The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: stories

  • Getting Away

    tumblr_m6o8rdALXy1qhwhflI like to be entertained by stories. I want to be taken away to a place I’ve never been or to see place I’m familiar with in a new way.

    That’s not asking too much, is it?

    Now, don’t get me wrong – we need all kinds of stories. We learn from them, we are informed by them, hopefully we take them to heart and not too seriously. Except when we should. It’s complicated.

    But it shouldn’t be. We should be able to discern which stories are entertainment and which are informative. The blurred lines of our society right now make that sometimes very, very difficult.  (more…)

  • We Will Always Need Cautionary Tales

    Lighthouse
    Like a lighthouse, stories can guide us through some dark places and help us avoid dangers we would not see.

    After Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 — his dystopian novel of a world where books are burned — he reportedly told interviewers “I wasn’t trying to tell the future, I was trying to prevent it.”

    Fahrenheit 451 is a cautionary tale, like so many of my favorite stories. If you think about it, some of the best stories are those that warn us of some great danger — real or imagined.

    • Ancient literature — From dealing with the devil to receiving wishes from a djinn, we are advised to be careful when dealing with supernatural creatures. The outcome is often not what we want, and it may cost us our souls.
    • History — We know to beware of Greeks bearing gifts, because — as the people of Troy found out only too well — a gift from an enemy can be a trap.
    • Fairy tales — The stories of “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Hansel and Gretel,” tell children to stay out of the woods because they are filled with dangerous animals and dark-hearted crones.
    • Science fiction — Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein warns of the hubris of human scientific advancement. As does the more recent Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.  Just because we can do something, does that mean we should?

    (more…)

  • There Are No Stories Here

    The world doesn’t need stories. Stories are purely entertainment, a way to fritter away time better No_booksspent being constructive.

    Think of the money we would all save without stories.

    Books, of course—that’s the obvious one. We could get rid of all the bookcases around our house, as well as the expensive e-readers.

    I know a lot of people have cancelled cable, but they still watch television shows through other avenues. Without stories, not only would we save on Netflix/Hulu/other sources of streaming content, we’d also save on the television itself. (more…)

  • Escaping Reality

    Every person has their own reason for picking up a book. Sometimes it is because a teacher has given them an assignment, other times it is because they need to escape to a fantasy world, and sometimes it is simply for the sheer delight of reading. The world needs stories. It needs people to come up with these tales and twist the words into phrases that will tease the imaginations of their audiences.

    For me, reading has always been an escape. It is a chance to immerse myself into the life of another person. I cry with them. I laugh with them. For the duration of the book, and usually hours after as well, my life revolves around theirs. I can set aside everything that troubles me in my life and live the life of another person and, when the book ends, I walk away with a new friend. A friend I know is always waiting for me whenever I need to escape from the stress of the real world. (more…)

  • Stories to Keep the Mind Engaged

    Because the human brain is what it is, we need stories.

    I think the first stories started as oral history – life lessons and wisdom passed down through generations. The history of our people is important. In theory, it helps prevent us making the same mistakes over again. Stories can impart morals by example – the Boy Who Cried Wolf being one of my favorite examples. Also, it seems easier to remember facts if they are presented as a tale rather than facts. People retain the enjoyable and interesting, not the dry and boring.

    Stories are also of value because they help people relate their experiences to one another. As humans, we all need validation. If we tell a story, and someone else has a similar story, we are affirmed and feel right. We can also share our stories so that our memories live on. Someday, I’d like the next generation – maybe my own children – to know what happened to me in my life, so in a way I am immortalized. (more…)

  • Stories of the Mind

    The world needs stories for a simple reason. Stories define us. Forget about the books you read or the movies you watch. Those aren’t the important stories. The important ones are the tales that never see the light of day. These stories exist only in the minds of every person everywhere, shaping our lives.

    I’m going to throw out a statistic here that I made up on the spot and is probably wrong. 99.9% of all stories will never been seen or heard by anyone other then the storyteller.. They’re the stories we tell ourselves, the fantasies we concoct when bored or the dreams we have in that awesome moment of sleep where we can kind of control what’s going on. They’re the lies we imagine about ourselves and others in order to stay sane. No one will ever hear them, no one will ever know them, but they are stories essential to the well-being of the mind.

