Science me up a story

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, storytelling, writing, scientific approach

"You can't catch fish with a straight pin." This Evangelical trope about Gospel preaching applies to all storytelling. A fish hook has a bent end and a barb. Author and educator Will Storr writes in The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better that the way our brains work makes us pay attention to stories that hook us and then snag us, while we're bored with what I would call "straight pin" narratives.

There are reasons the ancient Five-Act Play model of telling a story works so well. Author Storr tries to explain them to us. In the process he gets into the metaphysics of how an "I" emerges from the brain in its dark and silent box, the skull. Of course, bereft of communication with "the outside", a brain could do nothing but cogitate on whatever might occupy its memory materials. He tells how the product of all our senses is a "hallucination" (his word) that is a rough map of "the outside". In this conceptual world built of our sense impressions, we are the hero of a continually-running play. We can't abide not being the hero, so change is threatening.

The key to story is that stories are about change. If nothing changes there is no story to tell. Stories that catch our interest, that grip us, that move us, are about changes in persons caused by changes in their circumstances coupled with their reactions thereto, particularly when their control methods fail.

For example, most of us know how to handle a rainy day. We look outside, see that rain is falling, so we take an umbrella, a raincoat, perhaps galoshes, and we're usually good to go. We leave early so we won't be late, because we know getting somewhere will take longer in the rain. Now suppose what we see out the window is no ordinary rainstorm, but a historic hurricane, with torrential rainfall in the three-inch-per-hour range and hundred-mph winds. And we absolutely, positively, somebody-will-die-if-we-don't, need to go somewhere. I don't own appropriate gear to venture into such a storm, which would need to include a car that will stay on the road in those conditions. But what if you simply can't go, and somebody really does die as a result. Now what? Do you berate yourself? Commit hara-kiri? Blow it off with an "Oh, well, things happen" attitude? If we have just described Act I and Act II of a 5-Act story, the next three acts will follow a person who changes, or one who does not change, as a result of the foregoing action.

We are resistant to change, particularly change to who we are and how we want to be perceived. We typically can't endure the thought of being seen as "bad." When a big enough change occurs, even a tragedy, it's hard for anyone to come out a true hero.

My wife and I and a dozen others were seriously affected when a close friend and his wife and children died in a carbon monoxide gas poisoning event in their home. Everyone was badly shaken. Some blamed themselves, except among them, nobody (other than my wife and I) even knew that carbon monoxide existed. Some got angry at God, "for letting it happen." Some learned from it and others walled it all off inside themselves. Of the 14 of us, my wife and I and three others did the inside work, the spiritual work, to learn and even gain something valuable from the experience. The rest soon "vanished into the woodwork." None of us 14 knew initially how to cope with such a tragedy. The coping skills we had were inadequate or were dramatically unhelpful. We had to grow and to change…or to decline to do so.

Someone could have written 14 stories about the extended event, or a 14-part story. I could not do so. Having read the book, and having done my best to pay attention, I realized I don't have the right personality or skills to actually craft such a story. I'm a straight-pin kind of man; if I had read this book fifty years ago, perhaps I could have incorporated the author's work into my skill set, but these things take time to learn effectively.

Mr. Storr calls his work "The Sacred Flaw Approach". We are all flawed. Our inadequate coping skills are examples of such flaws. What worked before isn't useful in the new situation. Good stories show us a flawed person, let us observe them in action, bring them into a new situation (often with the opening sentence), let us observe their failure, and then show us how they either permit themselves to change, or deny the change.

When I have counseled others who are struggling to cope, I've told them the definition of a neurosis: a defense or coping mechanism that is out of date. One woman asked, "Am I neurotic, then?" I said, "In that sense we all are." And I remember what the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, "Be transformed by the renewing of the mind." This is the meaning of "repentance," a change of mind. It happens to be just about the hardest thing anyone can do. It was no "easy believe" gospel that Jesus proclaimed, when His first word was "Repent." So the kind of stories that this book analyzes come down to practical repentance when the old ways stop working…or to failure to repent.

