So Few People Own Their Own Stories.

It’s a claim I made a few posts back and I wanted to talk about what I meant.

I think to own your story, you have to tell stories.

Good news: anecdotal party banter does encourage such telling. BS sessions which fall under the general headings:

“remember the time when…”

and

“you think that that’s bad!…”

are, I think, one of the great vestiges of oral culture left threading through humanity. I think that this tradition is great – it fits in well with deipnosphistai (below). I’ll wager that if you know someone who you would say – “So-and-so is a great storyteller.” – that they are experts in the two genres mentioned above.

So my complaint is not that these stories are bad (again, they’re GOOD!) but that they’re insufficient.

Somehow we relish opportunities to swap these stories (which generally affirm collectively held values, demarcate micro-cultural boundaries, and reinforce shared criteria for evaluating humor / art / performance) – but turn to the movies or novels or church or the newspaper – to hear stories that raise and answer the bigger questions of meaning and morality.

We lack, it seems, opportunities to tell our stories.

And in some ways, I think, maybe its okay that we don’t always tell our dark stories to just anyone or to everyone. Most of us tell these stories to a few people and that’s hard enough as it is.

But there’s a middle ground. Another place. A point-of-view, a way-of-seeing, a way-of-being – which both enables us to tell the big stories, but also preserves the delicacy of intimacy and the dangers of disclosure. It’s called:

Fiction.

I’m convinced that honing your skills as a creator of fiction is a way to own your own Story. And your own stories.

Are you skeptical? Delighted? Nonplussed at my rantings? There’s only one good response to reading this blog. Use your imagination and tell one fiction story today. To someone. See what happens to you….

Peace~