Hillsview 2007 03 27

“Some Stories…

Some stories just don’t seem to have a real beginning; a place from where you can start the telling of your tale. This can be a real problem for a writer, especially when the story needs telling and the time to ponder such troubles has already past. I can hear my editor pacing outside my corner office, cursing the day she gave me these 18 inches. You know the old saying; “Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a mile”. Well, her problem was she gave me EIGHTEEN inches, and it takes me all week!

Some stories are linear: they start somewhere, go somewhere else, and then end somewhere other than that. A ninth grader worth his or her own salt would tell you that the true literary analytic terms for this are: beginning, conflict, rising action, climax, and denouement. “I don’t know nothing about that”. All I know right now is the sound of my editor’s ticking clock and that I have one humdinger of a story to tell, but nowhere to jump off!

Stories ought not to be this “circular”. No matter where I start to write this story I feel the need to go back to a better starting place, which might just as well be the conclusion to the same story!

Were this to be a screenplay (all copy rights pending), I would just use a series of reflections to reveal the deeper story. I could confuse my audience with dizzying flashbacks and flash-forwards until their heads spun and the credits rolled. Best of all, I could call it “art” and just sit back and wait for my Oscar.

Relating this story verbally would have just the opposite effect. Relating flashbacks in a conversation has a completely different result, and what might be award-winning art on screen would be seen as the residual effects of a life lived in the fast lane of the 70’s… and maybe some of the 80’s, were it to happen in conversation. When folks speak to you like this in public, one tends to nod consolingly while at the same time backing carefully away. No doubt the speaker continues on his merry, circular way, allowing the audience to flow in and out of his tale like the characters in his tale.

These two points seem to go a long way toward explaining the disturbing similarities between the person at the party who carries on a conversation all by themselves (even when no one is near) and the OTHER person accepting an award for his “art” that can’t make a concise, intelligible acceptance speech, despite being nominated weeks in advance of the award.

But I digress…

“Some Friends!”

Some friends are like this as well. There is that one point where you realize and finally accept that you are friends (not an easy thing for me OR my friends!) and the tale could start from there. But this friendship grew from a series of experiences together, each of which is (or at least ought to be, according to my editor) a story in itself. The time you originally met could be the true beginning of your friendship, but then you come to realize (and finally accept) that this person could have been your friend during any point along your lifetime. The truth is that he is probably some odd reincarnation of a friendship you already had, but maybe lost somewhere along the way… like a bad penny, I guess.

That he also has a brother just confounds the trouble!

Next Week: Rancid Crabtree?

Reach Paul and Julie Hill at hillsview@sbcglobal.net or at PO Box 599, Beebe, AR 72012