Stories Within Stories: INCEPTION’D

A friend of mine linked me to Mike DiMartino’s blog about stories the other day, and so I’ve been browsing through a little each night, reading old entries and thinking about stories and what they mean to people and how we build them.

Last weekend my girlfriend and I went down to Orlando to visit friends and see Wicked (which was great), and that got me thinking about stories again. What it really got me thinking about was historical fiction and retellings, actually.

Retellings and unofficial sequels are really popular right now–you don’t need to look further than searching for “Mr. Darcy …” at the bookstore and you’ll find a bunch–to say nothing about the popularity of fairy tales being retold now. (Cast in point: I just finished watching Once Upon a Time. Any other watchers want to rage with me? Gah.)

Anyway, I remember reading an interview with a historical fiction writer a while back now, and I can’t remember who it was unfortunately, but they said that there favorite thing about the genre was finding the gaps in events that happened and coming up with all of the things that could have fit in those spaces.

Wicked made me think of that. We know a lot of stories about Oz, but someone saw space where a story could be told about the wicked witch and it got their mind turning. The same way historical fiction writers see two points in history and their brains are suddenly filled with what could have happened between two points. I mean, fan fiction writers do the same thing a lot of times.

Taking this back a step, culturally everyone does this. We love rumors, because it inserts a story between things we know that collects these nodes in our brains like lightning bolts. We know point A and point C, but throwing in this idea of B that connects the two is like bottled lightning.

It’s a way to take old stories that we know we love and reinvent them, Or to step back in time and breathe new life into an old story, just enough familiar touchstones that we’re in that comfort zone of the familiar, but the story teller stretches the boundaries and allows us, in the case of retellings, to experience something we love again for the first time or, in the case of historical fiction, to step back in time.

I love those simple What If questions that pull these stories back from the past and into the present. It keeps myths relevant, it brings history forward and puts us in touch with some of the oldest stories and ideas.

And it’s just incredibly cool.