C1015-1 Writing Stories: Dialogue

A. GOOD DIALOGUE IS OFTEN INCOHERENT (This Example is From the Movie, Topsy-Turvy):

(1) Kitty: [sitting in her bed, looking at Gilbert] “Did you dine at the Beeksteak Club?”
(2) Gilbert: [sitting in a chair alongside Kitty’s bed, looking straight ahead] “Yes...somewhat unsatisfactorily.”
( 3) Kitty: “Oh! You missed Mrs. Chad’s rarebit curry.”
( 4) Gilbert: “One gets the impression that everyone is snickering behind one’s back”
( 5) Kitty: “Perhaps you could have some for tomorrow’s lunch.”
( 6) Gilbert: “‘The King of Topsy-Turvydom!’ It’s humiliating!”
( 7) Kitty: “You look a little uncomfortable.”
( 8) Gilbert: “I’m comfortable enough. [pause] I watched a bit from the wings.”
( 9) Kitty: “Oh, did you?”
(10) Gilbert: “First Act. Seemed to be going rather well, surprisingly.”
(11) Kitty: “There, you see. [pause; looks toward the foot of the bed; then she looks at a book she holds in her hands] Would you like me to read to you?”
(12) Gilbert: “No, thank you. I’ll leave you. You must be tired.”
(13) Kitty: “No, I’m not in the slightest.”
(14) Gilbert: “It’s wrong for me to unburden myself on you.”
(15) Kitty: “Don’t be silly. That’s why I’m here. [pats the bedcovers with her hand] Come and talk to your Kitty.”
(16) Gilbert: [rising from his chair; looking off into space] “Sometimes one wonders why one bothers. They say jump; you jump. [turning toward Kitty] Good night, my dear.” [Gilbert exits the room]

B. COMMENT: Real dialogue often does not follow previous statements in a way that would imply that one statement is linked to another with some linguistic or logical necessity. Instead, one might notice an abrupt disconnect between statements, as in the sample of dialogue above. I use the word “statement” here to mean any verbal utterance by either party in the dialogue.

In this scene, William S. Gilbert, the lyricist of those redoubtable Gilbert & Sullivan works, is seen sitting on a chair in his wife’s (“Kitty”) bedroom. He has just returned from the opening performance of one of his newest operettas. He is rather distraught by the uncharitable comments of a newspaper critic about his work. Kitty, however, true to her depiction in this movie as a rather flighty person, begins by asking a highly irrelevant question. She does not ask about the performance of the operetta; instead she asks about something much more prosaic. She asks about his supper.

Kitty’s straightforward question in statement, (1), “Did you dine at the Beeksteak Club?” is answered in a logical and linear manner by Gilbert in statement, (2), “Yes...somewhat unsatisfactorily.” Then Kitty adds a slight irrelevancy, (3), “Oh! You missed Mrs. Chad’s rarebit curry.” Gilbert’s response, however, pertains to comments made in a newspaper about his latest operetta, (4), “One gets the impression that everyone is snickering behind one’s back.” His remark does not respond to Kitty’s comment about Mrs. Chad’s rarebit curry. The screenwriter uses this bit of misdirection in the dialogue to reveal aspects of Gilbert’s and Kitty’s personalities that could not be given by other means: the two have a tendency to talk past one another and to ignore the other’s statements. Kitty continues her statement, (5), “Perhaps you could have some for tomorrow’s lunch.” Gilbert counters with, (6), “‘The King of Topsy-Turvydom!’ It’s humiliating!”

This incoherent dialogue results from incoherency of agonistic concerns. As long as the speakers have exactly similar interests, the dialogue is coherent. But when the speakers do not share the same interest, the dialogue slips into the incoherency of divided interests: she speaks about the things that most attract her interest, and he speaks about things that concern him. As a result, they “talk past each one another.”

Artistically speaking, it would not be wise to allow an incoherent dialogue to continue apace. Appropriately then, the screenwriter nudges the dialogue back into a fleeting coherency with Kitty stating, (7), “You look a little uncomfortable”, with Gilbert replying, (8a), “I’m comfortable enough.” But then things slip back into incoherency with another burst of irrelevancy: Gilbert adds, (8b), “I watched a bit from the wings.” His statement does not follow the previous comments about looking “a little uncomfortable.” He has steered the conversation back to one that should be expected of a man returning home from a premier of his operetta.

