An Inquiry, If You Will
Let's tell better stories. Perhaps a collaboration would help.
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
Notes Comes In Clutch
A compulsion to write means there’s something worthwhile to write about, right? I guess we’ll see by the end of this one. I have brought this prompt up a few times in the last few days with many ideas floating around but nothing firmly in mind.
Earlier I posted something on Notes. It was an exercise and a question I’ve had for a while.
An inquiry, if you will.
If a writer came up to you and asked how we could, as a community of writers, work to tell better stories, what would pop into your head?
And, since that question has the potential to not answer the inquiry itself, what would you tell them?
What resulted was a few responses that really had me thinking, so currently that’s what is on my mind. But why two questions?
The way the first one is formulated it felt possible to answer without whomever commented giving their idea on how we could tell better stories. For instance, one thing that would pop into my head is “Who the hell is this person?”. Or, possibly, “Such insolence! How dare they address me?!”.
Reasonable, right? I think so, personally. Therefore the follow up was necessary. What followed was interesting. Those few responses I got were intriguing. I may be biased, but I think people have the capacity to be endlessly interesting. They’re just so unique, so different, and they see things in a vastly different way than any other person.
With all that said I shouldn’t have been so surprised at the responses.
But I was, which makes me happy.
Now, I understand that Notes on this platform is publicly available but I am still hesitant in posting directly from there to here and highlighting responses. I’m sure it’s not uncouth and I’m sure it’s well within the bounds of acceptability, but it still gives me pause.
So I will paraphrase somewhat.
The first response suggested we step back from our distraction centered existence and allow ourselves to reacclimate to and notice again what we have been ignoring in recent years. So stepping back from screens and noticing those small miracles everywhere.
That sounds like a good step to me. The amount we miss being on our handhelds all day is legion. We should correct this.
The second response was within the same vein, though more centered in existing without a need to connect with the world beyond what’s around us and a reconnection with nature itself. That could be seen as a Gaia centric approach but that isn’t how it struck me, just trying to be who we are, not who we have forced ourselves to be.
Which sounds like a good extension of the idea covered previously.
The third and last one I’ll address directly was about defining better. Now that’s a damn good response. How can we move forward intentionally and efficiently if we don’t have a clear direction? Having a common starting place, which would require agreed upon definitions beforehand, would lend to greater understanding overall. This, in turn, would enhance storytelling because we’re all looking in the direction the story is told from. It’s shared perspective and it’s wonderful.
It’s all wonderful. These were fantastic responses.
There were more responses and they were great. In fact I still need to get to more comments on that Note that I haven’t been able to think about yet. For transparency, I haven’t been able to get this thread out of my mind in order to concentrate on anything further.
So I am glad I got this written. Maybe I can move onto the next ideas.
Thank you
and .To the others, I’m sure to write more on this thread later. For now, it’s getting too close to dinner! And I don’t want to miss the chance to eat.
Love,
Dad
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Wow, thanks for the mention!
This reminds me a bit about some conversations I had at a Homeschool Book Fair recently. We were talking about what makes Christian Fiction. Is it merely fiction that Christians write? Does it need to be gospel drenched? Where are the lines and what... as you asked here... makes it 'better'?
To quote Chesterton again:
"This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern social discussion; that the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the aim. We agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear each other’s eyes out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad thing. We should not by any means all admit that an active aristocracy would be a good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood; but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one. Everyone is indignant if our army is weak, including the people who would be even more indignant if it were strong. The social case is exactly the opposite of the medical case. We do not disagree, like doctors, about the precise nature of the illness, while agreeing about the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half would call blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree about the bad public house. It would be precisely in front of the good public-house that our painful personal fracas would occur.
I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological method is quite useless: that of first dissecting abject poverty or cataloguing prostitution. We all dislike abject poverty; but it might be another business if we began to discuss independent and dignified poverty. We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? I have called this book “What Is Wrong with the World?” and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right."
I enjoyed our exchange immensely.
Thanks for it!