Life is made up of stories. True, false, skewed by time, stories map the fabric of what we call us. Where they start and end is never clear and always changing.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they find out something they’ve been told is wrong, and it changes things. Maybe it was that time in your childhood when your father told you John Denver died having sex with Buddy Holly in a plane. You might still believe that your cat will steal your daughter’s breath while she sleeps. I’ve met more than one adult woman that thought morning wood was caused by a man’s penis filling with urine overnight. 

Intelligent people believe cockamamie things. Somewhere, way back in our history, we felt certain whoever planted these old chestnuts in our brains would never lie to us. Years pass and our mixed-bag of nonsense never comes into question. We bounce confidently toward adulthood through a garden of forking paths with bad data that shapes the world. We bumble into other people’s stories mistaking them for our own.

Narrative Perspective is Everything

We hear the word ‘narrative’ a lot these days. It’s an important word. Narrative influences the way we perceive news events, financial hardship, career challenges, and tender moments. Our narrative perspective is how we relate to other people. Something similar happened to me! Things will get better. It's why people devote themselves in religious faith. Is God testing us? Our narrative gives context to the world around us and tells us how we fit in all of this chaos. It is essential to meaning, and meaning is what we seek.

'Narrative' has become a buzz word for news outlets. They promise us history will sort things out, but time has never told the truth to anyone. Their narrative isn’t our narrative, so it must be wrong. Does either of our narratives match the facts? Only time will tell us the lies that can allow you and me to feel at home in our story. That’s how it works. You don’t have to like it, but our narratives are simply all we have. 

In Patterns We Trust

Humans are pattern seekers. Conspiracy theories, religious texts, the movies we love, the novels we hold dear, the little incidents that told us we were being gang-stalked by the FBI leading to our schizophrenic break—those are the patterns that lead us. If we can find a pattern, we can make a prediction and gain something. We can avoid consequences and disappointment. We can learn from the pattern’s results. Hunt loud and catch nothing. Tread lightly and the village eats. On a longer timeline, the abuse a child suffers could dig a well of adult strength or stunt them for life. The divorce, the burned-out light, the car wreck, the death of a loved one, the broken shoelace—catalysts for our pattern of change. One man’s pattern is another man’s chaos. So…why?

The Existence of Meaning

It all has to be for something. Everything in our lives serves our narrative. It doesn’t matter what it means to you. What it means to me is the secret of life. My life. Get your own secret meaning. But the pattern doesn’t really change from person to person. We all seek the same pattern and it speaks to us in the same handful of ways. It’s the same skeleton hanging in our display windows and closets, and we drape it in the meat of our individual tale. The goal being: when they hang the whole mess over our deathbeds, we can look up at it and recognize the shape, be proud of it, trace the scars fondly, and embrace the story of us into the dark.

The stories we tell and the stories we relate to have the same skeleton. Every good story is built of the same parts. When I was in college, I rejected this absolute truth. There can’t be a formula for a good story, right? If every movie, every book, every show is the same, what’s the point? It has nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the journey. It’s the key to keeping you hooked, and, more importantly, it’s how we relate to one another. Empathy is born of the pattern, and the shape of that pattern is human.

The Heroes Journey

Dan Harmon calls it a story circle, and it has 8 parts. Blake Snyder, author of the popular screenwriting book Save the Cat, lays it out in a Beat Sheet comprised of 15 beats every movie should have. Before that, Joseph Campbell called his 12 steps The Heroes Journey, and George Lucas used Campbellian storytelling techniques to pen a movie called Star Wars. But it isn’t just Luke Skywalker that walks this path. Every protagonist from romantic comedies, thrillers, and Pixar movies follows the same pattern. It’s the human path. Tom Joad follows it to California in The Grapes of Wrath. And in the story of Joshua (in Hebrew: Yeshua, in Latin: IESVS/Iesus, and in Greek: Jesus), He walks this road to save us all. 

Let’s roll with Harmon’s explanation. It has fewer parts. I’ll draw from multiple stories for examples. (If that’s confusing, go watch Die Hard and you’ll find the pattern in all its glory there. Or literally, any other movie that had a script supervisor.)

1. The Ordinary World: We get a glimpse of our protagonist’s everyday life. John McClane is on a plane to L.A. to visit his wife in Die Hard. Leonard and Sheldon are taking the stairs because someone broke the elevator in The Big Bang Theory. The humans have sent an ambassador to meet with the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica; they’ve never shown, and he is starting to nod off.

2. But Something is Wrong: Katniss in Hunger Games goes to the tribute ceremony where two kids from each district are chosen to fight and likely die as entertainment.

