“Stories and Anti-Stories” by Jon Wesick
November 5th, 2011
Below is a talk prepared by Jon Wesick for a National Author’s Day celebration at
the Oceanside Libary. It offers an interesting insight into the mind of a creative
writer. If you look through the achives of this site, you will find that Jon has
contributed to this site before. There is a short discussion of how his Zen practice
informs his writing practice and several of his Zen inspired poems. The piece does
just posted does not specifcally mention Zen but if you read between the lines you
can see Jon’s “Zen” shining through.
Stories and Anti-Stories
Jon Wesick
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
After reading this I was shocked to discover that all I’d learned in ten years of physics classes was wrong. But when I remembered to story of Galileo dropping balls of different mass off a tower, his martyrdom for the cause of reason, Rutherford scattering alpha particles from gold foil, and the modern myth of the Manhattan Project, I realized that Muriel Rukeyser was right.
In Monoculture F.S. Michaels says cultural values are organized into one story. In America the one story is, “All commerce all the time.” Politicians promise to run government like a business, healthcare focuses on the bottom line instead of patient care, and it’s not enough to be a scientist or artist. You have to be an entrepreneur too. Don’t get me wrong. Businesses have improved our standard of living but do they have to control every facet of our lives? As writers we have to decide whether to reinforce the one story or show an alternative.
What is a story? Merriam Webster’s online dictionary gives one definition – an account of incidents and events.
Is this a story?
Bert the waiter arrived at Chez Louis at 1:00. After donning his apron he entered the dining room and handed menus to the couple seated at table 3. Neither wanted drinks. The man ordered beef medium rare and the woman asked for scallops in wine sauce. Bert placed their orders and brought them bread and salad.
By now the hostess had seated a lone man at table 5. Bert took his drink order and brought him a glass of red wine.
“Could you give me a few minutes to look at the menu?” the man asked.
“Of course.” Bert went to the kitchen to check on the couple’s orders.
They were ready so he brought them their plates.
This is not really the kind of story we have in mind.
The second definition of a story – a fictional narrative shorter than a novel
or
Short story – an invented prose narrative shorter than a novel usually dealing with a few characters and aiming at unity of effect and often concentrating on the creation of mood rather than plot
Let’s try again.
Chef was drunk again. Bert put on his apron and wondered how he could avoid another series of violent outburst until the end of his shift. Maybe no one would come in until chef sobered up. When Bert saw the couple seated at table 3, he knew there’d be no such luck.
“Anything to drink?” Bert held the wine list open hoping alcohol would deaden the disappointment that was sure to accompany the meal.
“Just water for us. Can we see the menu?”
The man ordered a well-done steak but the woman had a question.
“Can I substitute olive oil for the butter in the scallops in wine sauce?”
“I’ll check with the chef.” Bert walked to the kitchen like a condemned man on his way to the electric chair.
My little restaurant story is far from as wonderful as Stewart O’Nan’s restaurant novel, Last Night at the Lobster but it holds our interest more than my first attempt. This is because it contains conflict. Bert wants a peaceful day at work and there’s sure to be a confrontation with the chef. Some people say conflict is what makes a story. Ursula Le Guin disagrees in Steering the Craft.
“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.”
Taking conflict to the extreme some story-writing books advise, “Just say no,” meaning the author should throw more and more roadblocks in the way of a protagonist getting what she wants. These kinds of stories don’t work for me. There are so many difficulties in real life that I find them too frustrating and depressing to read.
But is my waiter example a story? I’d say it’s a start or a setup for a story. I call this describing a situation. To turn a situation into a story you need a plot. I wish I were the kind of writer who can outline an entire story before he starts writing but I’m not. To write a story I have to step into the unknown with the faith that I can find a path through it and arrive at a natural conclusion. For me this means brainstorming about what happens next keeping the characters’ motivations in mind. What do they want? What would they do next to get it?
Mainstream movies provide many examples of traditional plots that build to a climax and resolution. In Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush cite Sydney Lumet’s “The Verdict” as a textbook example of a traditional plot, what they call a “restorative three-act structure,” which consists of setup, confrontation, and resolution. In the movie Paul Newman plays an alcoholic lawyer who represents a comatose woman in a medical malpractice case. He rejects a settlement and takes on powerful opponents – the church, medical establishment, and a high-priced law firm. Witnesses disappear. His case falls apart. Rather than give up in the face of almost certain defeat he responds to his opponents’ dirty tricks by breaking into a mailbox to locate a surprise witness. In the end he wins and the jury awards him even more damages than he asked for. Dancyger and Rush say these plots focus on the central character’s development and eventual redemption.
This kind of story works because it fills a human emotional need. People want to believe that their lives have meaning. A movie like “The Verdict” reinforces that belief. Stories that say the game is rigged and you don’t have a chance fighting it alone are a tougher sell. Dancyger and Rush say, “[the restorative three-act structure] is a moralistic form of storytelling with the basic premise that good motives triumph, that the world is understandable, consistent, manageable, and responsive to goodness and truth.”
