I’ve been on a writing break recently, for a number of reasons. I finished my latest novel a few months back and I’m trying to focus on revisions and querying rather than diving into another new manuscript. This resolve also coincides with a month-long road trip to visit family and take our daughter to college (eeep!) so it wouldn’t be the best time for daily writing sessions anyway. But good gracious, I really miss writing when I’m not doing it regularly. When the idea for a new blog post occurred to me, I figured it would be a nice chance to keep my writerly-muscles from descending into total atrophy.
What I realized is that my general philosophy about stories can be summarized in two quotes. The first is from Harry Potter (which is a highly problematic source nowadays; I honestly find it hard to believe that the same woman currently spewing hateful rhetoric is the same one who wrote these insightful words). “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” This quotation can be applied to a wide range of situations (including, ahem, a sensitivity toward a person’s internal experience and identity, even if you don’t share their views) but for this post I’m relating it to how I feel about stories in fiction — books, movies, TV, plays, whatever. They are not “real” in the sense that the events didn’t happen as portrayed; the characters and plot are fabricated and so forth. But as we enter the world of the story, we create its reality within our own minds. We interact with it; we experience feelings and lines of thought that are quite real. Within fiction, we find truth. Those who dismiss something as “just a story” are missing the very real power that comes from narrative imagination.
Some of my thoughts here are heavily influenced by what I’ve been learning in therapy. The mind and the body are not separate entities engaged in an uneasy alliance to achieve functionality. The mind is part of the body. Coping mechanisms are best understand as the body’s reaction to stress or trauma, and can be managed by listening to the body and guiding it gently toward healthier mechanisms rather than trying to actively fight against its instincts. Further, trauma is not actually something that happens to you. It’s something that happens inside you. So whether or not it was a “big deal” by any objective standards, if your body feels threatened by it, you will respond accordingly. And you can only work through trauma by acknowledging the story that your body has created and taking it seriously. It’s real, even if it’s entirely inside your head. I could even go to philosophical extremes and argue that the individual, internal reality that each of us constructs is the only true reality, because we can’t really access anything other than that, right? In terms of stories, this means that none of us are reading or watching the same version of a book or show. Each of us fabricates our own perception of it within our minds, and each fabrication is equally valid for each individual.
Whew. Getting pretty heavy here. Time to bring in the second quote, which might seem to outright contradict the first. It’s from the theme song for Mystery Science Theater 3000: “Repeat to yourself, ‘It’s just a show, I should really just relax.'” How can I hold to both of these concepts? Easy. What I hear in this quote is a reminder to enjoy the forest and stop fussing over the trees. In the original song it’s referring to how the main character “eats and sleeps and other science facts.” These things are not definitively explained in the show’s premise, and if anything comes up from episode to episode it tends to be inconsistent or even contradictory. But it would be absurd to obsess over such issues, when the point of the show is not a meticulous exploration of how to send a man into space and perform bizarre, cinema-based experiments upon him while keeping all his life support running. Heavens no. The point is to enjoy a guy and his two robots making fun of lousy movies.
So what is the point of stories, in a general sense? To create a meaningful landscape within one’s imagination. Sometimes it’s a serious landscape. Sometimes it has educational components. Sometimes it’s just wacky fun. The degree of “realism” (however you may define that concept) is going to differ depending on the particular type of story, but all fiction is going to be creative, transportive, a journey you take without even leaving your seat.
Do we need the science facts? Maybe. Maybe not. But let’s not get all worked up over the wrong things. Those critiques about “plot holes” or the real-world accuracy of certain details are not the most effective way to assess the value of art. That’s not what we need. We need the story. We need the journey. We need that exquisite experience of constructing an entire world inside our minds and knowing that it is deeply, fundamentally real.
cynthiaailshie 