Telling partial stories
(Nimue)
How we tell stories is of course a significant consideration for anyone on the bard path. However, it’s an issue that affects everyone. What we miss out of a story is often as important as what we reveal. This can be considered both as a structural story issue and as an ethical issue.
On the fictional story side, the gaps we leave are the spaces in which readers or listeners add bits of themselves. Stories are a collaborative process and it’s worth thinking about what space you create. This is why excessively tidy endings don’t always work. Sometimes its better not to explain everything. Suggestion can be more powerful than clarity – this is especially true in the horror genre. When you make people do some of the work they can end up a lot more invested in your story than if you hand everything to them on a plate.
We all tell stories about our lives and experiences. Here the question of what gets left out has very different implications. The absence of key details can easily change the impression a story gives. One obvious example is that when women murder their partners it most usually happens in a context of the woman having endured long term serious abuse. Miss out the abuse part of the narrative and the shape of the tale changes dramatically. It’s often an issue around all kinds of abuse – if the person telling the story is able to miss out the thing they did that started it all, that can have a huge impact on what’s understood when their victim finally cracks under unbearable pressure.
We all see things from our own perspective, and will tend to foreground our hurts and our triumphs and not draw attention to things we messed up. Clearly there’s a degree of ordinary human mess that we should be allowed to get away with! Where it becomes an ethical issue is when our omissions impact harmfully on someone else. If missing out your actions or words makes someone else look irrational or more to blame, or it it gives the impression they’ve acted inappropriately, that’s not honourable.
I think what’s tempting about this is that it isn’t an outright lie. If you do it, you haven’t actively maligned someone, and it is harder to blame you for being misleading. If you tell people how hurt you were by a partner having an affair but don’t mention that you’d neglected them for years before that happened, you create a really misleading impression. If you’ve dumped an impossible workload on someone but only flag up that they didn’t manage to do something you asked of them, again that’s highly misleading. If you don’t mention that you said you wanted something and then get cross when someone acts on that information, you’re ducking responsibility. There’s a lot of that out there, especially around politics and hate crime.
In fiction, leaving bits out of a story can be a good choice. It can make more room for your audience. In real life the implications are vastly different. Speaking with integrity means acknowledging your own role in things. If you are developing bardic storytelling skills its important not to misuse those in ordinary life. Being able to tell the story of what happened tends to go with being a victor, and this is not a power to use lightly or selfishly to the detriment of others.