Even so, Gilbert’s statement, (8b), “I watched a bit from the wings,” introduces a new coherent dialogue, when Kitty replies, (9), “Oh, did you?”, and he responds with, (10) “First Act. Seemed to be going rather well, surprisingly.” Kitty approves by saying, (11a), “There, you see.”

Then the dialogue collapses into incoherency once again when Kitty says, (11b), “Would you like me to read to you?” Of course he doesn’t want her to read to him: he wants her to engage in a dialogue with him about his operetta. Instead, she asks such an irrelevant question that he decides to terminate the conversation, (12), “No, thank you. I’ll leave you. You must be tired.” She replies (coherently, by the way), (13), “No, I’m not in the slightest.” He slides off into another incoherent response, (14), “It’s wrong for me to unburden myself on you.” She replies (coherently, again), (15), “Don’t be silly. That’s why I’m here. Come and talk to your Kitty.” Gilbert answers her with a non sequitur by saying, (16a), “Sometimes one wonders why one bothers. They say jump; you jump. And then he adds the most incoherent statement of all, (16b), Good night, my dear,” and the scene ends.

In my opinion, this is a brilliant piece of dialogue.

C. PRINCIPLES: Authentic dialogue is often non-linear and incoherent. This is reflected in the fact that segments of dialogue do not always follow each other in the way that we would expect. Instead, dialogue is frequently disjunctive and incoherent. Stylistically, the artist properly utilizes this aspect of dialogue to flesh out his characters in a story and to give them definition.

Authentic dialogue reflects the concerns of the speaker. That is, the character speaking a line of dialogue usually expresses the things that concern him and not the things that concern others. At its most extreme case, such a dialogue may appear as two separate, parallel arguments that intersect only briefly - if at all - and then only temporarily. At the other extreme, the dialogue may be completely coherent. In fact, we have a term of art for a person who is unusually good at engaging in a conversation: we say that he is “a good listener.” What we really mean, however, is that such a person follows the expressed concerns of the other so well that no incoherency can occur. The “good listener” adopts the concerns of the speaker so completely that no disjunction is possible. Since there are agonistic characters in a story - characters who “fight each other” - their dialogue must be agonistic at times.

Authentic dialogue utilizes just enough incoherency to make things interesting. Just as a small amount of spice can enliven food, an over-abundant use of spice - or incoherent dialogue - can ruin the product. A measured amount of incoherent dialogue gives stylistic strength to a story. But, dear friends, all things in good measure.

F3200-1 Writing Stories: Emotions

1. THE CASCADING OF EMOTION: Emotions do not occur in isolation with one another. Rather, something external triggers a cascade of emotions in the person. To give a typical example, suppose a person gets a letter from another person. The letter is opened and read and the reader becomes angry. Usually, the event is depicted in just such a way: he read the letter and he got angry. In reality, the emotional cascade the person goes through takes place something like this: 1). the letter sparks curiosity in the reader: “What is it?”; 2). the reading of the letter leads to the comprehension of meaning: “What does it mean?”; 3). The person realizes the implications of the letter: “I can’t believe she really means this.”; 4). the person has an emotional response, i.e., gets angry; 5). The person “cools off” and regains her composure in a process I call the coda. So, the cascade seen here, then, is curiosity, comprehension, implication, emotional response and coda. The emotion of anger does not occur in isolation: it results from the cascade or chain of events that precedes and precipitates it, and it is followed by a cascade of events that follows it. The cascades always terminate in a coda or “letting off steam” period that eventually returns some stasis to the individual. When depicting the cascade in fictional characters, it is always necessary to show each behavioral activity that finally results in the ultimate emotion (but see below).

