The Story of the Stories
I got hypnotized by the story. What story? The story of stories.
I am not interested in a religion, just the religion of religions, not one culture, but the culture of cultures. Not philosophy, but the philosophy of philosophies. The psychology of psychologies. The martial of the martial arts. The core that makes the apple. What makes it what it becomes. The last curtain pulled back, revealing the back wall. And the story of the stories hypnotized me more and more.
It’s not that I haven’t been mesmerized by stories since childhood. I have. We all have, and that is an interesting part of the big story. Why?
You see, we all love stories. It started out with the spoken word around the old campfire, paintings on the cave walls, and we all know this. Then monks and the Chinese and others started making written copies and paintings of stories. The Silk Road. The Renaissance. The printing presses and books, and movies and TV. Hell, we all like stories. We love them.
Fiction or non-fiction, we love them. Ghastly. Sad, Happy. Each news report is a news “story.” We listen. We learn. We wallow in bias. We gossip, we shake our heads, shake our fists to the skies and pound our tables and shake out the crying towels. True or false? But the non-fiction irony of fiction is we just love stories. Especially good ones, that lure us in and capture our emotions.
Countries are built on stories. Held together by true history wrapped in emotion confabulations that make us hurt, make them stick. Make them larger than life. Religions are too – mythologies connecting each one to the supernatural, the alien and unworldly. Every one. Everything is. Every product we see, every deal we make every song we song. Every ad that sells. It’s the mythology, the tells a story. It’s all Shakespeare.
Tried as I may, I kept to non-fiction. The real stories. Reading it. Writing it like a history. But deep down I knew that the real mover, the real shaker, the real motivator in life was fiction. That extra push. They say truth is stranger than fiction, but then strange is just strange. Fiction is the poetry of non-fiction. Prose, like a song…touches. It touches. It effects. It affects. It makes the mountains and then moves the mountains.
We have ancient history, but it takes Ben Hur to give it grass roots in society. We have robots all around us, but it takes I Robot, and Kubrick’s 2001, and the movie Matrix to make us grasp what that means. We have organized crime, but it took the Godfather to enlighten us. We had World War II but it takes the Band of Brothers to enrich the events. We can construct nuclear weapons and drop them, but they won’t mean anything until we get a story about them. The non-fiction one, and then the fiction stories about them. A great fiction story about them will do far more to motivate for peace than the news report. You see because we love stories.
Understanding this, the true source of inspiration, the force of “the story,” has re-motivated me to tell stories again and to write fiction again because I know the true power is there.
I do still write non-fiction. Whatever fiction I do write is pulp and, or almost pulp with a dash of the classics. I don’t know that I will ever write an “intellectual” novel revered by the elite, bow-tie wearers on the east and west coasts of the USA. Like a great, Great Gatsby? I don’t think so. Usually there’s a punch or a gunshot every few chapters. But I will write on and on because the story is the most powerful force on the planet. The back bone of civilizations? Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard that…that story?
