The longest story short - Parte Dos

Here’s a perspective: A story is a string of salient events in the lives of the protagonist(s).

How do we decide the precise significance of an event in a story? More importantly, what really qualifies as an event? Is an event something out of the usual and having importance to the broad story line or could it be anything that occurs in the story involving the protagonist – one can argue that anything that occurs in a person’s life will be significant unless we have a yardstick to measure it with some other events. This means that the significance of events in a story could be directly proportional to the number of characters in it. For example: if the story were just about one character, the comparison of events in the life of this character will be just with their life events. However, let’s add another character to the story and you get a broader spectrum for comparison. Say you have to write a story in a finite set of chapters – in order to make it a succinct read – you will tend to leave off the extraneous details or occurrences.

That brings us back to the main question: what qualifies as an event in a story? In a story involving 2 people, an event in one person’s life compared with the other’s will emerge as the significant incident if it takes the story forward in narrative by leaps and bounds, has the ability to transfix the reader and moves the story decidedly towards its conclusion. So, a story is a series of such significant episodes with character precis, location details and weather summaries thrown in as fillers or glue.

That got me wondering: in a story having just 1 person, you could call “having a birthday” as a significant event. Widen the group to say a family, and you can call “celebrating a festival” as an event. Further widening the group to say a city, you can call “winning a sports championship” as an event. Furthering the expansion to a country, an indigenously developed satellite launch can be an event. Now let’s consider the world, and a “war” between countries would be an event. Going further, discoveries of hidden galaxies in far parts of cosmos would be a significant event in the story of the outer space: a gigantic asteroid travelling in high velocity towards a planet 10 times the size of the Earth and smashing it to smithereens would be a catastrophic event! Now compare that to the event of “having one’s birthday”!!!! Somewhere in space a planet just got blasted to pieces and elsewhere someone celebrated the day of being born! Now there’s an irony to that for sure!

Never mind! A story is a story! And everyone can choose the story they relate to. So, no story is too small or too larger than life. The profundity is in the perspective! 

The longest story short - Part One

Here’s some food for thought: do you really need any real life experience to be a good writer, song writer or a painter for being a highly regarded creative artist? Of course, some may argue that a vast real life experience would tend to give an edge to people over those who lack it. However, I want to question the basis of this assumption: what really is a real life experience? How real is real life anyway? We live mostly in our own heads. So does it really matter if we’ve been out there and done that? What if someone has a highly active imagination of such intensity that it can leave someone else’s swathes of real life experience far, far behind and what if they present an equally compelling portrait of creativity? Which one will be regarded better by an audience: the one from the person who had lived out a lot or the one from the person who had lived much more inside their own head? Is it difficult to imagine a vast dimension of world inside your own head? And if so why?

Consider Sir Issac Newton. He was already living inside his own head solving complex life questions, working hard towards finding the meaning of life. He already had put up enough work in that direction. You can’t really claim that just because Newton decided one day to take a stroll outside, got tired and sat under a tree where an apple famously fell on his head that he suddenly became aware in an inspiring way regarding the existence of gravity. That would be like cheating Newton out of all the hard work he had put up in that direction in the first place.

So, to bring a long story short, the whole purpose of this rigmarole  is to find out whether I can be a writer of any good regard or not. I happen to believe I lack most of the real life experience that people so much boast about. But I also happen to have an unusually active imagination. Imagination, that more often than not, takes me into the realms of surrealism. Of course I agree, surrealism is not reality. It’s far, far removed from what is reality as we know it. But my question is, is reality really real? It’s like Schrodinger would’ve said, can you really predict the outcome of the cat experiment? If you say the cat lives before opening the lid of the box and the cat actually perishes, you’ve just changed the reality that you perceive. So when reality itself is as surreal as surrealism is, why do we bother with being in the “real” world and having a “real life” experience? How much better off will we be if we have one, and how much better off will we be if we decide not to have any?