Our Oldest Form of Communication Is Rewriting Reality
I’ve been a storyteller for as long as I can remember. I used to come to breakfast and recount elaborate adventures I’d had during the night with my stuffed dog, Checkers. The purpose of these tales was to garner my mother’s attention, a precious commodity given mainly to my manic-depressive brother and egocentric sister. The stories I chose to relay often had a point, a message I was trying to communicate. Checkers attacked an evil kidnapper because my parents weren’t there to help me. I climbed the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland and rescued the children stuck at the top, illuminating my prowess and heroism.
Like most professional writers, I’ve written since learning to write, at first in diaries, then journals of story ideas, character studies, slices of life. I have boxes of spiral-bound notebooks in closets somewhere I’ve never shown anyone.
I’ve been writing to publish—essays, shorts and novels—for 25 years. Similar to storytelling as a little kid, each work I pen has a point. My Fractured Fairy Tales of the Twilight Zone Series are a collection of modern fables that challenge the accepted—a new way to see something. I’ve inflame many with my personal essays against the grain of the status quo. I’ve gotten death threats.
I write fiction and CNF essays because I love the process of storytelling. (I even love editing, honing a story to transport readers to other realities with characters that reflect our frailties, but delivers hope.) Whether writing or speaking, I use stories to entertain, educate/inform, to spark creativity, convey ideas, share observations, thoughts and feelings. We all do!
Every one of us are storytellers.
Fiction or non-fiction, the stories I choose to write or verbally share are modifications on truth—my POV about things I’ve experienced, and glean from others along the way. More precisely, I elaborate on things that happen in the telling. We all do this too!
Writing fiction allows for infinite possibilities, but the characters and scenes must make sense to us, express a universal truth most can relate to for a work to resonate. Storytelling goes way beyond weaving pure fiction, though many do to cover a truth or project an image. Most all of us recount stories differently depending on our audience, but we all knowingly fabricate truths to add drama, or appear a certain way, or add a bit of prevarication to drive a point home. Admit it, or not, we all do it.
Long time ago, I was told the best way to pull off a lie is to keep it as close to the truth as possible, just “tweak the truth.” It’s easy to pull off a realistic tale this way. We take what is said (or what we read) at face value, only questioning its validity if it’s too far out there, or doesn’t resonate with us. I find I need to tweak the unvarnished truth more often than not to be heard, or trusted, as truth is usually too boring, or sometimes too bizarre to be believed.
Oprah Winfrey called out James Frey for saying his bestseller A Million Little Pieces was a memoir when much of it was ‘exaggerated.’ But truth be told, we all exaggerate, fabricate, embellish, flat out lie, often. Yes, even you, regardless of who you are.
Storytelling is at the foundation of human communication. Before written languages, sharing stories was how we passed on our history, learned from our experiences, instilled morality into our communities, and advanced our race. We all elaborate on our stories, whether writing them down, or simply recounting an event in our day. We all tweak the truth to serve us, to present an image, teach our children, or convey our fears, desires, and dreams.
Every storyteller, whether at the breakfast table when I was 5, or an influencer’s memoir, or a blog, podcast, even the ‘news’ tweak the truth, embellishing our tell, slanting it to guide a point of view. FOX Media is the Republican view, and will give you a completely different take on the ‘news’ than CNN, or PBS.
Truth tweaked goes far beyond the news media. We are all storytellers. It’s in our DNA.
Almost every time I reveal I’m a writer, the response is, ‘Oh, I’m a writer, too.’ Upon inquiry they must be referring to magical thinking because they don’t write beyond personal journaling, or their life story they’ve not yet begun to pen. Used to bug me. I felt dissed by their self-proclaimed association with my absurdly challenging profession for the optics. For some bizarre reason I’ll never get, people think it’s cool to be a writer. Theoretically. Though most will never actualize their writing ambitions, the fact is, they too are telling a tale to communicate an image to me, and to themselves—that their stories are valuable, their life meaningful, they matter—tweaking the truth to serve their agenda.
We are all storytellers indeed!
