Story illustrates life issues
The theme of an involving story
illustrates life but also idealizes it.
In reading a published memoir the teacher liked in memoir-writing
class I read the damn thing to see what the teacher and students
thought was a good memoir.
The memoir was written by a sister whose loved brother killed
himself at age fifteen.
She used words well to describe her thoughts and feelings, and some
of the actions that her parents did around the event, and even some
of what the brother had been like.
She set the memoir task to sort of solve why her brother committed
suicide. She didn’t have a clue and never arrived at a solution.
All this sister writer could describe in her memoir is what she
experienced after the event, and also that three years later she
had suicidal fantasies.
So what are we reading here when we read about this real life
memoir event?
Did the memoir come alive for me, the reader, as if it were my own
brother or sister killing themselves, of which I have no direct
experience because I have no brother or sister?
The memoir did not come alive for me.
Why?
Possibly because a memoir is not simply describing real life events
and even the interior thoughts of the memoirist who lived through
those events.
A memoir, like a novel, should
be told as a story, not as a real life event.
A memoir is the re-telling of
life events as an imaginative and fictive real life story.
A memoir is a story and not a
life event.
People get involved with dramatic stories. They do not get nearly
involved in even good descriptions of life events.
The write of In Cold Blood, the supposed real life story
of two criminals who killed a family of five people and were
eventually tried in court and executed.
This same author had written a first book that became highly
successful about a young beautiful and filtrate friend.
He was asked if he made up any of what his two murderers said and
did when interacting with him when he visited them in prison for
long visits.
Did the author of In Cold Blood partially set up the story
we was writing about? Did he set up the two murderers to tell him
things by giving them hope they would not be executed?
Just as Einstein had realized that when a scientist and his
instruments measure a phenomena the mere act of measuring alters
the results enough that you cannot get a true measurement of an
external process.
So the answer is yes. Truman Capote to have the murderers creating
story for him by the way he interacted with them and the way they
interacted with him.
Fascinating Truman Capote was a story-maker-teller. He might start
as an objective researcher getting the full story of two murderers
murdering and yet by his presence and interaction he is altering
their life stories and thus creating more dramatic story to tell
than he would otherwise have had.
Thus Capote had his researcher visit the mother of one of the
murderers and report back to her son what she said and why she
would not see him.
Thus was Capote criticized for creating story at the same time he
was telling it.
Capote was smart. He created the first factual fiction, he said. He
would investigate fact and re-tell it accurately as a story using
the writing tools used in fiction.
Yes, but in the process Capote became very much the third character
of the book after the two central characters, the murderers.
The fact creates fiction and fictions create facts.
As in The Writer’s
Interface approach we are giving the craft ideas and tools
to use the above dictum as the basis for your writing.
Facts create fiction and fiction creates facts.
Make sure that your story-telling will create facts, create
life-changes in the lives of your readers.
Make sure that the life themes and events of your readers get woven
in in parallel into the stories you produce for your readers.
One major way of doing this is to take the real life issues of your
real life readers and viewers and dramatize these issues as
conflict battles around key life themes, such as from rags to
riches, parent dying young, teenager brother committing suicide, a
weak husband becoming strong under threat of a rival for his wife’s
affections.
Make it matter. Take a real life theme that is significant and
dramatize it.
One publisher friend of mine gave me a novel to read that did not
sell at all. I think its title was My Life As A Dog. My
friend wanted me to read it as a novelty.
Not bad, actually. I did get the impression of how a human
mentality in a dog’s body might feel in a number of life
situations.
However, this was not a great story in itself. It had not life
theme.
When Kafka has Gregor wake up as a giant cockroach that his parents
now have trouble dealing with, as does he himself, then that is
real story developing.
Life themes here illustrated by Kafka:
- the universal sense of being controlled and limited by our natural limitations
- the universal sense of waking up and ones self and reality has radically changed
- the universal sense of having difficulty coping with who one actually is, or even knowing who one actually is
- the universal difficulty of having other react to you they way you want
- the universal difficulty of having others understand you as you understand yourself, instead of having to deal with others projecting onto you their own images and limitations.
This is six universal life themes that plague all human beings with any self-awareness at all.
The difference between Kafka the writer and a sociologist or psychologist is that these scientific people present and go about evidence gathering to support their conclusions in a rather dry and careful way.
Kafka, the writer, uses and unique and imaginative literary device, the transposing of character from normal to abnormal, to dramatize at least six universal life themes.
Kafka takes a new and startling image to dramatically make metaphors of a real life situation.
The French impressionist painter, Monet, had a special garden lake built with a Japanese style bridge built so he could paint this scene over and over.
Here the French painter created outer life to stimulate him to create the story-telling of art using the painters impressionist craft tools.
When we meditate with his paintings we experience a most wonderful and beautiful scene full of light a nature’s fertility. It is an illusion of course. What we actually see is dabs of paint.
The Impressionist painter has given us the chance to experience the essence of outer reality by replicating it in paint on canvas. This painter sometimes painted very big canvases that covered a whole wall.
Was he creating a reality within a reality?
First he has special gardeners create a most beautiful actual garden lake, still existing to this day.
Then he paints smaller canvas impressions that are self-existent ideal reality portraits in themselves, made complete by the organizing powers of the human mind.
Now he goes even further to create a whole environment on a canvas so large that it fits the size of an actual view of his artificial pond but it is still an illusion, only dabs of paint on a giant canvas.
For the story-teller writer then you must be part magician. You must alter the environment of what you are dramatizing.
Steven Seagal broke the wrist of the James Bond character when he was teaching him martial arts. Seagal has broken bones of some of his fighter-stuntmen also.
Seagal does not always know if he is acting out a fictive character or a real life human being martial artist.
That’s the point. A good martial artist is fighting within the form but it is a real fight of sorts on the dojo mat, at least for advanced students, of which I was one.
Thus have we described here important points on how story theme must be dramatized in such a way to illustrate real life issues and experiences.
You are not much of a writer if you do not also live out in actual life your story themes.
Now Norman Mailer had a first novel success because he wrote up his war experiences in combat as a novel. He did not factually describe. He created story lines to carry the descriptions of place, time, event, action.
However, Mailer never succeeded again in creating great fiction. He even tried to write a Jesus novel as if he was Jesus speaking a first person Jesus.
Mailer failed to realize that he, the boozing, head-butting party-catcher New York celebrity, was not Jesus.
Mailer like Monet, tried to take the pond he himself created and paint it into as much life as it had in outer life.
Mailer created himself as a main character in New York Life but failed to create great characters of literature. He was confused. He failed to get the relation between fictive writing and real life living.
We certainly hope that in The Writer’s Interface we do give you the ideas and tools to create in dramatic fashion the merging of real life and fictive life.
With the emergence of modern electronic gaming we question if such addictions are ruining the natural story-telling imagination of creative, intelligent human beings or enhancing such a potentially rich capacity.
It’s too soon to tell, of course.
What would it be like to master all the tools of The Writer’s Interface. This author certainly has not mastered these tools yet though he knows about most of them.