3. The Call to Adventure: The catalyst of the story. Harold and Kumar get stoned and hungry, so they climb in the car and head for White Castle; their friendship and lives are changing, and this could be their last big adventure as a duo. Neo takes the red pill. Luke’s aunt and uncle are burnt to a crisp by Storm Troopers. There’s no going back to our old lives.

4. The Protagonist Enters an Unfamiliar World: In Stranger Things, Will’s pals and their new psychic friend, Eleven, search for their missing chum. Here, they’ll learn the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance and find the means to pull their friend back from the Upside Down. This is always the part of the story we came for. Miracles happen. Water is walked upon. We learn to use lightsabers. We crawl through vents. We learn to play piano because every day is Groundhog Day!

5. The Hero Gets What They Want: What!? But this is the midpoint! Yep. Here lies the false victory or false defeat. Campbell called it “meeting with the goddess.” The protagonist gets the girl. Luke saves the princess from Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer. But this is the part where we find out we were chasing the wrong goal. The character gets what they want, not what they need.

6. They Pay a Great Price: Sometimes, we lose someone here. It is the dark night of the soul for our hero. Prim dies in Hunger Games. Bad guys close in. Paul begs Annie to just kill him in Misery. Mark’s potato farm is gone in The Martian. Jesus dies for our sins, and the apostles find they’ve been following a mortal man. This low point pushes us to find the thing we needed all along: meaning.

7. Return: The tools and proper motivation are all in place. Wayne stops the wedding to declare his love for Cassandra in Wayne’s World. Luke blows up the Death Star with Force-guided aim (it was inside him all along!). Jesus rises from the dead, forgives, and ascends to heaven. Moses parts the Red Sea. John McClane saves his wife and his marriage.

8. Change: We get a final glimpse of our hero's lives and how things are different. They are fundamentally changed. Some get medals, others leave behind a planet without reason to suffer for sin. We’re all saved. Bilbo Baggins tucks his ring away and feels fulfilled.

Circles, Returning Changed, Shifting Parts

Most television shows arrest us in part 4. We come back week after week for a little more of that fun part of the adventure. If you put the love interests together too soon, it’s a wish fulfilled. We move on. Break Ross and Rachel up, and we wonder if they’re going to get back together. It would be nice to live there, in a stage 4 world of wonder.

Usually, each episode is a smaller story circle within the larger overall narrative. A misunderstanding occurs, or a minor villain shows up to meddle in our hero’s journey. An inner and/or external battle is fought, pushing us a little closer to the next stage without stepping over that stage 5 line. In Lost, every episode covers a different character facing an external problem that parallels an inner struggle, and the narrative moves forwards and backward through time.

While our lives don’t look like this time-honored story arc, we find a way to shove our story in there eventually (much like an episode of Lost). Our lives are squiggly lines that go up and down without warning. Our story circles are many. They overlap. They exist within larger circles. They’re part of other people’s stories. But retrospect allows us to fit it all in there. 

We root for the pattern to tear us apart and rebuild us better. We reject the narrative elements that don’t fit and call it bad writing. We do this with our love, our losses, our politics, and our dreams. We choose our set of beliefs to better arm ourselves as the protagonist of our story. Our creeds become tools forged in our spiritual battle with the dark as it pushes at the door, whispering lies to our children while they sleep. 

Our narratives have less to do with the linear momentum of day-to-day life and more to do with what fits in our template later. We’re compelled to trim the parts that make us dislike ourselves. Some memories will lose their shape over time, become pliant, easy to stuff in a box. Others we bury in Louisiana graveyards. One day the soft, sinking ground coughs them back up and there’s Grandma, telling you you’ll go to hell for lying. 

The Illusory and the Illusion

The Return now could be a False Victory later. We’ll become different people. The story of us shifts. How we see the world is in no small way dependent on how we want the story summarized in the end. Life, sanity, and happiness depend on shifting our narrative to fit our struggle, compelling us forward. But your tale is not my story. It didn’t start like mine, and my book will not end like yours. 

It would serve us all well to remember that everyone is a different story, at a different stage, and they are also a protagonist. While it may not have meaning to you, it may explain everything to someone else. The meaning of life is the story we tell ourselves and the story it ends up being and the story it almost was. Choose wisely.

