why i tell stories.
"people don't die, rto us, .really die as long as we tell their sories"
—wertperch, at a friend's eulogy c. 1999.
Someone told me recently that they stopped enjoying reading my factual writeups because there was too much story and it got in the way of the facts. Well, Everything2 is not wikipedia, thank goodness; here we are free to inject opinion, background, anecdote and humour into the dry facts.
The aspect of E2 that I enjoy most is that I can, after reading, follow links into other bits of the database. in following these inks I am following in he footsteps of a generation of other readers, who have (inadvertently or deliberately!) left their mental footprints fossilised in the softlinks. It's as though I'm following their trail into new lands, in a way reading their histories, their stories of their journeys through the nodegel.
Referring to the 'dilution of facts with story", well it's true that i used to write just the bare facts of a topic, but for me it's not enough that someone writes about a person as though they were just statistics. born such-and-such a date, did this and that and then died. i want to know what made them write about that person (or place, or thing). I began to realise that when people did tell me why a topic was interesting to them, that the facts became more alive, gained reasons to be read. and so i started to inject more of myself into my writeups, became unafraid to offer my opinions, tell the story of how I got to them.
My maternal grandfather was a great storyteller and pragmatic philosopher. He'd travelled extensively, and while some of the stories he told were doubtless exaggerated tall tales, even to young wertperch they were clearly based in reality. He'd certainly been to India, certainly served in the Army, but sending a tiger to perdition by turning it inside out, well i doubt that happened. Yet despite that I've no doubt that he had seen a tiger in real life. That he decided the best way to learn to play the violin was to learn to build one, i have no doubt. I have seen the violin he built out of old wood in his front-room workshop with its scent of oil and woodshavings.
Grandpa Turner died over forty years ago, but I still miss him, can close my eyes now and see him, either sitting in his chair in the living room with a book or newspaper in his hand, out in his allotment garden tending to his vegetables, or in the workshop tinkering with whatever his latest project was. I still have the box he made out of old cigar boxes, the hinges fastened on with the tiny nails he made himself. That box is one thing i would run in to rescue if the house were on fire, one of the few things i decided to bring with me to the US, from England. it reminds me of some of the stories he told me, facts told from a personal perspective as aell as his tall tales.
One day all that will be left of me are the few things i have written here, and others' memories of me. it's only fair that I include some of myself, some of my story here, in with the sticks and stones of facts. Scoff if you must, but I want to leave more than a few fattened worms when i have finally slipped the bonds of flesh and bone to go to whatever new journey awaits. i want people to continue to tell my story, just as I have told Christine's now that she's left us. as I've told her story (my story!) to others, they have become part of he story too. And so on it goes, the story growing with each telling as more people retell it and rejoice in it. />
Jet-Poop says I honestly want to see more factuals that mix in some storytelling.
etouffee says re Everything is story: this place has survived- and works best when it is both- factual /educational and fiction/ entertaining-both serve our purpose
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