2. THE CLUSTERING OF EMOTIONS: Again, to take the previous example of getting a letter, the cascade leading to the emotion of anger engenders auxiliary emotions, such as, betrayal, confusion, despair, grief, hatred, hostility, irritation, resignation, resentment, revenge, sadness, shame, sorrow, etc., whose aggregate effect is to produce a cluster of emotional responses. To state merely that “a person got angry,” does not list the full panorama of emotions that the person might have at the time. Remember that the emotions are triggered by a cascade of events and produce clusters of attendant emotions. Emotions seldom occur in isolation with one another other and it is important to remember that when depicting emotional responses in fictional characters. Show the whole shebang.

3. THE SPECTRUM OF EMOTIONS: The range of emotional responses is characterized by a multiplicity of apparent and unapparent emotions. Some emotions are highly visible and almost always are understood by the observer without any misapprehension. Strong, powerful emotions, such as anger, hatred, etc., are in this category. Whenever a person is extremely angry, the observer will almost invariably know that the person is angry. Other emotions are practically undecipherable because one cannot “read” the outward evidence of the emotional response in the facial appearance, gestures, verbal clues, etc. of the other person. Yet, it would be a significant mistake to misread or ignore those relatively unseen emotional responses because they form the basis for enduring and settled opinions in the person whose emotions are being misread.

C1008-3 Writing Stories: Narratives

1.    OUR STORY:  Each of us has a cluster of stories, personal vocabulary, quirky, idiosyncratic habits and sayings that in totality constitute what might be called “our narrative.”  Often, but not always, our characteristic gruntings most aptly define and characterize who we really are.  To be sure, we should recognize that there are times when we can give the impression that we are espousing a particular notion by using some particular piece of vocabulary when we, in fact, believe quite otherwise.  Yet, we should also be aware that the impression that others form after dealing with us often come from small - even unitary - words, gestures, or phrases.  When we hear someone using a word like “karma” in a conversation, our minds automatically pigeonhole the speaker as one familiar with Hindu philosophy, even when doing so might well be a mistake.  After all, the speaker’s usage may reflect only a passing familiarity with the word rather than a settled philosophical conviction.
     If we had sufficient time and opportunity to observe and listen to an individual, we would begin to assemble an accurate picture of that person’s narrative.  We might recognize then that “karma” was a word our narrator used whenever he wanted to give the impression of sophistication, even though he may have thought that the concept of karma itself was silly beyond comprehension.  Only long exposure to his narrative would reveal the true beliefs of the narrator.

2.    INCOMPETENT NARRATION:  There are those who reveal their uttermost characteristics in a chaotic and incompetent manner.  Such people are, as the saying would have it, their own worst enemies.  It is not that they actively seek to deceive their auditors.  Rather, they are incapable of delivering a coherent message to others, or of expressing themselves in a way that can readily be understood (cf. “A fool’s narration is like a burden on a journey, but delight will be found in the speech of the intelligent” [Sir. 21:16]).  They are inadvertently ambiguous communicators.  Sometimes we refer to this phenomenon in a particular situation by saying that “he cannot tell a joke.”  In a similar manner, others cannot tell their personal narrative without creating a great deal of confusion in their listeners.  Often the reaction of others is perplexity and confusion.  “What the hell did he mean by that?” is a typical follow-up question to his narrative.  So, all I can say is: Hey, you people know who you are.

3.    MISLEADING NARRATION:  At other times, circumstances force us to make assessments of others based largely upon a single word, gesture or phrase.  The fleeting burst of information that comes our way is often insufficient to make an honest and realistic appraisal of the other person.  Thus, a misunderstood word here and there can take our minds off and running in inappropriate directions, when a more faithful transmission of information would never allow us to misinterpret what we are hearing in such a way.  A smiling person may convince us that he is warmhearted; when he may be, in fact, a simpering idiot who grins at the wind and every passing car just because he doesn’t know any better.  Or, conversely, the unsmiling man we meet may appear grim and forbidding, when he may have just forgotten “to look pleasant,” as his wife told him earlier in the day, just before he slammed his fingers in the car door.  We can be seriously misled by these momentary bursts of narration (or looks) and we should always be open to the possibility that our “first impressions” are just that: they are first - and not necessarily correct - impressions.

