"Story" as a model

I don't know if I ever expressed this before, but having seen a recent entry in kightp's journal, I figured I'd throw this in to the mix.

It took me a long time, especially in my writing, to understand the notion of a story.

A story is not what happened. A story is a *representation* of what happened, in a way that the reader/listener/watcher *understands* the story.

Watch an action movie. Ask yourself how many times a single wrong move, a single wrong guess, a single moment's hesitation, or a single momement's lack of hesitation would have ended the movie.

Well, those are all ways of saying "It was scary, at that moment" or "it was a difficult situation to get out of, but the protagonist(s) got out of it".

I later imagined a real-life version of the character Indiana Jones (i.e.: pretend Indy really lived, and Harrison Ford was playing a biographical role) seeing the "Temple of Doom" movie, and saying "And you know that mine car scene? We were actually in the mine car for a much shorter time. And, we didn't jump a large gap in the tracks; we just hit a really bad section of rail, and it's a miracle that we didn't derail; I swear we actually were airborne for a moment. But, while it's a little overblown, it's a darn good way of expressing how it *felt*."

I don't know if it's weird or not, but realizing this really improved my enjoyment of fiction. I mean, it's *fiction*, right? But the lack of certain bits of realism annoyed me sometimes, until I realized I could look at it as a model, a representation, of what "really" happened in the fictional world.

In other words, I could enjoy fiction by pretending it was fiction about fiction.

Herm. Maybe I should skip the part about "I don't know if it's weird" :-)

"Story" as a model

I don't know if I ever expressed this before, but having seen a recent entry in kightp's journal, I figured I'd throw this in to the mix.

It took me a long time, especially in my writing, to understand the notion of a story.

A story is not what happened. A story is a *representation* of what happened, in a way that the reader/listener/watcher *understands* the story.

Watch an action movie. Ask yourself how many times a single wrong move, a single wrong guess, a single moment's hesitation, or a single momement's lack of hesitation would have ended the movie.

Well, those are all ways of saying "It was scary, at that moment" or "it was a difficult situation to get out of, but the protagonist(s) got out of it".

I later imagined a real-life version of the character Indiana Jones (i.e.: pretend Indy really lived, and Harrison Ford was playing a biographical role) seeing the "Temple of Doom" movie, and saying "And you know that mine car scene? We were actually in the mine car for a much shorter time. And, we didn't jump a large gap in the tracks; we just hit a really bad section of rail, and it's a miracle that we didn't derail; I swear we actually were airborne for a moment. But, while it's a little overblown, it's a darn good way of expressing how it *felt*."

I don't know if it's weird or not, but realizing this really improved my enjoyment of fiction. I mean, it's *fiction*, right? But the lack of certain bits of realism annoyed me sometimes, until I realized I could look at it as a model, a representation, of what "really" happened in the fictional world.

In other words, I could enjoy fiction by pretending it was fiction about fiction.

Herm. Maybe I should skip the part about "I don't know if it's weird" :-)