The book's four chapters, and 40 sub-chapters, discuss all the pieces. The extended Appendix details a kind of recipe for the 5-Act story, and uses the book The Godfather by Mario Puzo to brilliantly show how it fits that formula (the film is simplified and takes a sidestep, which actually enhances the story's power). One could have as easily used Jurassic Park; a colleague of mine many years ago had been the college roommate of Michael Crichton, who at that time was building his skills and methods for writing, and he told some of us the formula Crichton used for his books.

So we are all control freaks, and when our control methods fail, we may grow or we may descend into depression and obscurity, the true opposite of a happy ending. The best stories, according to Will Storr, tell of someone who is faced with such a transition, however it may turn out.

Living the story

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, storytelling

Don Miller wrote a book, mainly about his own experiences, which was well written and was published. Some time later he heard from two guys, Steve and Ben, who wanted to make a movie based on the book. Once Don had been induced to collaborate, the three began to write the screenplay. Don was surprised to learn that his life was actually boring, and needed quite a bit of "punching up" to make a movie people would want to see. He began to learn about Story. An early turning point was the day he realized, "My entire life had been designed to make myself more comfortable, to insulate myself from the interruption of my daydreams." (p 77)

So what is the trouble with daydreams? Nobody can see them. They cannot be filmed. Though dream sequences have made it into celluloid, a whole film of dream sequences simply won't sell. The impresarios convinced Don that the story line of his book needed a lot of work to become a Story. Don began his pursuit of understanding, what is Story?

Along the way, he realized how boring and pointless his life was. He was living a bad story. How to live a good story? He began to live with more intentionality. As he edited his memoir to make a better story, he began to edit his life. The process makes up the meat of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life. In the book's five parts, he moves from being a non-character in a non-story to A Character Who Wants Something and Overcomes Conflict to Get It. That phrase embodies Story.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? At the root, there are only four stories: the character succeeding and liking the result; the character succeeding and not liking the result; the character failing but growing up; and the character failing and going into oblivion. What underlies all of them, like the turtle under the four elephants of Hindu cosmology, is the transformation of the character. Without that transformation, there is no Story. The big "conflict" for Don was riding a bicycle with 15 companions from the Pacific to the Atlantic, but that is not his full Story, it is but one story making up a part of the whole.

Two things changed for Donald Miller, in a big way, as he was transformed by living new stories in his pursuit of Story. Firstly, his habits changed and he became someone he liked better than the "himself" he had been before. Secondly, his relationship with God grew closer and more profound. He realized we really do need to take God's way, that God has wisdom we don't have. But not like God is some dictator; rather, he writes, "God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help." (author's emphasis; p 247)

Ah, there was the rub. He hadn't been very good in the "take somebody with you" department. One of his trial stories involved pursuing a woman he'd come to like. Though the effort finally failed, he learned something about relationships. And he sums it up in the experience of a couple he got to know, "Neither needed the other to make everything okay. They were simply content to have good company through life's conflicts." (p 205) It is the purely human side of the prior statement.

Naturally, such a book causes a bit of introspection. What of my own story? I realized that, after a couple of false starts, I haven't done badly. The editing of my own life is exemplified in my choices of life companions. Early on, I went for excitement and self-gratification. That flamed out within thirty months. After more than thirty months of recovery and reflection, I chose someone based on faithfulness and steadiness, and now, 35 years later, I am well pleased with the result. My wife and I both count ourselves lucky, even blessed. I could elaborate more, but the foundation of all else is our faithfulness to one another and to God.

Some of the things Don Miller has done are comparatively great, such as the Mentoring Project he founded. As a result, he is on a Presidential task force (Fatherhood and Healthy Families). May his talents always match his challenges.