4.    OPINION-FORMING NARRATION:  I once met a man at a wedding reception.  He was standing outside the reception hall and he was “watching the sky,” as he explained to me.  I wondered very greatly what it meant to “watch the sky.”  I asked him why he was doing that.  He seemed to notice that I was perplexed by his intense scrutiny of the skies, and I think he anticipated my question.  He suggested darkly that “they were spraying here last week, and now everybody was going to get sick.”  I was surprised by his remarks and I asked him who was spraying what.  He said the 910th Airlift Wing was flying those C130 aircraft on those lowpass missions over the village again, and that they were spraying biological agents on the people.  “I could see the liquid shooting out of the nozzles at the rear of the planes.  You watch and see,” he said.  “Everybody is going to get the flu or whatever it was that they were pumping into the air.”
     Well, yes.  I had seen the very same airplanes from time to time myself.  They were flying very low, just above the treetops.  The noise from their turboprops created a huge rumble over the village.  But I never suspected that they were spraying anything from the rear of the fuselage.  And since I had no other source of information about airplanes spraying pestilence or other apocalyptic substances into the air, I could only conclude that my sky-watcher was a disturbed individual suffering from some ill-defined paranoia.  The narration I heard from him did not move me from indifference to concern about the spraying per se; rather, it made me think I was dealing with a garden-variety, certifiable nut.  And his “narration” made me think that he was bonkers.

5.    CIVIC NARRATION:  Any definable group of people (tribe, city, state or country; organization, etc.) will possess what might be called a civic narrative that describes the hopes, dreams, pride, regrets, shameful nostalgia and other items of interest to that community.

a.    LOST PAST NARRATIVES: For example, I saw an obituary in my local newspaper several months ago for a man who had been the president of the labor union in a shop where I had once worked.  He had retired some months before I actually began working there.  As a result, I cannot really say that I knew him.  But I did hear quite a bit about him because he was one of those legendary, fire-breathing union presidents.
     He was a person who “pioneers” a spate of radicalness in a company just before the bottom falls out. And, at the end of the day, that man’s grandsons must move away from the area because the grandfather had created the very conditions that sent jobs elsewhere.
     For this area where I live, that is a rather common story.  In fact, it is the defining story of this region: a nostalgia for the very things that unionism has destroyed.  Much of the city looks like Warsaw after WWII.  Hundreds of hulking, empty brick buildings stand in testimony to the thoroughness of the unions’ destructiveness.
     The one thing a visitor to this area will notice immediately is that none of the locals ever see a connection between the rabid unionism of the past and the dearth of jobs now.  Somehow, in their minds, the two events are disconnected, unhappy co-incidences and really have nothing to do one with the other.  Instead, what the visitor sees is nothing but an obstinate blindness about the region’s unionized past.
     The city has lost 50,000 residents since I moved into this area thirty-some years ago.  It is now of such a small size that it cannot effectively counter the Republican votes of the other parts of the state.  That is significant because presidential elections are lost without this counterbalance.  But more importantly, the loss of population is a reflection of past union”triumphs” which resulted in chasing manufacturing concerns to the American South or overseas.
      Almost everyone around here remembers the heyday of manufacturing when General Motors, Delphi Automotive, General Electric, Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet &Tube and others employed tens of thousands of people.  In their minds they couple a prosperous middle class with strong unions and imply a casualty that does not really exist.  They forget the heady machinations of mere co-incidence.  Yes, strong unions existed then, along with a prosperous middle class.  But then, strong unions co-existed as well with, say, an imperial Soviet Union.  One could hardly suppose unions “caused” that imperialism or vice versa.  The two existed on the same planet at the same time without any connection between the two.
     It is important to remember that a union at it most basic level is a coercive, collusive, and adversarial party in a labor negotiation.  It does not exist to con-celebrate prosperity or indulge in feel-good sentiments about shared success.  Instead, it seeks to sequester some of that prosperity for benefit of its members at the expense of the owner/investor class.  Unions, when they are most effective, take so much away from the owner/investor that they destroy the host much like an incompetent parasite.
     The loss of 50,000 residents from the city is proof positive that the union efforts have been successful in destroying every employment opportunity in this area.  Rational owner/investors who sink large sums of money into facilities and equipment (think of a steel mill, for example) do not just walk away from those investments unless it becomes uneconomic to continue in the business.

b.    PESSIMISM OF USELESS MYTHS:  In the United States, the “Lost Cause” narrative of the American South is prototypical of such a narrative.  It describes in endless detail the reasons why the South should have won the American Civil War (1861-1865).

c.    IMPROBABLE DREAM OF RECAPTURING THE PAST:  So often a narrative  of this type will center on the rebuilding of an amusement park or downtown theater that now lies in a state of utter disrepair.  The thinking seems to be that the lost glories of the area will be reestablished by the incidental restoration of a particular form of architecture from that lost past.  It is the silly dream of nostalgia clouding the judgment of an otherwise rational people.

