The Point Of A Story

At the dawn of mankind our ancient ancestors huddled around campfires and told stories to entertain each other. But the smarter ones realized there was a way to make the stories more effective for the audience. And that was the origin of storytelling technique.

Any artist wants their work to be appreciated. And most artists want to leave a lasting impression. In order to do that, you are either naturally gifted and can do that through your instinctive performance, or you can do it through an understanding of the driving forces that make it happen.

Most people fall into the second category. That does not make them lesser artists. Even the people with natural talent can improve it by honing their craft and learning new tricks.

Where all this falls into the realm of this discussion centers around what I call the point of a story.

Think of it like the business end of a sword. If a sword is dull, it has less a chance to do its job effectively. Of course, most of us writers don’t want to hurt anyone with our work. We want to entertain. Enlighten, if possible. But some have lost track of why they’re doing this. Whether intentionally or not, they are hurting people with their fiction. They are doing harm. Their sword is being put to bad use.

We’re attracted to stories because we not only want to be entertained, we want to feel something. And for a story to do that, it needs to speak to us personally. It needs to tell us something we can relate to. Something we can understand. Even if the subject matter or situation is absurd, there has to be some kind of truth in there.

The stories that stand the test of time are the ones that hit home in some way. They are the ones we can get some kind of personal insight or meaning from. The reason? Stories act to make sense of the senselessness of our existence. They’re a tool for putting reality in perspective.

Reality is a vast, complex and often scary place. If you were to bother to look up the size of certain heavenly bodies for example, you would find you could fit around a million worlds the size of the earth in our sun. And as big as our sun is, you could fit 350 million Earth suns into the star Antares. And Antares is just one of a nearly uncountable number of stars in a possibly infinite universe. Which may only be one universe in an infinite amount of parallel universes. So, yeah, we’re pretty small in relation to all that. Even George Clooney’s ego.

It’s hard enough for contemporary people to take in our crazy world, but imagine how it was for our ancestors who knew almost nothing. They had to figure out why things happened and they had to get really creative. They didn’t have Google. They had to wing it.

Fiction was invented, in part, to provide a context for life. Religion (depending on your point of view, of course) sprang from a need to lay down some ground rules so a society could function properly. People learned that certain actions had bad consequences. So they wrote down rules that said: “Don’t do that, stupid!” And when people did that anyway, they said: “Do that again and you’ll regret it!”

in 350 BC, Greek Philosopher Aristotle explained how fiction worked in The Poetics. He explained that people can relate to cause and effect in a story. This is because in real life, actions often equal some kind of result, either good or bad. And we can all relate to that.

But we can’t relate to stories where a character does something that doesn’t make sense to us. And the result of their actions makes even less sense.

We’ve all seen those movies. Throw a rock in a video store and you’ll hit one.

The problem with a lot of entertainment today is that mindset has dominated the scene that tells us illogical things. Things that don’t ring true to us living in the real world. This is because the producers who commission these stories, the editors who supervise them, the writers who slap them together are either coming from a place of unreality and delusion, or they are trying to impose some kind of vision of reality that they want to believe on the rest of us.

This often results in bad fiction. Whether it’s in comic books, plays or films, even if it comes in the lyrics of a song, or a comedian’s joke, fiction is trying to pass on a version of reality to the audience. And many creative people today are passing on a negative, defeatist or depressing message that doesn’t really offer any solutions, hope or lessons worth a damn.

Stories don’t have to be uplifting or even positive to be good. But they have to have meaning to be relevant or effective. The meaning passed along by many of today’s entertainment is neither helpful or constructive.

Some creative people today are making fiction that seeks to tear down society, through slurs and condemnation. But they offer no ideas, no constructive solutions, and for many of us, no reason to agree with them. But to young impressionable minds, this is harmful because it makes many kids think it’s a form of reality. As I said, fiction can serve to put reality in perspective. The perspective many kids are getting is one of hopelessness, anger, fear and paranoia.

Science Fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon had an axiom that 90% of everything is crap. He said that in the 1950s, so this isn’t a new problem. But if we want to make a difference and improve entertainment, we need to start focusing on solutions instead of sitting off to one side throwing bottles at the walls of the institutions we’re annoyed with.

We have to bring our convictions, values and ideas to the table. The naysayers will try to beat us down, but guess what? We don’t need their approval. Opportunities and new paths are always opening before us. The Internet is creating all kinds of exciting avenues to bring our work to the masses. When people band together they can achieve great things. Pulling our resources together we can make things happen.

Art is a calling. When you answer the call you have to bring it to make a difference. The people who were your heroes and inspiration when you started didn’t get there by playing it safe. More than likely, they broke some rules and rattled some cages.

If we’re to bring back a sense of balance and true diversity of thought to entertainment, you know what to do.