What makes you cry when you read a story? What makes you laugh? What makes you feel sorrow? Joy? Pride? Fear? Any feeling at all?
It is the way words are placed on the page. Words communicate ideas, images, sensations, realities. These are called word pictures. We use them to create moments in a story. If a story has no moment, it is like a joke with no punchline.
Good storytelling creates moments, and moments serve purposes. Even higher purposes than we know. Our stories are filled with awe and wonder. That is the reason we tell them. Life is not boring.
A Sense of Reality
When you read a story, you are looking at a painting, not a photograph. In other words, it is not reality — it’s a representation of reality. If a word picture rings true, you feel something. What you feel is a sense of reality. Not reality itself.
Don’t panic. This is a good thing.
Parallel Realities
It amazes me how people think about this. Many think if they just tell their story exactly the way it happened in every detail— mission accomplished. Not true. First of all, no one remembers an event exactly the way it happened.
Two people are watching a movie on an airplane. A truly funny comedy. One person is flying to a funeral. The other is going to a wedding. After the movie the person who has lost the loved one remembers the film as the most tasteless piece of trash they have ever seen. The other thought it was a total hoot. Both realities are true.
Human beings, without exception, distort reality based on their inner experience. Knowing this and accepting this will make you a better storyteller. It will also take you one step closer to the river.
Poetic License
The river is a tide of awe and wonder, not a trickle of facts and data. It flows with fluid realities bigger than you, and truths that completely engulf your limited point of view. Knowing this is essential to good storytelling.
So given human distortion, as storytellers, we use poetic license. That means we leave certain details out. And we paint other details more vividly so that the words create a moment, and the moment serves a purpose. The possibilities are endless.
One Step Forward
Take someone to a movie. A week later, when all first impressions have grown quiet, sit down alone and write the three most outstanding moments you remember from the film; 1, 2, 3. Then ask the other person to do the same. (Alone! This is not a time to edit someone else’s thoughts.)
Later, get together and have a cup of coffee. Compare and contrast your answers. This exercise can help you see how two realities can sit side by side in a theatre. It can also serve as a conversation starter that leads to deeper discoveries.
To be continued…
This is VERY helpful to me in understanding the workings of “parallel realities” and how to use them to broaden truth’s that come from two-way (or more) communication. We need not take offense to another persons perspective but rather accept it as their reality, Although I am not a writer per say, I am seeking ways to better my active listening skills and communication of my own thoughts. Surely there is a “right way and a wrong way to do and say anything”.
I am once again, looking forward to more on this subject.
I believe our story is neverending. Your story today is not your story tomorrow. Not if you are a living, growing person. That doesn’t mean there are no absolutes, but none of us understand them absolutely. We see through dark glasses. It is our perspective that changes.
Two thumbs up to this post for its brilliant insight into story-telling as well as human nature. If a storyteller/writer can adeptly gauge, understand and wield the two, I think that they can become quite the tools in his or her writing tool-belt.
Thanks, Bo. Much appreciated.