C1008-2 Writing Stories: General

1.    UNIVERSALITY:  All people at all times have used stories to communicate important cultural values from one generation to another.  Stories have universal usage.  And even though some people might disagree, it could be argued that man is a storytelling animal rather than (or primarily) a tool-using animal.  I think we would be very surprised to find a people totally devoid of story telling.

            “In my experience on the air, I have found that the best question for bringing a lofty or difficult conversation back to a usable place for the listener is: ‘What do you mean when you say that?’  The more thoughtful answers almost always contain a story.  And the most vivid personal stories have the most universal reach, elevating our sense of others and of the humanity we share” (Krista Trippett,  “Word Craft: Rules for Discussing The Meaning Of It All,” The Wall Street Journal, 20-21 November 2010, p. C12.)

2.    FORMS:  Often the stories people tell are anecdotal and personal, and in that way, family members come to understand their place and importance within the family; their relationship to others within the community; and their culture within the context of the world community.  Stories can be quite informal and unsophisticated, as in a scribbled note to one’s spouse “to pick up the dry cleaning.”  On the other hand, stories can be quite formal and elaborate, as in novels such as, War and Peace, or, Gone With the Wind.  And though one might be reluctant to admit it, even such things as legal depositions are stories in their most elemental essence.  Stories, then, come in an array of styles, structures, and modes.

3.    TYPE:  Since stories come in this astonishing variety of forms, it is sometimes difficult for an auditor to tell the difference between a story that is purely fictional and one that is purely nonfictional.  One is apt to encounter stories that blend smoothly from one pure form to another without the disjuncts that might signal their prosaic and distinctive origins.  We might observe, though, that fictional forms are frequently characterized by names and circumstances that are obviously concocted by the author.  We seldom confuse those concocted fictional elements with the realistic descriptions that we might find in nonfiction works.  Often bland character names and insipid character settings tell us that we’re dealing with fiction; whereas, a person with the name such as Waldemar Schlachtenhaufen might sound so real that no fiction author would tag his character with such an unwieldy  name.  Yet, we recognize that a skillful storyteller can so mix those elements that we can never really tell for sure whether he is “making it up” or if he is faithfully narrating a circumstance that actually took place.  Some recent docudramas on television show this very technique: the intermixing of fiction and nonfiction, with very uneven results.

4.    FACTUAL CONTENT:  It is quite a different matter, however, with works of nonfiction.  We almost always know that a piece of nonfiction is, in fact, nonfiction because of the structural elements of the work.  Nonfiction frequently deals with subjects with high factual content and relatively low narrative content.

5.    FAULTS:  Some auditors, however, have the inability to properly locate the proper context of the story, and to make sense of it.  Instead they wildly misinterpret the story by assuming that the story is about A, when it is actually about B.  This is a fault of misallocation of context.
     Other auditors have the inability to correctly interpret vital story elements in such a way as to understand the full meaning of the stories.  Here, the auditor has the inability to correctly place the context because of a personal deficiency of judgment or understanding.  We might term this a fault of misinterpretation of events.
     For example, years ago I told a story to some tavern patrons about a state policeman who was following a semi.  The truck driver stopped his rig from time to time, and got out and walked around the trailer and beat the sides of the trailer with a baseball bat.  After the policeman saw the truck driver do this several times, he walked over to the truck driver and asked him what he was doing.  “Well,” the driver said, “I’m hauling a load of canaries and I’m overloaded.  So I have to get out of the truck every now and then and hit the trailer with a baseball bat in order to keep them flying.”
     One of the persons listening to that story was a woman who “didn’t get it.”  Even after the others tried to explain the story to her, she still didn’t get it.  Everyone thought it was hilarious that she “didn’t get it,” and they began to tease her for weeks on end about the story.  One day, as she sat there with a dreamy and pensive look on her face, her expression suddenly brightened as she finally realized what the joke actually meant, and she began to laugh.  We asked her what she was laughing at, and she told us that she finally understood the joke.  That revelation was even more hilarious to the assembled crowd than the original joke.  After that she would be reminded daily to “keep her canaries flying.”