Classic plots are common in movies. In fact, one can buy screenwriting books with cookie-cutter plots and characters. Fill in the details and you have an outline of a script. I think the reason classic plots are so common in screenwriting is because movies cost much more to make than short stories. Studios want a sure-fire story to get their investment back and classic plots work!
The problem with classic plots is that they too often seem formulaic and artificial. If I read a book and I’ve heard the story before, I get bored. Also these stories aren’t realistic. The good guys don’t always win and life rarely ties up the ending in a neat bow. Dancyger and Rush say, “…if we feel our history has shown us the limitations and corruptions that underlie our illusion of free will, then we must be leery of the restorative three-act structure.”
Though I believe the physical world is understandable, I’m not so sure about the world of people. I’d like to believe the world is fair but too many dictators have died peacefully in their beds for me to be sure. In any case I’m a contrarian so I’m interested in movies and stories that break the mold. Contrast “The Verdict” with Aaron Katz’s beautiful low-budget film “Quiet City” in which a man and woman meet by chance and hang out together. There’s no sex but the movie ends perfectly with the woman resting her head on the man’s shoulder on the subway. “Quiet City” works because the audience sees the romance forming between these two people and roots for them. John Carney’s “Once” is another example of a movie like this.
One example of a movie with a different kind of ending is Kihachi Okamoto’s “Sword of Doom.” It’s about an evil swordsman who hires himself out as an assassin in late 19th-century Japan. Toshiro Mifune plays the teacher of rival sword school. He instructs his best student about the assassin’s weakness. The film ends with the student practicing the sword move over and over before a final match that is never shown.
What’s going on here? Maybe a story about an internal struggle reaches a natural conclusion with the decision to act. Maybe the struggle between good and evil never stops. “Sword of Doom’s” ending gives a feeling of violence going on and on and never ending.
Stories seem to be hard-wired in human thinking. Why do they resonate with us? Stories are about humans and the things that concern humans. They fill human emotional needs. In fact, I believe all creative writing advice boils down to my caveman theory. Write everything so it would matter to a caveman. What is a caveman concerned about? Food, sex, running away from saber-toothed tigers, getting a weapon and chasing the same saber-toothed tigers, and religion (not sitting-in-a-pew-listening-to-a-lecture religion but shamanistic-out-of-control-cave-painting religion). So stories are about human concerns. Even stories about animals and aliens anthropomorphize their protagonists. Do you know of any stories from the point of view of a tree, rock, or cloud? Could you write one that holds the reader’s attention?
I think this “anthropomorphizing” goes overboard when it attempts to make an evil character sympathetic, someone the audience can relate to. For example, “Dexter” is about a serial killer but he’s not a “bad” serial killer. He only kills other serial killers. Writers often stick in some traumatic childhood event to explain why the evil character is the way he is. I find this artificial. Human behavior cannot be that easily explained. Why can’t you write a story about a character with no redeeming moral values if he’s interesting?
Maybe another reason stories resonate is that stories are how people naturally organize knowledge about the world. I’ve often pondered how to apply the concepts of information theory to determine if a poem or story is meaningful. James Gleick wrote about this in his book The Information. In an interview he defined meaning as whatever compresses detail into something simple and memorable. For example, I could give you pages and pages of tables describing how a rock slides down a surface inclined at various angles. Newton’s Second Law F=ma contains all that knowledge, so we can say it has meaning. In the same way I think stories have meaning. The universe is made of stories.
Even though people organize their knowledge about the world in stories, stories can misrepresent reality. Propagandists know this. Regardless of your politics I think you’ll agree that at least one of the following books and movies distorts reality: Red Dawn, The Battleship Potemkin, Dr. Strangelove, Top Gun, Catch 22, Atlas Shrugged, Seven Days in May, and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. Believe the wrong story and you’ll advance someone else’s agenda. The Buddha said suffering’s cause is not understanding the way things really are (more specifically grasping the illusion of an eternal, separate self). Whether you’re a Buddhist or not, I think you’ll agree that acting on incorrect information will lead to undesirable outcomes.
I want to write stories that lessen suffering. Taking a cue from Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, who writes anti-poems, I’ve begun writing anti-stories. An anti-story informs the reader of the deception in the story form. An example is “The Adventures of Middle-Class Man,” a superhero who single-handedly battles against the structural problems contributing to the economic decline of the American middle class. It’s a reductio ad absurdum (like a mathematical proof by contradiction) of the idea that you can triumph over entrenched corruption alone.
I try not to get stuck in writing anti-stories exclusively but to use stories and anti-stories freely depending on which one is appropriate in a given situation. If you want to write anti-stories too, I suggest reading Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Ron Carlson, Ted Chiang, Jim Shepard, and Jorge Luis Borges. They may not write anti-stories exactly but their imagination will free your mind. I challenge you to write stories where there are no separate selves, where matter bends space and time, and where electrons exist in clouds of probability. I challenge you to write stories that reflect reality the way it is.
References
Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything, F.S. Michaels, Red Clover Press, Canada, 2011.
Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O’Nan, Viking, New York, 2007.
Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Eighth Moon Press, Portland, OR, 1998, p. 146.
Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules, Fourth Edition, Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush, Focal House, Burlington, MA, 2007, p.35.
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