Story: Nobody Cares About Middle Ground

As I mentioned before I’m completely engrossed in Robert McKee’s book Story. It is so loaded with profound observations and information on the nature of story --- of what story is --- that I feel I could write a blog about every page. I am proceeding slowly because there is so much to digest. And I am underlining and marking pages and … well, you get the picture.

One of the wise observations he makes is that the nature of story relies on the extremes of human reality. Nobody much cares about the middle ground of experience. Naturally it is the ability of an author to set those extremes in a highly believable and familiar setting that makes the extremes plausible to the reader. So authors seek that balance --- a familiar environment as the setting for extreme behaviors. As McKee says: A believable impossibility is more satisfying as a story than an unbelievable possibility. Wise words.

Yesterday a wrote a little story for some cyber-acquaintances about a situation that has been the subject of an on-going conflict for much too long. In recent months I have tried to avoid it but I decided to deal with it by concocting a story based somewhat on the truth and post it. Basically, the characters, setting, and situation is true but, because I am a writer, the telling of the tale veered into the extreme, mostly to add humor, drama, and entertainment. I used myself as the butt of the joke at the end and then I hurled it out into the world for all to see. The results were interesting but not surprising.

I was talking to a fellow writer last night who is also a teacher. He writes historical novels based on his areas of interest as a history teacher. He was complaining about his students and he said that he is beginning to believe that kids spend so much time on the internet which, of course, necessitates them reading a lot, that they are losing the ability to differentiate between what is real and what is not real. To them cyber-life is so real that they come to believe that what they read there is equally real. I want to make a distinction here between “real” and “true”. “Real” involves the willing suspension of disbelief as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said. Suspension of Disbelief is what every author, screenwriter, director, actor, etc. relies on heavily in order to practice their art. When you can convince an audience that what they are experiencing is real then you can take them to outer space where they experience attacks by aliens, or back in time where they suffer through the plague. Whether or not those stories are true doesn’t matter --- the reality of them carries them, and those who experience them, into a separate reality.

So what happens when hours of immersion in cyber-reality become as real as actual reality? Does that suspension of disbelief become easily confused with real life? Which brings me to my story. Mostly it was an attempt to find humor in a depressingly pervasive situation. The majority of people who reacted to it reacted accordingly --- “OMG! That is so funny!” They got it. They realized it was a story that contained some elements of truth and some of the extremes of human experience that creates story. Several more took it as the gospel truth and polarized according to their personal prejudices. All in all it was highly instructive albeit not surprising to read the results.

I’ve always said that the joy of being a writer is that no experience, however awful or depressing, is wasted, if you get a good story out of it. In an interview on his web site author Gregory Gibson talks about Gone Boy, the book he wrote about the murder of his son in a school shooting. In the interview he says that writing that book was therapeutic for him. His experience in losing a son is one of the farthest extremes of human experience one can imagine. But his point is perfect --- whatever life hands us, from the sublime to the horrific, can be transformed through the art of story. Let’s hope that we never become so distanced from ourselves that we lose the ability to enter into that place of story and experience what we cannot live but what we can come to understand.

Thanks for reading.