Storied Introspection

Don Miller seems to have turned into a motivational speaker/event organizer, building a whole philosophy around the idea that what makes a good story might just make a good life.  Don says, if your life wouldn't make a good story, change it so it would.  Make it a story people would be interested in, and make yourself a character with goals people can care about.  I don't enjoy this new Don very much, but I suspect he's grown up and is doing great things for a whole lot of people. Other people who aren't me.

   I teach English at the high school level, and I see the worth in that idea Don puts forth at his Storyline conference.  I do think, however, that in most respects, the whole point of a story, be it TV, movies, video game or book, is that it's not happening to you.  Not really.  There's a buffer.  You experience it, but only second hand. 
   I think that middle area, having an experience, but safely removed, is why people like stories, and what makes them work.  Even when someone's telling you a true story that happened to him.  You experience it.  Only second hand, though.

I know it is traditional for English teachers to present the adorable idea that the reason we have stories is to learn valuable lessons about human nature, or suggest that they are mainly artistic inventions to analyse.  A teacher of this kind will look at important lessons these stories can teach us and messages that they may be vehicles for.  "What powerful message does this story have to tell us about the power of empathy?"   They delight in counting instances of vivid floral imagery, in looking at how prettied up the stories are with "icing" like symbols, foreshadowing and similes.  They want to bask in the "richness" of heavy-handedly descriptive language.
   I think the authors would be spinning in their graves.  That supposedly deep people are focussing on the icing, and claiming it's the point.  I don't think that's why the stories exist at all.  I don't think they're "for" that.  I want to see how the stories are made, and why they are, and what they do.  Mostly in terms of what makes people connect to the stories.  (and I don't think it's the floral symbolism, or sea imagery, nor important lessons to be learned, or scintillating themes presented insightfully therein.)

I grew up reading books incessantly.  I "rode" those stories all over the place.  My own life, especially as a child, wasn't terribly inspiring. It was very bounded and limited.  So I travelled with stories. I was blissfully unaware of any of the stuff that English teachers would perhaps have argued, is so important to stories.  And I didn't miss any of it one bit.

I can't help but notice that what we "want" in a story, is very much the opposite of what we want in real life.  In real life, in the course of our afternoon we most want comfort, nothing major happening, no serious problems or troubles and no sudden changes of fortune.  In a story though, we love it when the main character loses everything and is put through the wringer.  Because stories aren't happening to us.  That's why we read them.  To have an adventure.  To survive an ordeal.  Second hand.  Not riding on a pony in the rain with a bunch of smelly dwarves and no pocket handkerchief.  Just imagining all that, safely on the futon, with Kleenex right there in the same room.  With work the next day.  For greedy dragons who never will be slain.

   So I think the most important thing about stories is that they can be far more interesting than we want our actual lives to ever get.  They can get crazy intense.  And that's just fine with us, because they're not real.  Where a wardrobe, closet, ring or door can be an ordinary, boring thing in our life, a story presents the only imagined possibility of these everyday things launching one into a horrible, challenging, danger-filled world filled with risk and possible death.  I mean, the Death Star, Mordor, a myriad castles of powerful, evil people in Narnia, Middle Earth or wherever?  We love to visit them in stories, when it's all second hand.  Because it's safely not happening to us.  Which is best, I think you'll agree.

   Don Miller points out that a story is "someone wanting something, and overcoming obstacles to try to achieve it."  That's a nice definition, in all senses of the word.  It's very simple.  It's up on my classroom wall. I think a lot of English teachers are forgetting to actually study that with the kids, though. You know?  What a story is.  Too busy counting motifs and pointing out personification to unheeding juvenile illiterates.

