Never Walked In High Heels

What is it about watching a movie or seeing a play or reading a book where the story is completely new? There are archetypes, there always are, but on the whole, you don’t know what’s going to happen or how it’s going to end. It’s in these situations that the characters, I believe, are so unexpected they almost seem like real people and you get emotionally involved and invested until the credits roll and the last page turns.

Such stories are unique and becoming increasingly rare. Recently I went to a conference at BAFTA and they started spurting out the three act formulas and inciting incidents and lists of rules every story must have in order to fit the mold of a “good story.” It’s nothing new of course; Aristotle did the same thing thousands of years ago and his outline for what a “good story” needs to have hasn’t changed much, despite the plethora of books and essays written about the “good story.” It doesn’t matter what sort of media it is and how you interact with the story; the element’s are always there.

But when I sat through this two day long conference at BAFTA literally breaking down the moments piece by piece and wondering what they need to have, I began to get very bored. A good story doesn’t necessarily just have the basic elements; like anything else in life the elements have to create some sort of harmony where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You don’t taste the individual ingredients that go into a cake; you taste the entire cake. So it must be for a story. If you were to say that the climax is most certainly the climax, you’re suddenly ripped out of the world of the story and placed back into the classroom or worse, a science laboratory, which is never a good place to be.

What makes a new story great is that like life, you have no idea where it’s going and how it’s going to end. The level of tension in the defining moments build and build until you literally squirm in your seat. It’s a physical reaction as well as an emotional one which forces you to stay in the world of the story. Actually, this is what life is supposed to be. We don’t walk around saying “This individual didn’t have a father, therefore these psychological characteristics must create personality.”

Our lives are nothing if they are not first stories; and a good story, while you may not know where it goes and what roads it will take you down, still makes you feel like you are in good hands. Likewise in life the authors of the story, whether they be ourselves or something out there in the cosmos, must also give us some element of support and confidence that in the end it will work out for the best one way or another. And so looking backwards at our lives when we get to see our stories and the elements that builds off of each other to create ourselves today. We are an essence, a piece of artwork that takes years of creation in order to flourish and is constantly evolving.

An old teacher of mine once gave me some advice which I think was meant to guide my writing; instead it ended up guiding my life. On a piece of paper he wrote: “Spin life into a verse.”  It took me a while but I think he wanted me to make my life my own story. What he meant was I was to be understanding the elements and the building blocks individually and being grateful for where they landed. But as a whole, seeing life and living it as an irreplaceable and unrepeatable which is unique in itself. In this way, when I look at an original story of fiction, I cannot help but see myself and the one great story that is the story of us as an entire world within it.