    Stories are how we sort through our problems. When something goes wrong, this is how we cope. We make stories about difficult situations and potential resolutions. The point of these stories isn’t to find an actual solution, but to explore every possibility, and maybe relive some of the best ones, in order to get rid of the dredge so your problems don’t effect the rest of your life.

    The world doesn’t need stories as much as the individual needs stories. We need the narrative in our lives in order to get our way through the boring parts and relive the great parts. Unlike real life, stories almost always have happy endings. Even the ones that don’t end happily at least make sense and end with a purpose. Isn’t that something we all strive for in our own personal story?

  • Base Instinct

    evolution-406x226Why does the world need stories? I don’t know that we have a choice in the matter. Stories seem to be the thing that separates us from the animals. Forget about writers for a moment. Forget about books and movies. All of that is just an extreme extension of a base instinct. Even if you took that all the way, we are a story species.

    When you see someone you haven’t seen for a couple of days, the first thing you do is tell a story of what you did last weekend. When you get up in the morning and look at the paper, you are reading a story. When you get in the car and turn on the radio, regardless of your listening preferences, you hear a story.

    Our religions are based on stories, some of the most archetypal stories in history. Our philosophies are based on narratives. Decartes meditated in the form of narratives. Plato put forth his theories in the form of fictionalized dialogues of his teacher Socrates. Everything we know and do is based around a story, a dream, a narrative powered by aspirations and advertising. (more…)

  • Do We Need Stories? (Week of February 3)

    Imagine ancient man, sitting at a campfire with his family and friends. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider what happened next. He started telling a story. Whether it was a recounting of the days hunt, or a wish for a plentiful summer, it is highly likely that early man told stories.

    And we still do today.

    But are stories really necessary these days? We’re connected as never before in a web of communication. We have facts and data at our fingertips. Scripted television seems to be dying, replaced by reality shows. The media has made celebrities of people whose lives are recorded and viewed for our pleasure.

    This week, we’re asking the writers in the Cafe to ponder the imponderable: “Why does our world need stories?” Can humanity survive without them? Are they necessary to our existence? Are they a frivolous luxury for the rich and idle who are not working?

    We hope you enjoy our responses to this question. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.

    Until next week,

    The Cafe Management

  • You Can’t Go Wrong with Books

    Writers are not hard to buy for. I promise you, they are probably the easiest group of people (aside from kids – why do I have twenty things I want to buy the five-year-old but can’t think of a single thing to buy my Dad?) to shop for.

    Why?

    Easy. We love stories. Anything that comes in story form is perfect for us.

    (more…)

  • Who are you and what do you want?: Developing characters and finishing what I start

    Back when I never finished anything, I used to just give my characters a name and a situation and watch the ‘fun’.

    But it wasn’t enough, I cannot be pantsless (See Confabulator Ted Boone’s Pants are optional. Plans are not. | Confabulator Cafe.) and I never finished anything! And it wasn’t all that fun, either.  Not that it was their fault. Among other things, I found through this process that I needed to know these people extremely well to have a grasp on how they might act, or react, to other characters and the situations I put them in, and, come to think of it, what the situations might be that they’d be in in the first place.  Is this making sense?  Hello?

    Writers need limits, or this one does anyway, to circumscribe the possibilities, to give boundaries to work in, to pressure the work to make it go.  Willy nilly is too chaotic for me, too many choices (like those giant @&#% menus at chain restaurants) made me a worse writer, and I NEVER FINISHED ANYTHING. Did I mention that?

    Now I use character worksheets to help me think about what these people look like, their backgrounds, relationships, desires; I use screenwriting techniques; I brainstorm with people about what might work; I practice with my characters in situations other than the story I think they want to tell.  I think hard about them:  What do they want to say? What do they want more than anything in the world? What’s to stop them? Then what? Go from the inside out. I’ve ‘finished’ some things, but it doesn’t end there–I’m still trying to make them better in revision, and I find getting down to the base motivations of my characters is a big part of that making that process better, too.

    As for the reader, oh yeah, I do not want to insult the reader with boring, cliché, two dimensional characters, the actions need to flow coherently from who these people are and if they don’t, well, I hope you do shut your laptop or throw down the pages in disgust. I’m lucky to have your attention in the first place.  And that’s a pretty good motivator…