C1008-1 Writing Stories: Nonfiction

    1.    CREATIVE NONFICTION:  Some time ago, I purchased a copy of a literary journal, entitled, Creative Nonfiction.  I found the title of the journal somewhat difficult to absorb because it seemed so completely counterintuitive to me.  Indeed, how could literature that was labeled as “nonfiction” also be “creative” at the same time?  While it is true that the process of writing anything is a creative process - and it could be no other way, unless one could scoop up literary works in much the same way one mines iron ore - doesn’t the nonfiction moniker suggest a written work that should be strongly factual and “realistic?”  Really, when you think about it, though, isn’t all writing “creative” by definition?  Is it even possible to have writing that is not creative?  What would you call it instead?  “Found” writing?  “Accidental” writing?  “Inadvertent” writing?  It is almost too perplexing to contemplate.  Nonetheless, there exists a tension between what we think of as the legitimate works (all right, you English majors out there, all together now, say: noble, creative writers of fiction), and those gnarly bastards of creative nonfiction.  The editor of Creative Nonfiction, Lee Gutkind, even wrote an introduction to the issue, in which the basic “unfairness” of categorizing creative nonfiction writers as lower-order writers than creative fiction writers was explored, and he did that with some bitterness: “Frankly, I am sick and tired of having to pass legitimacy tests” (Lee Gutkind,  “From the Editor: The Poets & Writers Issue,” Creative Nonfiction, Number 26, n.d., p. 2).  Jeeze, Gutkind, I feel really bad for you.

    2.    JOURNALISM WITH A CLEAN SHIRT:  Well, legitimacy tests or no, I was perplexed, let me tell you, about that unusual title until I saw an advertizement in the back of the journal that pretty much defined the genre for me: “Creative nonfiction liberated journalism by inviting writers to dramatize, interpret, speculate, and even re-create their subjects.”  Just so.  Perhaps “creative nonfiction” is just another way of saying, “elegant letter-writing,” or “journalism with a bit of genuine style” (i.e., style that was not taken from some newspaper’s idiotic notion of style, e.g., the New York Times Style Manual.  Remember that traditional journalism is to writing what coal mining is to sculpture.  So, any suggestion about informing journalism with some modicum of writing excellence is always to be welcomed.  After all, we can’t all be eight-year-olds in our reading habits).  In effect that is exactly what I found in that literary journal: material that could be found in any personal journal or in a letter from an accomplished writer-friend.  And I recognized the genre at once because that’s precisely what I do when I write: I tell stories that have some anchor - however tenuous - in reality.  But I wouldn’t degrade myself by calling my writing “journalism.”  Good heavens, one should always strive to produce writing on a more exalted level than that.  Man!

    3.    VACATION STORIES:  But the literary journal had me in a frame of mind at the start of a personal vacation in which I was reflecting upon the meaning of the words “fiction” and “nonfiction.”  And it was into that very context that some difficulties in telling stories to others led me to reflect on the meaning of stories in general, and on the practical implications of differentiating between the various forms of narration or storytelling.  In particular, I found it difficult to tell some of my stories to others with my wife and daughter present. They interrupted my stories repeatedly, and would not let me tell the stories in my own way - even when I said, “Hey, it’s my lie.  Let me tell it my way.”  For some reason they felt compelled to emend almost everything I said.  They made me feel like a fool, and I became very angry at their persistent rudeness.

