Storytelling

This is a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as ultimately it’s what I’d like to be doing in life.  If you’ve been to the main MissElaineous website, you’ll have seen a few circles that are currently greyed out, waiting for me to find the time and mental space to tackle them. One, the Language of Flowers, is a blog I’d like to start that incorporates the Victorian language of flowers to tell a story in a modern setting. The other, Writing-365, is based on an experiment I tried of writing a short piece of fiction every day. Ranging from only one or two paragraphs to several pages, this was a way for me to exercise my fiction muscles.  I admit I only made it a few weeks the first time I tried, but I am eager to pick up and start again.

Yet storytelling stretches beyond the deliberate creation of fiction, and what originally prompted this musing was a visit to my hometown to catch up with family and friends. Listening to them talk about the past is fascinating because, quite frankly, their tales  are often untrue. As someone who has become a character that features in these retellings, I often find myself double and triple checking my memory, striving to reconcile my understanding of the past with theirs. Yet there are events that never happened or conversations that are turned on their head.  Other times, the description of what was said or done is accurate—to a point—but the motivation behind it was not what is implied in the telling. Why does this happen?  Because the resulting story is better than the rather mundane reality.

I’ve walked away from this with a few lessons. First, accuracy often gets in the way of a good story. As someone who spent more years than I care to mention studying archaeology, the idea of “the truth” was drilled in to me. The facts and figures that make up the past are what was important, and even if the exact details weren’t known, there were plenty of wiggle words to lend a hand: about, approximately, circa.

Yet adhering blindly to the “facts” can stifle flexibility and creativity. Nowhere is this more clear than in the stories we tell ourselves: “I can’t do that because I’m too fat / thin / tall / short / old / young / negative adjective of choice”.  “I am only good at this and not that”.  “That’s not for a person like me to try.”  I have previously touched upon the limitations inherent in believing that stories must proceed in a linear way, starting with “Once upon a time” and ending with “…they lived happily ever after.”  Instead, stories—whether in fiction or in real life—can zig, zag, and double back on themselves.  It’s what keeps the plot interesting!

I’ve come to realise that storytelling is part of human nature: we all do it to various degrees, both positively and negatively. As for me, I hope to have the opportunity to do a bit more in the not-so-distant future. So, please stay tuned … I may be sharing a bit of fiction in this blog occasionally, allowing it to fully live up to its tagline!