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]]>Only Time Will Tell: The Narrative Craft Of LivingScott MoranFri, 02 Oct 2020 15:42:55 +0000https://www.dispatchesfromthepit.com/blog/youre-probably-lying-about-voting5e8f51c24a1d8330db07811a:5e8f55ecba0c077f84cb0d6c:5f76099586c01760813ee4e1

Here comes the election. Sure, there were other ones, but maybe you were feeling lost. Maybe you had no idea what a comptroller was, and Proposition 42thx1138 didn’t make any sense to you. It wasn’t because you didn’t like what it stood for, you just didn’t know what the hell that could be. Perhaps it was about stockpiling a species of genetically engineered turnips that we will desperately need in the coming shortage of food product for our weekly ration pickup. I, for one, couldn’t tell you. Things are set up to be confusing and reading is hard.

If it’s your first time voting, welcome. This is going to be both bewildering, and no matter the outcome, you are going to feel a little defeated. I sure did. The first election I had the pleasure of participating in was the reelection of George W. Bush. That was after 9/11, after he literally lost the election to Al Gore and became the president anyway, and I was voting against our former governor deep in the heart of Texas. Plastic American flags on little wooden sticks lined the edges of perfectly manicured lawns and littered the streets. There was a whole store in my neighborhood that just sold flags. Just flags. For real.

I thought this was going to be about lying?

Yes. Right. Where did I leave my thesis?

All of those things are worth thinking about and preparing yourself for, but what’s worse, after the election, some of your friends and family are going to lie to your face about it. Lies they will carry to their graves. People are going to tell you they voted. They did not vote. People are going to have strong opinions about your choice. And they did not vote. In fact, over the last few years, some of the people that you have argued with about politics—you guessed it—did not vote.

We are a species of liar apes.

Not only to our friends and coworkers and family, we lie to ourselves. Studies have found that polling people about how often they lie in a given day, week, month, or year will yield skewed results. The subjects actually lie about how much they lie. Some of this can be attributed to self-deception. We tell ourselves lies to prop up the web of falsehoods we spin, and it makes us feel better about ourselves and the world at large that’s lying to us all day every day (10-200 times a day). We can fall down a philosophical hole together, debating what a lie is, the evolutionary reasoning for our lying, and the outcome of telling the truth all the time. I’ll suggest you go watch a Jim Carrey movie, and I will link a hefty scientific study filled with statistical data, complete with shiny charts and graphs, here. 

And that has everything to do with voting.

What lazy creatures we are—but come on, we have a ton to do today. We can’t read all those propositions on the ballot. That’s what all those signs on the freeway and in neighbors’ yards are for, right? If it’s good enough for the Murphys next door, it must be good enough. Vote yes on Prop 2! It has nothing to do with Soylent Green. It’s about people. People.

It isn’t that simple when it’s time to head to the voting booth. There will be all of that guilt. And will it let me skip the things I have no business weighing in on? What if I vote on it anyway and I was wrong? Guilt. Crushing guilt. That feeling you had in fourth grade when you didn’t do the reading, it’s happening again. Life is about one thing: avoid all that discomfort. You skip that line and get some Wendy’s, buddy. You can tell the people at work you lost the sticker or that you voted early. All the guilt goes away. Lying is easier. Lying is in our nature. 

Here come the statistics…

In a study published in 2018 by the Environmental Voter Project, registered voters in Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Nevada were surveyed. Their responses were then compared to their voting records on file with the state. What they found was completely unsurprising:

The study refers to this revelation as “social desirability bias,” a term used to describe the tendency of research subjects to choose responses they believe are more socially acceptable over answers that are actually reflective of them.

In the 2016 presidential election, only 55.5% of Americans eligible to vote actually voted. The last time that number was higher than 60% was 1968. It’s been floating around 50% for the last forty years, and hasn’t broken 70% since 1900, topping out at an all time high of 81.8% in 1876. In 1876 they were clearly only counting white dudes. After all, the percentage falls from 61.6% to 49.2% from 1916 to 1920. That election was only one year after the signing of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote in every state. It might be safe to say that these percentages skew higher. Eligible minority voters and women who were able to vote in some states before 1919 may not have been factored in at all. 

Curiouser and Curiouser

Those figures explain a lot, and they should give us a fair amount of reason to pause and wonder if the person shouting is even a voter. Will they even vote this time? Have they ever voted at all? Do they lie about voting so much that they now believe they voted? That sort of widespread self-deception doesn’t seem unlikely, does it? What’s one more lie on the pile of lies we all hide under every day? How can we shove our opinions down each other’s throats if we admit our opinions don’t even matter?

I’m not saying you should go around accusing the folks that you don’t agree with of being filthy, non-voting liars. The people who have views that align with yours aren’t voting either. It would be to all of our benefit (and a credit to our species) if we made it clear to one another that we know there are a helluva lot of people close to us lying about voting. Make them aware of it too. That social desirability bias needs to extend to physically going and voting. Go vote. Actually vote. Don’t be a worthless liar. 

