Let me tell you a story

I wanted to continue pulling at this stranger-than-fiction line of thought I touched on a couple of weeks ago. Kelly and I saw The Accountant 2 recently, as much because we’d seen The Accountant as because Amazon seemed really desperate for us to watch it, and I didn’t want to hurt its feelings. Jon Bernthal was charming in the movie, but also the center of a hacked-together sequence in recent memory.

Without spoiling too much, there is a passage near the end of the film that is so serendipitous and farfetched it pulls you out of the movie. This, in a film where an autistic international assassin/crime syndicate CPA has an army of autistic children hackers at his disposal.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I can still recommend it as the cutest murder and violence movie this decade, but the third act felt very thrown together, particularly as they had more loose ends to tie up than time to reasonably to it with.

One of my favorite short stories is “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” by Stephen King. In it, the narrator is telling a true story and avoids a plot hole in it by saying something like, the advantage of telling a true story is that it doesn’t have to make sense.

I don’t know if I completely agree, but I think about it often. The way I’d put it is the advantage of telling a true story is you can say, “I don’t know.”

You are a human being when you’re telling a story to your friends. You are an omnipotent god when you’re writing fiction, able to bend the universe to your will. We expect more from omnipotence, and not getting it feels a little like a betrayal, as if god got bored with their own creation.

Fiction helps us understand the world differently. It allows us to suppose a greater meaning where none exists. A side effect is it also lulls us into a false belief that “real” stories have a beginning, middle, and an end that make sense.

But we have no reason to believe that. It doesn’t happen in life and a lot of the best literature has ambiguous or “unsatisfying” endings.

I’m not defending the lazy writing that shoehorned a resolution where none could have existed in a fantastical action movie, but when we see these Deus ex machinas, it’s worth remembering they happen in real life, we just dismiss them.

The alternative is to admit that we’re not living the story of our lives. That there’s no beginning, middle, and satisfying ending to our own biographies, which is a tougher pill to swallow.

Narration Machines

We have narrative brains that connect random events into stories. That’s how we understand the world. One of our great flaws is that random events aren’t really part of stories, they’re discrete moments that we tie together for our convenience (and sanity).

Also, predicting what will happen next, looking for omens and portents, is essential to our survival. The weird-looking mole is a fact. Whether it portends cancer is one of the potential storylines, we have to consider.

We find the conflict and solve it over and over again because that’s the way we’re built, and that’s the way we’ve learned to survive, not because conflict “exists” in some larger narrative sense.

So, as disappointed as I was in the movie gods for derailing a story to fix a problem, incorporating it as a “truth-is-stranger-than-fiction” moment has helped.

I wrote a little about foreshadowing a couple weeks ago and want to pick up that thread a bit here as I’ve been beset with narrative meaning in real life recently.

Like when you buy a car you think is rare and can’t drive more than a mile without seeing 10 of them, literary devices keep pressing themselves into my descriptions of real life.

It’s important to acknowledge that I write and love literary nonfiction, which relies on those precise devices, but they are just that, devices. They’re not the way we should understand the world.

In my most recent example, Kelly and I were sitting in the living room, waiting for my daughter to arrive. There had been some tension of the type that’s common when planning a massive endeavor (traveling cross-country with seven people, three of them six or younger).

I mentioned to my wife that we were behind schedule and were likely in for a rough first night when thunder crashed, punctuating my worry. No storm came, no bolt of lightning or second sound of thunder. It wasn’t just uncanny; it was hacky.

Worse, it didn’t pay off. Besides, there being no rain, the trip went fine. The thunder was a red herring.

The only literary device that exists in the real world is dramatic irony. Our lives are happening in ways we won’t understand until it’s too late. Looking for other literary clues merely helps pass the time.

The Tales We Live to Tell

The regularity with which we tie a bevy of disassociated facts together to make sense of, or at least come to terms with, the events of the world is insane.

Without getting too plug-y, the madder the world becomes, the more I think about my most recent book. On the surface, it was about an internet cult that believed reptilian demons ran the world.

I called it “Dragged into the Light,” a pretentious title that even my mother thinks was a detriment to sales, for a very specific reason. It’s borrowed from the Allegory of the Cave, probably one of the most famous stories in philosophy.

The allegory considers what people will do when confronted with proof that the story they’ve been telling about their lives is bad fiction. The answer is: literally anything up to and including murder.

In my (nonfiction) book, a man commits suicide in an attempt to jump realities. It is an obvious and reasonable thing to do, given the story he was telling himself about his life.

He was obsessed with the Mandela Effect, which, simply put, is a phenomenon fabricated from whole cloth by stupid people to avoid admitting they were wrong.

I referred to the cult as a canary in a coal mine, the logical end of a culture where, in recent decades, admitting one’s mistakes has become a sign of weakness and low intelligence, rather than part of the learning process.

I’m realizing now that I’d fallen into my own trap, believing that there was some eventual positive resolution where ignoring past mistakes was preferable to rectifying them.

That’s the real problem with all cogent stories, they’re told by people for whom, against all historical and sociological evidence, the truth is the greatest good and, once it’s revealed, will tie the whole story up nicely.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

PostScript

First of all, welcome new subscribers! I started the year a little scattershot, but I think I’ve found a groove, so you’ll probably be hearing from me more.

Anti-Social

It’s time to admit to myself that I have zero social documentation skills. I like to joke that my fingers are too fat, but in reality, trying to write with just my thumbs isn’t in my wheelhouse. The writing part of my brain requires access to all 10 fingers, and I don’t have the inclination (or motivation) to rewire everything just so I can sometimes write with only my thumbs.

Still, here’s a link to the few chats I managed.

I considered switching to video, and joining all the unfocussed yammering, but I’m just not there yet. For all the above whining and pseudo-nihilism, I still like to have a beginning, a middle, and end as well as a point. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but short-form video isn’t good for that. It’s for facts and polemics, not stories.

That said, I probably will start promoting these stories that way.

Spoilers: We made it.

I’m writing this on Sunday morning in Pullman, Washington, which accounts for its lateness. I was editing the main section last night and ran out of gas. When that happens on the East Coast, I can still get this out before 9 a.m. That’s not happening this week.

I’ve made lots of notes on the trip west. There have been many adventures. Honestly, finding stories to tell about bringing three children under six cross-country in a van almost feels like cheating. I’ll try more updates this week. Speaking of which …

Don’t be surprised to hear from me more than once a week. I know I say this every six months, but I cut about 12 ideas out of this story because they were stories of their own and they won’t keep long.

Over the past six months, I’ve honed my journaling and write once or twice per day instead of sporadically. I’ll be adding Substacking on Tuesday nights, according to the current schedule. We’ll see if I “really” do it in just 72 hours.

TR