Stories- a few questions
Stories
I was at the Hometown Buffett for dinner and I was thinking about stories. I have some questions. Now, it might be that the more appropriate questions are:
1. Why are you at the Hometown Buffett the day after Thanksgiving?
2. Is everyone at the Hometown Buffett, you included, clinically obese?
But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about stories. Not about writing, the process of creating the stories, and not about us as writers, but about the little darlings themselves. They are all dressed up in their neatly pressed holiday clothes, shiny and new, ready to march out into the world. Who are they? What do we expect from them? Who owns them?
1. What do we expect our stories to do for us as writers? Are they hard working little moneymakers? Are they the ticket that gives us a new identity, and a cool one: Now you are a Writer. Are they the magic key that unlocks the door to the magic life of the writer, a life that never requires the use of an alarm clock again? Are stories simply the way we get someone to listen to us when we talk? Or is a story like the Alka-Selzer for writers, we have a large psychic burp burning in our guts, as if we’d had lunch at the Hometown Buffet, and we feel so much better when we can get it out?
2. What are they? Do they exist outside of the human mind? I don’t mean a book, I mean the story itself. Are stories tiny ripples on the big river of the collective unconscious, one story among millions that in whole define us as human? Are they dreams? Is the story the same, even if it is read differently, interpreted differently, by everyone who reads it? Or are stories plastic? We know animals talk to each other. Do they tell each other stories?
3. Does the story belong to the writer or to the reader? Or does the story belong to the tribe? Do stories conform to the Native idea of ownership—you can’t own the air, or the water, or the land, or the stories? Or are they products of our work, and we own their asses until 100 years have lapsed and the copyright goes away?
4. Do stories have a function in human society? Why do we love narrative so much? Is storytelling essential to mental health? (Or just mine?) Can stories kill? Can stories heal? What is the source of their power over us? What do we need so desperately? Why, in countries where writing the truth can get you sent to the gulag, hard labor in Siberia, the torture chambers, do writers keep writing the truth? Is what they are writing different from what we are writing? Does the intention change the story?
I was at the Hometown Buffett for dinner and I was thinking about stories. I have some questions. Now, it might be that the more appropriate questions are:
1. Why are you at the Hometown Buffett the day after Thanksgiving?
2. Is everyone at the Hometown Buffett, you included, clinically obese?
But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about stories. Not about writing, the process of creating the stories, and not about us as writers, but about the little darlings themselves. They are all dressed up in their neatly pressed holiday clothes, shiny and new, ready to march out into the world. Who are they? What do we expect from them? Who owns them?
1. What do we expect our stories to do for us as writers? Are they hard working little moneymakers? Are they the ticket that gives us a new identity, and a cool one: Now you are a Writer. Are they the magic key that unlocks the door to the magic life of the writer, a life that never requires the use of an alarm clock again? Are stories simply the way we get someone to listen to us when we talk? Or is a story like the Alka-Selzer for writers, we have a large psychic burp burning in our guts, as if we’d had lunch at the Hometown Buffet, and we feel so much better when we can get it out?
2. What are they? Do they exist outside of the human mind? I don’t mean a book, I mean the story itself. Are stories tiny ripples on the big river of the collective unconscious, one story among millions that in whole define us as human? Are they dreams? Is the story the same, even if it is read differently, interpreted differently, by everyone who reads it? Or are stories plastic? We know animals talk to each other. Do they tell each other stories?
3. Does the story belong to the writer or to the reader? Or does the story belong to the tribe? Do stories conform to the Native idea of ownership—you can’t own the air, or the water, or the land, or the stories? Or are they products of our work, and we own their asses until 100 years have lapsed and the copyright goes away?
4. Do stories have a function in human society? Why do we love narrative so much? Is storytelling essential to mental health? (Or just mine?) Can stories kill? Can stories heal? What is the source of their power over us? What do we need so desperately? Why, in countries where writing the truth can get you sent to the gulag, hard labor in Siberia, the torture chambers, do writers keep writing the truth? Is what they are writing different from what we are writing? Does the intention change the story?
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they could all be getting together at the story cafe and talking about us!
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2. I'd like to believe they have, on some plane, an independent existence. Like all thought.
3. Legally, we own their asses. (Hey, why encourage piracy?) Philosophically, anybody who hears or reads a story becomes its owner, and partially its creator.
4. Storytelling is universal and inescapable and certainly doesn't have to be verbal. However inadvertently, every living thing tells a story every time it makes a decision or reacts to its surroundings. Perhaps this is true of inanimate objects as well -- if they are, in fact, inanimate. (Who's to say there's no life or even consciousness in a stone?)
Sorry for sounding simplistic, but a.) I'm in pare-to-the-core mode today and b.) I ain't no Descartes or Stephen Hawking. ;-)