The Story is Fiction

High on any list of nonsense words ought to be “nonfiction”.

There really is no such thing as “nonfiction”.  Even medical journals and scientific papers are just conclusion based upon hypotheses.  Stories borne out of conclusions based on study and information.  A meteorologist gives a story of tomorrow’s weather based upon information and turns it into a (oftentimes farcical) narrative.  We understand that science is not the same as nonfiction.  But a doctor gives an opinion based upon information and everyone takes it as fact.  We like to believe in hard truths, but really the hard part is to accept that everything we experience is just a story that someone is telling us.

Recently, I asked a few people to name three timeless “nonfiction” books—it’s harder than it seems.  Even prominent works like A Brief History of Time is fiction—information as interpreted by Stephen Hawking.  His speculation is based on information.  As nonfiction as The Shining. 

Biographies, autobiographies, technical manuals.  None truer than a Shakespearean tragedy.  The histories of the Bard take details of the lives of kings such as Richard III and Henry VIII to play out as high drama.  The result?  A timeless lesson on conflict and power that has survived for four hundred years.

So what relationship “nonfiction” self-help book will survive the test of time like Romeo and Juliet?  What episode of Oprah will still speak to relationships in four centuries like Much Ado About Nothing?  Fiction gets to the heart of the matter, whereas folks telling facts fail in the interpretation.  Because the real story is always the human one, how we react to the world and how it changes around us.  What does a novel like To Kill a Mockingbird say about human nature that a hundred studies on race relations fail to report?  What insight does Pride and Prejudice give us into social norms and relationships between people in the 19th century?  Fiction gives the human story behind the mutable information, and that is a truth that is truly timeless.

            

The Story in Fourteen Words

“It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Just a few words thrown into the wind to be plucked and pruned.  What new meaning can be construed by a limited bunch of letters?  Information in limited form can be given new beginnings, new endings, or made into something it never was.  Either side can make it mean opposite things depending on agenda and experience.

A story is more than just the last line of the novel.  The whole tale cannot be contained in a random passage plucked from the middle.  An ominous beginning may lead to a brighter end.  The story is more than one single chapter.  More than one paragraph or an especially interesting quote.  The story needs context, history, nuance, mystery.  Don’t believe you can know the whole story by just a few words.

Lately, we are given just a few words of the story.  A single picture from an extended video or a few words from a long speech or a sampling of data without regard to relation or method.  New stories form from this nucleus, and may be something entirely unrelated to the original intent or its actual genesis.  Too often, the story is construed into something fantastical from very limited information. 

“It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” In Catcher in the Rye, what did those last words by J.D. Salinger’s convey about the whole story?  Fourteen people would take those fourteen words and tell fourteen different tales.  We cannot know a novel by its end, nor a whole story by just a few words, nor glean truth from snippets.  The world has been rendered soundbites and memes, a whole fiction based upon just a few random bits of information.

As always, I challenge us to ask questions.  Doubt before deciding.  Wonder instead of settling on a set story.  Don’t believe that you know the whole story by just skipping to the ending . . .