Everyone Has a Story...But Most Aren't Interesting

Last March the older of my two sisters died of cancer and a few times it's occurred to me that maybe I should write a story involving that.  Sort of like therapy, though my literary hero John Irving says in A Widow For One Year not to do that, though then he did that very same thing in the later Until I Find You.  That part of it isn't really my problem.

The real problem is every time I think of something I want to add more to it.  And then it occurs to me that when you add more to it, the story starts to not be true anymore.  The sticky wicket is that there was no tragic love story or dramatic speeches or stuff like you might get from Nicholas Sparks book or a Lifetime TV movie.  It seems to me that if I do add those elements in to make it more dramatic and commercial then it's just selling the idea out, cheapening it.  That's not really something I'd want to do.

Like the title says the saying is "everyone has a story" but really most stories aren't interesting because they aren't stories in the way we think of stories.  It's why every biopic you see has to dramatize events, mush characters together, or in the case of Aaron Sorkin-penned movies just make shit up because the real story isn't all that interesting dramatically.  So in The Social Network they had to invent this "one who got away" when Zuckerberg had been dating a girl since high school.  Or in A Beautiful Mind they had to invent the whole Ed Harris government agent thing.  Or in 21 where they basically only used the core concept of a group of college card counters and made up the rest.  When I watched that movie I think I said somewhere that really the documentary on the History Channel was a lot better because it wasn't filled with a bunch of commercial cliche bullshit.  It was the real story and in that case the real story was pretty interesting, at least to me.

Another movie actually deals with this subject, the Charlie Kauffman-penned Adaptation where Nicolas Cage plays a fictionalized version of Kauffman who's trying to adapt the book The Orchid Thief into a movie.  The problem is how do you make a book about orchids interesting?  He really can't and so in the end there's all this wild, cliche stuff like a twin brother and a showdown in the Everglades and stuff like that.  The point being that sure this orchid book was a story but it wasn't really the sort of dramatic story that would do much for viewers.

But I did sneak a little therapy into the Eric Filler book The Comeback where the main character goes to visit a young fan dying of cancer in the hospital.  And when the kid dies, the main character dedicates a performance to her.  It was kind of sad and like I said a little bit of therapy I guess.  Maybe that's helpful, but probably not.

I guess when you come down to it, the point of stories is two-fold:  provide lessons and entertainment.  I just don't think there is much of a lesson and it sure as hell wasn't entertaining.  I can try to make it one or both of those things, but as I said then it just cheapens what really happened.

So I guess for now I'll just keep it confined to this blog. 

That is all.