    4.    RUDE LISTENERS:  Yet, it is almost always a facile and unthinking matter to confuse the internal logic of a story with the raw structural elements of a philosophical argument.  When that happens, the narrator’s exposition of his story is frequently attacked en echelon by his auditors, as if it were a philosophical argument requiring a precise refutation, or a piece of courtroom testimony to be seared with heated and repeated objections.  Yet, the story itself so often contains such rhythms and internal cadences that philosophical inquiry and argumentation serve only to destroy the lilting flow and pace of the story.  Then too, the abrupt cessation of the story line that is necessitated by the imposition of those raw arguments, causes the story to cease, left unsheltered among derelict and desultory fragments of narration, and caught unawares in the sudden tangle of rudeness.
     For indeed, it is always rudeness and ignorance that compel an auditor to “question” the elements of a story as if the story were wholly didactic.  Stories, to those who really think about them, however, are often actually works of performing artistry.  The stories are told, not to convey eternal truths per se, or to present compelling arguments as such, but rather, to give pleasure to the auditors (and to the narrator) by the very act of telling alone.  In many ways, a singer and a story teller both infuse their particular media so that their efforts might be received with pleasure by those so inclined to receive it.  One would not confuse either effort with a legal deposition, or a philosophical argument, or even, surprisingly, with detailed instructions for repairing washing machines.  The proper telling of a story, in my view, is always a piece of artistry, and one should no sooner interrupt an actor on a stage in order to contradict one of his lines than he would or should - properly - interrupt a narrator in the thick of his tale.  No reasonable person stands on his feet, shouts rudely at the actor on the stage, and expounds on the ontological dilemmas of Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” during the play itself.  To do so would quickly label the person as a crank of the meanest order.

    5.    THE STORY IN ITSELF:  But often rude and ignorant people will interrupt a narrator to edit his story, or to contradict it, or to launch an ad hominem on his character because they believe that he is fabricating the events in his story, or what have you.  And yet, and yet - none of these things about the story is necessarily true.  The story in its broadest outlines is the very essence of what the story means: or, more succinctly, the story means itself.  How can anyone, then, contradict something that means itself?  One may properly disagree with the delivery strategy of the narrator, or his choice of words, or the pace and cadence of his tale.  But one cannot disagree with the story itself except in a banal, perfunctory, and pedantic way.  To say that one does not like so-and-so’s story is to make a statement about one’s own opinions.  It says nothing about the story itself.  In fact, the story stands immune and alone, quite beyond the reach of any would-be detractor.
     We should always remember that no two stories are ever precisely and exactly alike - even if the second story is a digital recording of the first story: the digital reproduction will contain electronic hum, distortion, noise, and glitches that are not present in the first story.  To be sure, they are similar.  But they are not alike.  And we can see this demonstrated in a very gross way almost daily, when we are present when someone tells a person a brief story.  Let’s call the auditor Michelle.  Later, we hear Michelle attempting to repeat the story to another third person.  Invariably Michelle - and all of us for that matter - will garble some of the details of the story, to the point that we cannot believe what we are hearing.  Whereas Mrs. Smith may have told Michelle that 77 people were on the ferry, Michelle will report 37 people present.  If we are ignorant and rude, we might have a tendency at that point to reach into the narration to hit the big emergency stop button, and to correct Michelle right then and there.  But when we do that, we destroy Michelle’s narration; we embarrass her; and we transform unimportant and tiny details of the story into big, lumbering, forensic monoliths that trip up poor Michelle.  Unless Michelle’s story was a confession or a deposition in a police station, the sundry details of the story should always be unimportant to the narration.  Does anyone really suppose that Michelle’s ferry story is any less compelling because she could remember only 37 passengers being present when the ship sank to the bottom of the sea with the loss of all 77 hands on board?  What practical difference does it make if 37 or 77 or 907 people were on board if the fate of all of the passengers is death by drowning?
     But the pendant, rude or ignorant person (to be sure, there is a considerable overlap among those categories) will insist upon disrupting the narration in order to “correct” the storyteller, when, in fact, the story being told is unique in itself, and cannot properly be emended.
     Please do not finish my stories.  With all your might, pretend that the story I am telling is my story, mine and mine alone.  And let me say further that you cannot take the hand of the dancer and whirl her away from me as if that didn’t matter at all.  I’m doing this foxtrot, pal; not you.  You understand?  This is my story.  Get your own damn story.