So an author we love went and publicly said a bunch of things that sit wrong with us. How do you move forward when a piece of literature that is part of your identity is now tied to statements and behavior you can’t agree with? While it feels like a problem specific to 2020,  it’s nothing new. I’m not here to weigh in on the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s comments on Twitter, but I would like to talk about what happens when we find out that our favorite author’s beliefs do not align with ours and how it affects our attachment to their work.

Maybe it was a book you read as a child or a movie adaptation you hold dear memories of curling up and watching repeatedly with loved ones. It got you through the tough times, the times you felt alone, or those moments you just needed to get out of your head. All of that’s ruined now! Your fond memories with those characters have been invalidated by what your former hero said after a couple of glasses of wine. Oh, god. She’s making it worse, backpedaling, getting frustrated, doubling down. She’s already got your money after all, why does she need you to like her? I guess we can all go fuck ourselves.

Those are your memories, your experiences, and no one can take that from you.

The first time I felt betrayed by an author was back before it was commonplace to broadcast our every passing thought. I discovered that Orson Scott Card, author of the Ender’s Game series, is a hyper-religious nut job with some very concerning thoughts about homosexuality and race. Just Googling him will turn up a metric-fuck-ton of hatred and bigotry. 

Having no idea what Mormons believe, I researched the origins of why he feels this way. I came to realize the Ender series (and everything else he’s ever written) is riddled with parallels to the Book of Mormon. It’s a scripture that has only slightly more disjointed and absurd narrative elements than were forced on me in Christian Sunday school. (The origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the story of how their holy book was written is  fascinating and well worth exploring.) 

We are products of where we come from, and the stories we make our own are a reflection of that, whether we like it or not. The mythology and structure of religious upbringing have a direct correlation to the way different cultures and regions tell and relate to stories. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica series bears the similar parallels to the Book of Mormon; however, its creator hasn’t publicly gone on racist rants and express extremist opposition to same-sex marriage the way Card does.

The list goes on and on.

The last few centuries are littered with examples of world-renowned writers with problematic viewpoints. Maybe the world around them shifted and stopped aligning with their views, or someone dug up new information exposing the author’s dark side. Times change quickly, and it has happened a lot. 

Lewis Carroll was an early enthusiast of photography, but over half of his approximately 3,000 photographs are of children—many of which are depicted nude or in various states of undress. Although likely acceptable in the Victorian era in which he lived, this fact is even more disconcerting given his “uncle” relationship to Alice Liddell and her sisters. Furthermore, Vladimir Nabokov (who translated Alice into Russian) was quoted by a New York Times reviewer as saying there was “a pathetic affinity” between Carroll and the pedophile narrator of Nabokov’s novel Lolita.

Jack London was an advocate of violent social justice, and he believed those social rights extended to white men only. Charles Bukowski kicked his wife during a television interview. Rudyard Kipling published this hymn to U.S. imperialism titled “The White Man’s Burden” (not just racist, it’s straight-up terrible, lazy poetry). Charles Dickens blamed his wife Catherine for having too many children (10 to be exact), and in the pursuit of a divorce he apparently laid the groundwork to have her committed. A years-long correspondence between Flannery O’Connor and a close friend reveals her deeply ingrained southern racism and feelings about actions of prominent civil rights leaders.

So where do we put our new feelings? 

In “The Death of the Author,” a 1967 essay by French literary critic Roland Barthes, he argues against the practice of including the author’s biological context and intentions in the criticism of literature. Barthes explains that “to give a text an author” is to assign a single interpretation of the work. While convenient for critics, the practice of attaching an origin point to the meaning behind a text connected to a writer’s “passions” or “tastes,” particularly in a work of fiction, is “interpretive tyranny.” He goes on to state, “a text’s unity lies not in its origins […] but in its destination.” 

Something every writer should have learned in their first workshop is you will not be in the room to explain your work to your audience. Like children, just because you squeezed it out doesn’t mean you get to give its life meaning. Author of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, struggled with this concept. When Bradbury became the first author of science fiction and fantasy to be honored by receiving a Pulitzer Prize for Fahrenheit 451, he refused to make the trip to receive the award. He would not have been allowed to give a speech, and the author had long struggled against the interpretation that his book was about censorship. Rather, Bradbury meant the text to convey the dangers and dulling effects of television. Once the story found its way into the hands and minds of readers, the story he’d created no longer belonged to him.

It Belongs to Us.

Which brings us to now.

