Pursuing Story, Pursuing Truth

"Wanna go see (insert latest movie craze)??"
"No, sorry, I'm already working through (insert popular TV show)...."
"Oh, have you read (insert literary phenomenon)?"

In our culture, we pursue story. Constantly we have new stories put before us in a whole range of formats. We can even interact with story without actively working towards it. Say, for instance, that you don't go see a movie. You still might interact with an ad for toothpaste with a smiling girl and boy on one another's arm. The reason the ad appeals is because there is a story (girl and boy finding one another through a mutual love of obsessive dental care) and because there is the promise that said story could become yours.

TV shows provide us distraction, but they also tell us that reality can be different than the one in which we live. Movies teach us that, somewhere, your prince or princess really is waiting, and when you finally meet, you will be the best french-kissers in the world. Books make us privy to people who not only act differently, but who think differently and reason differently.

Why do we pursue these stories though? I suggest there are predominantly two reasons, one detrimental, one necessary.

The first reason we pursue stories different from our own personal narrative is to assuage the dissatisfaction we feel about our own narrative. We are not all James Bond (which might be a good thing). We do not all flop in a fantastically funny way like Cameron Diaz when the character she plays makes a mistake. No, we have 9 to 5 jobs, we have angst-y problems that can barely be put into words let alone a widescreen, we have normal talents and normal complexion.

But we would like to fly. We would like it to be possible at the least, and immersing ourselves in a story tells us that it is. If it is possible for another, then maybe this world isn't so hum-drum as it might appear. If it is possible for another, then maybe it is possible for us too.

Yet pursuit of story as motivated this way is dangerous, because it is fundamentally rooted in our dissatisfaction with our current status. From the page or screen or print, we then learn what difference would truly make us happy, but we also learn that we do not have that. In some cases, we never can. Thus, the dissatisfaction continues in a vicious cycle that turns us to stories to give us hope, but, because our initial action was founded on despair, we find only the same.

Instead, then, I propose a healthy means to pursue stories. Stories present the other, someone different from us. We must engage with the other because, if we do not, we are trapped inside an insular ring of our own making, constructed of thoughts and biases that we will not even be able to see as such.

Most people act in ways that they deem to be right in some way. If you think it will be tasty for you to eat a bowl of ice cream, you will. If you think it would be dangerous to run across the street without marking the traffic, but you also have an urge to be daring and a sense that being daring will bring you pleasure, you will proceed across. However, what if you are wrong?

If I think the sky is green, I am wrong. However, if I never allow anyone else's testimony to intrude upon my view point, I will never learn that I am wrong. In this example, it would not be exceptionally detrimental to go on thinking that the sky is green for the rest of my life. Someone's thinking that murder is a positive social mandate, however, could go awry much faster.

It is here that we much rely on an inter-subjective awareness, which can only be communicated through inter-personal relations. We cannot, ever, get outside our subjective bias. Even the attempt to do so would reflect a subjective bias. However, we can compare our set of subjective biases to the subjective biases of another, and another, and so on, until we reach what is the common conception operated on as truth. For example, if I start hearing someone calling my name, and someone else hears it too, I would assume that I am truly hearing someone calling my name, and I will respond accordingly. If, however, no one else hears what I hear, we will assume that I am going crazy. Thus we must have open airways of communication between people, such that we can get to a greater understanding of operative truth.

In pursuing stories then, we pursue truth. We pursue a greater range of subjective lenses such that we can gather them up and evaluate both our truth and the truth presented. We pursue the other, validate the other, and, by acknowledging the general and nonspecific value of another, equally validate ourselves for the same general and nonspecific reasons.

We pursue story for two reasons, one detrimental, one beneficial. Choose wisely.

Flash (or fake) Fiction?

What is a story?

What makes a piece of writing something that stirs you and churns you and spits you out, but you're happy for the experience and would do it again?

Maybe it's length. Write a certain number of words, a certain number of pages, and you've got a story on your hands. But that can't be right, because then any rambling could be a story, which doesn't reserve enough status for those truly inspired and inspiring pieces. Besides, there is now not only the novel, the novella, the novelette, and the short story, but there are even smaller forms like flash fiction, microfiction, dribble, drabble, and hint fiction. It's a bunch of terms, I know, and there's no one set definition between these the shorter forms. Suffice it to say that, as a catch-all phrase, flash fiction can be anywhere from a 6 word story to an 2,500 word vignette.

"For sale, baby shoes, never worn." Is that a story? Careful with your answer; that sentence has been attributed to Ernest Hemingway. But even great writers can make mistakes. They can overextend or overestimate their abilities. Is this what Hemingway was doing?

I believe that for anything to count as story, it must have a character interacting, whether by action or  reaction, with an object, which may be another person, a world, an idea, a situation, or more. Typically for novels, there is emphasis on character change or development, but I have removed it from the list of necessities because, since flash fiction is shorter, I think it can only show that a character has the potential to change. In this way then, for story to be story, it must present character interaction and character potential; dependent on the form is the fact of whether or not character potential must be taken to actuality.

So now it's your turn to judge. What really makes a story? To make your job easier, to move you from the abstract to the concrete, what about these?

           -(no title)

                Fighting with what she could, crying, she struck him just as hard. (12 words)

          -America the better

                He looked at him incredulous and asked, "Do I look like the kind of man who, if I had a doughnut, would still have a doughnut?" (26 words)

         -Trade

                The wind slapped her face and the desire reared within her, to take the wild horses and strap them down, hurt them with her whips, and make herself as wild as the temper she would work out of them. (39 words)

So, what's your call?