What I tell you three times...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, storytelling

Telling stories is the most human of human activities. Even autistic people tell stories (those who are capable of speech). In a disorderly, chaotic world, stories make the meaningless meaningful, the chaotic orderly, and the confusing sensible. We use stories to amuse ourselves and others, to "one-up" rivals, and ultimately to define who we are.

As a professor of American Culture and a practiced storyteller (both print and performance), Bruce Jackson is well suited to "look under the covers" of stories and storytelling in his book The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories.

As I began to read the book, I wondered if it might ruin stories for me. I remembered once, walking with a lady friend: as we passed a particularly lush lawn I noted that it was all crabgrass. I told this to my friend, stating that a grass that is so strong might as well be used for lawns; it thrived better than all our "bought" grasses. She scowled and said, "I thought it was real pretty until you said that."

Dr. Jackson delves into stories in three areas: Personal, Public, and "Too Good to be True" (but we accept them anyway).

We all tell stories, all the time. When my wife and I tell each other how our day went, we're condensing a confusing scramble of little-related events into two or three "bullet points" that meant something to us: we're telling stories. When a friend asks how my son is doing at college, most of my reply is in story form. When something amusing happens, I or a friend will recall a similar incident, highlighting the recitation to display the similarity, often with an amusing twist.

Are our stories true? Never, and always. Here is one I've told when instructing young spelunkers on the first principle of caving/climbing safety, "It IS possible to get into something you can't get out of":

My Dad sometimes took me hiking in the desert. Once, when I was 12, we took different paths. I would up climbing a cliff, until I got to a point where I couldn't go up, and could not see how to get back down. I was ~30 feet up. When he found me, he told me, step by step, what foot to move in what direction to find footholds so I could descend safely.

It is a true story, but I leave out a lot of details, such as that I hollered for a while, or the gray color of Dad's face when he caught sight of me.

Sometimes we read or hear a story and appropriate it, such as this one I have told a few times:

My family dined at Chinese restaurants a lot. I learned to use chop sticks very young. Once, right after we began eating, a waitress looked at us a moment, then dashed to the back of the restaurant. She returned with two small Chinese children, and said, "See, they eat with chop sticks!"

This could have happened to us, but it didn't. I read it in a Reader's Digest in the 1970s. But I've used it as though...Did I lie? Strictly speaking, yes. It is harder to say whether the rock-climbing story is wholly truthful because of all that I leave out. To this day (I am 60 now), Asians are amused and often remark on my skill with chop sticks. In a certain sense, then, the restaurant story is still happening.

Public stories are a more collective effort. The author dwells for a chapter and a half (and parts of others) on the story of O.J. Simpson's murder trial and the very public drama so many spent a year of their lives upon. The whole truth will never be told in full (unless someone gets to the murderer with a syringe of pentothal). But the story, a collaboration between the police, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, OJ, the victims' families, journalists, broadcasters and a hugely willing public, lives on and is still morphing this way and that, in two versions, a black one and a white one. On this stage, the race tensions of the mid-1990s were played out (By the way, I find it refreshing that, less than fifteen years later, Barack Obama is a serious contender for President. Things do change).

But OJ is not the only megastory of these times. Jackson discusses whether Bob Dylan was booed at Newport, the archetypical hero embodied in the Lone Ranger, the need to "break the mold" for some stories to be told, and the euphemisms public (and not-so-public) figures use to distance themselves from responsibility for the consequences of the stories they find themselves enacting: "Mistakes were made", or "Events resulted in the officer dying" (this by the officer's murderer).

The penultimate chapter chronicles a truly inventive imposter and the widespread fraud he perpetrated on the author and others. He was such a charming raconteur, that even those who knew he was lying let it continue for quite a while, until he got so far out on a limb nobody could keep silent any more.

Ultimately, while "the story [of our own life] is true," none of us can ever tell the whole truth—it would take longer in the telling than in the living. Somehow, most of us recognize the boundary between the lies we have to tell and those we don't. The "real liars" help us define that boundary.