Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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Disgust. Except for maybe six movies at the video store, the rest is crap. And most books, it's the same. Crap. We could do better. We know all the basic plots. It's all been broken down by Joseph Campbell. By John Gardner. By E. B. White. Instead of wasting more time and money on another crappy book or movie, how about you take a stab at doing the job? I mean, why not?
Then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.
Okay, okay, so maybe we're headed down a road toward mindless, self-obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angles. Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer. Every funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the first opportunity.
A world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential.
Where a story no longer follows as the result of an experience.
Now the experience happens in order to generate a story.
Sort of like when you suggest: "Let's not but say we did."
The story-the product you can sell-becomes more important than the actual event.
One danger is, we might hurry through life, enduring event after event, in order to build our list of experiences. Our stock of stories. And our hunger for stories might reduce our awareness of the actual experience. In the way we shut down after watching too many action-adventure movies. Our body chemistry can't tolerate the stimulation. Or we unconsciously defend ourselves by pretending not to be present, by acting as a detached
Another danger is this rush through events might give us a false understanding of our own ability. If events occur to challenge and test us and we experience them only as a story to be recorded and sold, then have we lived? Have we matured? Or will we die feeling vaguely cheated and shortchanged by our storytelling vocation?
Already we've seen people use «research» as their defense for committing crimes. Winona Ryder shoplifting in preparation to play a character who steals. Pete Townsend visiting Internet kiddie-porn websites in order to write about his own childhood abuse.
Already our freedom of speech is headed for a collision with every other law. How can you write about a sadistic rapist «character» if you've never raped anybody? How can we create exciting, edgy books and movies if we only live boring, sedate lives?
The laws that forbid you to drive on the sidewalk, to feel the thud of people crumbling off the hood of your car, the crash of bodies shattering your windshield, those laws are economically oppressive. When you really think about it, restricting your access to heroin and snuff movies is a restriction of your free trade. It's impossible to write books, authentic books, about slavery if the government makes owning slaves illegal.
Anything "based on a true story" is more salable than fiction.
But, then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.
Of course, it's not all bad news.
There's the talk-therapy aspect to most writers' workshops.
There's the idea of fiction as a safe laboratory for exploring ourselves and our world. For experimenting with a persona or character and social organization, trying on costumes and running a social model until it breaks down.
There is all that.
One positive aspect is, maybe this awareness and recording will lead us to live more interesting lives. Maybe we'll be less likely to make the same mistakes again and again. Marry another drunk. Get pregnant, again. Because by now we know this would make a boring, unsympathetic character. A female lead Julia Roberts would never play. Instead of modeling our lives after brave, smart fictional characters-maybe we'll lead brave, smart lives to base our own fictional characters on.
Controlling the story of your past-recording and exhausting it-that skill might allow us to move into the future and write that story. Instead of letting life just happen, we could outline our own personal plot. We'll learn the craft we'll need to accept that responsibility. We'll develop our ability to imagine in finer and finer detail. We can more exactly focus on what we want to accomplish, to attain, to become.
You want to be happy? You want to be at peace? You want to be healthy?
As any good writer would tell you: unpack "happy." What does it look like? How can you demonstrate happiness on the page-that vague, abstract concept. Show, don't tell. Show me "happiness."
In this way, learning to write means learning to look at yourself and the world in extreme close-up. If nothing else, maybe learning how to write will force us to take a closer look at everything, to really see it-if only in order to reproduce it on a page.
Maybe with a little more effort and reflection, you can live the kind of life story a literary agent would want to read.
Or maybe… just maybe this whole process is our training wheels toward something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures. Our flood of books and movies-of plots and story arcs-they might be mankind's way to be aware of all our history. Our options. All the ways we've tried in the past to fix the world.
We have it all: the time, the technology, the experience, the education, and the disgust.
What if they made a movie about a war and nobody came?
If we're too lazy to learn history history, maybe we can learn plots. Maybe our sense of "been there, done that" will save us from declaring the next war. If war won't "play," then why bother? If war can't "find an audience." If we see that war
Then, finally, what if some writer comes up with an entirely new story? A new and compelling way to live, before…
Sorry, your seven minutes is up.
Demolition
They come over the hills, sacrifices on their way here to die.
Today is Friday, the thirteenth of June. Tonight the moon is full.
They come here covered in decorations. Painted pink and wearing huge pig snouts, their floppy pink pig ears towering against the blue sky. They come, done up with huge yellow bows made of painted plywood. They come, painted bright blue and costumed to look like giant sharks with dorsal fins. Or painted green and crowded with little space aliens standing around slant-eyed under a spinning silver radar dish and flashing colored strobe lights.