 Turn of the 20th century author H.P. Lovecraft is responsible for the horror genre as we know it today. He is cited as a primary influence by everyone from Stephen King to Guillermo del Toro and all the way back to Richard Matheson—high praise for a guy who couldn’t write dialogue. Lovecraft was also a venomous racist. In 2016, author Matt Ruff gave us Lovecraft Country. The book has been adapted into a series of the same name that premiered last week on HBO. It explores an intersection of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and Jim Crow era racism. Given that Lovecraft’s work was created before Mickey Mouse’s Copyright Act of 1976, his stories are public domain and truly belong to all of us now. Albeit divisive, the material addresses the concept Barthes argued in “The Death of the Author” quite well while maintaining a love and reverence for the source material. Time has not been on Lovecraft’s side, but the continued life his stories have gained is far bigger than the man that wrote them.

The way I related to the Ender series bears no relationship to Orson Scott Card. I made a connection with Ender. You may feel how Harry Potter felt sleeping under those stairs. A well-written story contains the essential human arcs and elements that stir a deeply personal reaction in us, but we bring our own viewpoints and associations to a story and that is what makes it special. Big ideas and interesting, flawed characters are often born of flawed writers. 

If you are faced with an ethical dilemma purchasing one of these books, you can take into consideration whether or not that author is still alive. (Most of the authors I mentioned here are long dead. If anyone is still receiving a residual check, it ain’t them.) Save your money for a writer whose views align with yours. Buy their books secondhand and you’ll be instead supporting your local used bookseller. If you feel strongly about the things J.K. Rowling said, you can skip paying to see her half-assed Potterverse spin-offs.  

There is no reason to comb pages of text looking for something insidious you missed. It’s up to you as the reader to bring your own connection to a story. They can symbolize anything you want them to. It’s always been your story. Don’t let anyone take it away from you.

It isn’t just any nightmare after all, it’s that one you read about over and over again. The one you couldn’t get enough of. The one you expected. The one where all the characters reacted exactly like you knew they would. But it isn’t on the page and screen anymore, it’s at the door. The story of it moves agonizingly slow like a week in lockdown, and you can’t stop scanning the headlines for the glimmer of hope that comes around the end of act two. Where is that shiny bastard that could save us all?

For the first few weeks of the pandemic, we were faced with a decision when it came to how to entertain ourselves during all this. The better half of the books I consumed in the last decade (or more), were at the very least, set against the backdrop of a deadly disease. It’s a helluva way to world build and a damn good way to squeeze a hero’s journey out of the boring, ordinary world. So when the news starts to look stranger than your favorite fiction premise, where do you turn?

Some go for reality tv. Documentaries about murderous white trash tiger owners is a good place to look away. Maybe you can bury your head in romantic comedies? Serial killers are a tangible fear I can see. I wonder who’s out there murdering people right now? Everyone is home, the cops are busy beating people to death, and—Oh come on! Is there anywhere safe?

I have a suggestion that works. Lean in. Lean all the way in.

After a few months of reading books and watching movies that had zero relation to all this, all the while checking my news feed for certain death creeping ever closer, I did the opposite of what I thought was healthy. I dusted off my copy of Stephen King’s The Stand, and later that night, I fell asleep with that heavy tome on my chest. I slept like a rock, and the impulse to check my phone started to fade just a little bit. Why?

The Stand isn’t about a virus the characters can defeat. In fact, it kills everyone but the central characters in the first hundred pages. But I had stumbled on a solution to my constant pandemic anxiety, and it’s linked to the very reason we read that type of story. Survival. We love to see people surviving. We find a character with whom we relate, and we want to think we would make it too. There’s a reason The Walking Dead is still on, and it’s the same reason Amazon keeps suggesting you rewatch Outbreak. We want to know how we survive this. It’s okay to go extreme here, folks. The more intense the comparison, the more our current situation doesn’t seem so bad. 

Don’t get me wrong. I beg of you, Hollywood, please don’t flood the market with stories about the lockdown. It’s a sentiment David Wong, still holding down the fort over at Cracked, said well enough already. I recommend giving his column a read here.

Immersion therapy doesn’t stop there. Last week, the incredible The Last of Us Part II arrived on PS4 to allow us twenty-five long hours of creeping up on infected and spraying bullets into other survivors. Before that, I was having a good time avoiding hordes of the undead in Days Gone. A video game is also a great way to forget you are stuck in your apartment for the foreseeable future. 

Everyone on Facebook is telling you to stand together, don’t look away, and I agree. This is a moment in history that, for better or worse, has come for us all. Maybe you have to get up and work from home in the morning. Maybe your job is “essential,” and you’ve spent every day since March terrified because people won’t wear a mask to protect you while you make eight bucks an hour. Either way, you’ve gotta get out of your head. Sometimes the way out really is through.