problems in 1970 St. Louis and if you didn't concentrate on character it might not be of inherent worth to anyone outside of someone familiar with St. Louis in the '70's. I guess that's why so many creative writing teachers were paid far too much money to tell aspiring student/writers to focus on character, and that they drive a story more than plot or setting. Of course, this is a little odd to say, because plot and setting challenge a character, but they are not the character, and serve him/her, rather than the other way around.

I'm not sure how much we focus on character as a society anymore, and that's to the detriment of storytelling. I saw a Mike Bribiglia movie last night called, "Don't Think Twice," and he's a good artist. The movie was about an improv(e) comedy troupe and fun to watch but there were almost no memorable characters. There were sketches at character, hints at conflict, lines that were so good they defined the idea of a person, but there were no living breathing flesh eating characters in the movie, and it will therefore be forgotten. I'm not sure if contemporary fiction suffers from this same problem, but I could imagine it does if only because we're living the age of the critic where the essay rules the day.

I think TV gets this problem much better than the movies nowadays. The second golden age of TV has figured out what people want to watch, and that's not easy to do. We all can only write from our experience, but if our experience is rich enough it should be able to encompass a whole host of experiences that can be turned into art. This would be fiction at its truest representation and why the writers of old argued for composite characters, seeing it as an art to make a a story inherently interesting by basing it on your experience, but not necessarily it being your experience. I was never very good at composite characters, so my hats off to anyone who can make them real. I want to say that we've reached a point in society where we've lost the use for a composite character, and no changing the name of the character does not make him/her a composite. It makes them a thinly veiled version of someone real and pisses off the audience.

So, what is the inherent worth of "If So Carried by the Wind"? It's not really a love story but a story of a young student with mentors and in this way is universal. How well I told that story is another question, but without dwelling on that this is the inherent worth of the story. The secondary worth is that the mentor's involved happened to be important underground figures of their era. Why is this important? Well, it changes their character because the reader sees the worth of the mentor's life, adding to the inherent worth of the story. It does matter what people have done or not with their life and while this might not be the inner depth of their character it is what they are made of, inside and outside. The tawdry part of this secondary meaning is that people love to name drop, but this is not storytelling.

The inherent worth of "Toy Land" my yet to be published novel with a collaborator to be named later is that it's about my mother, or at least the first half is. The second half is about my friends. I definitely see the inherent worth of writing about one's mother, since we all have a very deep relationship with ours, and it's something everyone relates to. As for childhood friends, that may or may not be a better subject matter for a story. It does have inherent worth, but the friends better be very interesting to make it matter, but I could also say that about the mother. The thing is not everyone has great childhood friends, but to repeat myself everyone has a mother.