"Story" as a model

[johnpalmer]

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" :-)

Comments

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Good fiction does the same thing. It selects and heightens and focuses in ways that most of us don't do in our daily lives, and if it does it well, we don't just understand the story, we believe it.

This is exactly the point you made about answering the phone happy when you are getting sad news and vice versa.