On Trouble

Trouble.  No one needs it, we all do our best to avoid it, and yet it seems we all have more than our fair share of it.  Flat tires, honest mistakes, hidden expenses, tough choices.  The kinds of things that make you want to curl up and wish yourself back to childhood through sheer weariness.

But we can't get away from it, things just go wrong sometimes, it's life.

What can we do about it?

It's nice to think that every problem out there has a solution, and that with patience, hard work, or just luck, we'll mostly find our way through the things that get us down.  Most often, things that go wrong aren't as bad as they might seem at 

Sometimes of course things go wrong and there's just no way to fix them, and we're left to survive the difficulties with whatever we're able to salvage.  One of the cruelest lessons the world has to teach us is that we can't prepare for everything, we can't fix everything, we can't survive everything.  All we can do is try, and sometimes not even that, but only wait and hope.

Boy what a post!  To what goal is all this obscure meandering leading to?

I was thinking the other day about trying to find the root of all storytelling.  A weirdly tall order, perhaps, but I like oversimplifying things, at least at the beginning, because you can always expand and un-simplify them later.  

Since this is the beginning of our new year, and this is sort of a storytelling blog, I thought I'd try to find the starting point of storytelling and work from there, to see what we can find out.

I thought about what most if not all the stories I've read (or watched, or listened to) had in common, and I came up with the same three basic components that every freshman literature class in history probably lists.  Characters, setting, and plot.  

This seemed colorless, and none too particular (should fit right in with the above), and so I turned instead to the kinds of stories I've heard in person from other people.  Not novels or movies or episodes of shows, but anecdotes, little pieces of real life that other people feel are worth sharing for one reason or another.

What did these have in common?  

They usually begin with a character (9 times in 10 this will be the person narrating) and a setting ('So I was going to work the other day,' 'I went to unpack my Christmas decorations,' 'We thought it would be fun to go to the zoo,' etc.) and what else?

Trouble.

Almost every anecdote I can remember hearing has some problem, or snag, or frustration or source of conflict that the person telling the story has to resolve in order for the story to be finished.

There are probably plenty of stories and anecdotes that don't necessarily focus on the problem or trouble -- but do I remember these?  Apparently not.  And of course when it comes to storytelling, the burden of memory is on the speaker, not the listener.

Unless of course it was about curiosity, and the person wanted to find out how or why something was happening, which is often its own excellent excuse! But that's another post.

So, if you want the foundation and source of all storytelling, I give you my humble key: trouble.

Character and setting are both important, but if you want to cut to the core of what both these are centered around, find your problem first and everything else can follow.

So, when things go wrong, and when you don't have anything useful you can do with the experience you've been through, see if you can make a story out of it.  You might be surprised to find out it has a meaning and a lesson you didn't understand until you see it as a story; the human mind has a funny way of sorting its own things out.