Trafficking In Make-Believe

Tell Your Story

A friend of mine once told me, referring to the creative act, that ‘people have taken something that should be joyful and turned it into a fucking science.’ I liked that, because it’s true. No matter what medium you practice, no matter what form of art fills whichever creative desire you have, there exists a legion of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ who have taken it upon themselves to provide us all with the ‘correct’ way we should be doing things. The problem is, quite often the ‘correct’ way is always something different, depending on who you ask or who you choose to listen to. We engage (hopefully) in the creative areas we love because it fulfills this need, this sort of intangible ‘thing’ that is often hard to explain to those who either don’t delve into creative endeavors, or simply don’t care for them at all. In other words, we do what we do because we love to do it.

The reasons why people write fiction are as various as the number of those who actually do it so there is no point in trying to tease it all out here. If you’re a writer of fiction, you know why you’re doing it, but I bet, over everything else, the love of doing it is primary. You have to do it. You love to create stories, to express yourself, perhaps even relate an event in your life which may connect with someone in a meaningful way. I know many of the great authors have done that for me (and even the not-so-great ones). It’s something that isn’t easily definable, but there’s a reason why human beings love to tell stories to one another and have been doing so since the beginning of time. It’s part of what makes us human. In fact, it is human.

Unfortunately, as my friend pointed out, there is a tendency for those of us who write stories, poems, novels, or plays, to take ourselves a little too seriously at times. Take the work seriously, sure. Try to make it as good as you can make it. Please yourself first and perhaps you’ll be able to please others. Writing is not an easy endeavor. All one has to do is try it and they’ll soon learn it’s not something you can just pull out of a hat (although many of the great authors throughout time make it seem as if it is). What I’m getting at is the ‘making it into a fucking science’ part my friend had said. I understood what she meant. It wasn’t about the craft of writing, or the mechanics of it, or the difficulty of putting something together cohesive enough for others to enjoy and relate to. No, what she meant was those who took something that should bring the creator joy, something that should be fun, and turn it into an endeavor of stress and quite often crippling self-doubt.

I got to thinking about how we all, as children, begin to create something, whatever it may be — a crayon scribble on a piece of paper, a hodgepodge of cut construction paper, a macaroni collage, an attempt to draw your mom and dad standing outside your house with a huge sun hanging over their heads, or whatever else pops into a child’s mind. When a child is engaged in such an activity, most likely they feel some sense of joy as they are creating whatever it is they are creating. The time has not yet come where self-appointed guardians are standing at the gate, ready to rip the child’s drawing to pieces, destroying their self-confidence, and making what was once an act of joyful play into the head banging, stressful, neurotic thing it eventually becomes for most of us. Who would take their child’s drawing and tell them face to face that they suck, or they are doing something wrong, or perhaps tear it up in their face and tell them to give it up, there’s no hope for them?

However, we are not children anymore and have moved into the adult world, where pettiness, envy, or merely the desire to blow out someone’s candle in order to make one’s own shine brighter often rules the roost. Hierarchies were imposed and others allowed them to exist, either willingly, or by default. You can argue until the end of time whether or not these hierarchies are necessary, or whether or not there is a need for ‘gatekeepers’ to filter out the ‘crap’ from the works deemed ‘worthy’ of one’s attention. Art by its very nature is supremely subjective. One person’s garbage is another person’s gold, as the saying goes.

Writers of fiction, at least from my point of view, are in love with storytelling. Why else would they do it? Writers of fiction are participating in something that has taken place since time immemorial, even before any writing systems were even invented, when humankind was an oral culture. Tens of thousands of years of storytelling before the first Sumerian cuneiforms, people told stories to one another, some so engaging they became the myths we still read today. Religions were even founded on them. Writing and storytelling is a very powerful thing, a very human thing. So those of you out there writing fiction and telling stories, you are participating in something quite profound when you stop and think about it.

I try to imagine the first storytellers, sitting around a campfire at night, the whole clan or tribe huddled together for warmth, while the group’s storyteller spins another tale. I am almost certain, at times, one story was received better than others, or even one storyteller was loved more than another would have been, but people still did it, they still told their stories, making up things, perhaps to better help understand the world around them and for things that weren’t easily explainable, such as why they even existed in the fist place. Perhaps it was entertainment, to allow those in the group an escape after hunting all day, or gathering food, or taking care of the children. I am also certain there wasn’t a group of people standing around, listening to the stories first, then deciding whether or not one should be allowed to tell it to the group. In the end, some stories endured while others — perhaps most — were long forgotten.

Things aren’t much different today, but the difference now is there are those who decide to become our culture’s storytellers and take themselves, and not their stories, way too seriously. Back then, storytelling was an essential part of the human experience, but it certainly wasn’t more important than hunting down that animal so the clan could eat for the day, or keeping predators at bay in order to live to see the next morning, or caring for an infant who had gotten sick. What storytellers did then, just as they do now, is traffic in make-believe, and are quite often doing so against the ‘dictates’ and ‘permission’ of the so-called ‘gatekeepers’.

We writers of fiction — no matter your status on the literary totem pole — are making shit up, perhaps throwing in bits and pieces of our lives and experiences into the mix, but we are just making things up just the same, things and events which don’t exist, no matter how realistic our stories may be. Some of these stories today, as in ages past, are universal, stand the test of time, and they resonate with us in such a way, they remind us or affirm our humanity. Or should, anyway. It doesn’t always have to be that, though. It can be also be entertainment, but what often entertains us can also carry a very powerful message or allow for some profound insight about ourselves. It can allow us forget the hardships of life, the real important things, but a good story can also help us through those trying times, learn about one another, teach us to become more empathetic and more open to the world outside what we immediately see and experience.

Imagination and creativity are two essential ingredients why we are where we are today and not still sitting around a fire at night, hunting animals with sticks and stones, but in a lot of ways, we aren’t much different from that either. The only difference now is that the art of storytelling has fallen into the realm of commerce and big business, and so long as it remains there, there are always going to be those who feel it is their duty to let some people tell their stories and disallow others from doing the same. But they can’t stop you. They can only stop you from becoming ‘famous’. They can only stop you from going to fancy cocktail parties and hobnobbing with the so-called ‘important people.’ They can only stop you from becoming a ‘celebrity’. They can’t shut you up. They can’t keep you from doing what you love to do.

So for all us traffickers in make-believe, take advantage of the technology that now exists — which was unthinkable when I was young — and tell your story. Stand up around the campfire and sing it with all the joy you can muster. If some don’t like it, so be it. If others do, all the better. The important thing is to just do it. Do it for the joy it brings. Do it for learning something about the world. Do it for learning something about yourself. Be human. Tell your story.

This is a slightly revised version which originally appeared in Angie’s Diary, 2013