   Thing is, I believe very strongly that we all use story every day.  We craft it.  Over and over, in our daily lives, whether we're trying to explain the origin of the universe, or defend ourselves to a police officer, judge, spouse or parent, or when we're trying to understand where our country comes from, what actually happened during a war or more natural disaster, or when we're talking to a doctor or shrink, we package all that life up into a story.  And to understand it (and share it with others), our life becomes a collection of stories.  Because until we package it all up as stories, it's just an overwhelming, unprocessed pile of seemingly disconnected, apparently chaotic facts.  Something we don't have any perspective on, nor could we share any of it with anyone else.  So we story it up.  Before we do, a psychiatrist would probably argue, when something bad has happened to us, we don't really have any idea what's happened to us, or even that it's bad, really.  The storymaking process is about deciding what's what.  And the same structure, the same skeleton that makes fictional, adventure stories work, is what is required when making stories of our real life stuff.  A person wanting something and overcoming obstacles to try to achieve it.
   So we go through it all, weed out some of it and perhaps underline, highlight, exaggerate or even kind of add some bits, and we sequence it, connect dots, draw similarities and distinctions, and the resulting story makes us feel like we know what's going on.  We call it "making sense of it all."  And we do that by making the stories of it.
   That's what I teach in my English classes.  That we all make stories.  To seemingly make sense of otherwise random, chaotic things.  That we need to.  To cope.

One person said that, no matter how imaginatively one writes, really, it's all just a retelling of one's own thoughts, views, experiences and life.  So, when a man is writing about some crazy planet, or a magical kingdom, or a failing marriage, if you know how to look, he's really pouring himself, his life, into it.  You're reading him.
   That's what they say.  And I think there's some truth to that.

   I find that, when left to my own devices, as I am far too often (I am cursed with leisure), I find myself sorting through and trying to make sense of my life.  The more life I've lived, the more sorting it seems to need.  The more connections can be drawn.  So I storify it in various ways.  Seems repetitive and narcissistic, even to me.  But it works.  I feel stuff start to come unhinged when I go too long without processing what's been going on, and joining it in with the past stuff.  So, like most people, when I've been alone for a long time, and then meet someone who'll listen, I tell them stuff.  Stories.
   Right now, making videos of past stuff reconnects me to all that me, and every time I do, I find I gain a more solid understanding, grounding and feeling of resolution regarding it all.  And I suspect many people let their past follow them around, biting them in the ass repeatedly, pretending that the past obediently stays safely in the past.  Like "the past" is stored in a cardboard box of dusty stuff that would never show up for you to trip over this afternoon.  Or like the past is, somehow, gone?
  People tell me they think I need to "get over" my past.  I feel like I am.  In my own way.  By engaging it.  Dissecting it.  By repackaging and sorting it.  Making sense of it.  Making it into what Chuck Palahniuk might call "100% story."  Viewing the present and immediate future in terms of it.  Viewing my past life in terms of what I know now.  Letting past experiences inform what I'm currently doing.

   One of the things I noticed when editing my video footage this week, was that my life has very obvious "chapters."  And I realized that I consciously didn't want them to be over, most times.  I didn't want certain characters to leave.  But they were over and people did leave.  But then there was more.

   And in the middle of each life "chapter," if you had asked me "Is God blessing you?" (atheists: read "Is your life going well?") I would almost certainly say "Not really.  Not mostly.  Not yet."

   Thing is, if you line up the life chapters in order and look at them at all, each one is clearly an improvement on the previous ones.  There is an arc.  The wins, and the problems and heartbreaks are bigger as the chapters go on.  Like in any story, by the middle I am handling more, because I can handle more.  And like any story, if I do this, my life suddenly seems headed somewhere.  Seems to be continuing.  Building and going on into the future.  The past shows me that there is a future.  That the present is going there.

   So why would I be sad because I haven't already ended the story and achieved all the tasks/beat all the bosses/completed all the levels?  That's dumb.  But still...

   Looking at all the past chapters of my life, indulging in cataloguing the apparently endless parade of cold, empty, backstabbing crap and inevitable eventual drama/abandonment/death that seems to have characterized most of my human interactions?  It has had a very unexpected, odd effect:
   It has made me see growth.  It has made me feel like I am better than I was.  It has made me feel blessed.  It has made me feel like God knows what He's doing, and that it's all Working Out.
   It's Working Out.  Huh...

   Weird, right?  Now go tell your life as a series of stories.  I want to hear it.