Tangent:…

(Tangent from the tangent: If one is of a schizophrenic persuasion, chasing impulse and flighty ideas like a dog spinning at cars on the freeway, is any thought really tangential? It’s not like we have a strong, solid baseline from which to diverge. Well, back to the initial thought.)

Isn’t it cool that storytellers rule the world? I find that truth to be totally awesome, to use a Dashnerism. (Dashnerism: noun—A word used with great frequency by James Dashner and which is, without exception, completely incongruous with the world of Jane Austin, unlike James’s name; common Dashnerisms include “totally”, “awesome”, and “totally awesome”.)

What do I mean? Simply that story is structure, as William Goldman says. This doesn’t mean that screenplays include three acts or that novels wrap up with a denouement, no more than consciousness means having the physical ability to sense the outside world. The truth is so much greater and grander and unfathomable than that. The structure of story is nothing less than meaning; story is the interrelating of stuff (anything really) in such a way that relevance can be drawn from the raw material of life, thought, and imagination.

I’ve been thinking about this since teaching an adult learning class on writing last night. (Thanks to Brenda Bench and her class for an interesting and enjoyable evening, as always.) The presentation was on using POV to achieve the three objectives of story simultaneously, and I got to talking about how we can only make sense of anything by incorporating it into a story. Here’s an example: China has a population of about 1.2 billion; the U.S. population is around 300 million. So tell me what that means. No, “China has more people that the U.S.,” doesn’t count. That’s like saying red and blue are different colors: meaningless. Can’t do it, can you—at least, not without placing these numbers into a story, such as: Because of their massive workforce, China will supplant the U.S. this century as the world’s greatest economic power because of its power; or, as environmental destruction and global climate change continue to intensify, China’s massive population will result in far greater negative consequences than the U.S.’s smaller citizenry, which is why China will not overcome the U.S. as the world’s dominant economy. One story is the story of environmentalism, one is of means of production. What are these, really, but perspectives or points of view and the narratives that go along with such?

No fact matters in isolation, only in conjunction with other facts. The structure of aligning information is story. Story is the substance of who we are as individuals, cultures, religions, nations, and even as a species. With that being so, a storyteller becomes something a good deal more than the proverbial daydreamer detached from things that really matter. We’re more akin to superheroes, possessed of mystical powers to manipulate reality according to our desires and designs. All the truly influential individuals in history have understood this or have benefited from someone who did, whether politicians, scientists, artists, business people, philosophers, or whatever. History isn’t just written by the winners; the meaning of life and its substance is created by the tellers of tales.

Which leaves only one question: am I, Clint Johnson, also known as R.D. Henham and a slue of less respectful appellations I won’t mention, a superhero or supervillain? There is a certain romanticism about being bad….

May one be a  super-anti-hero? Now come on, there’s no way a question that important could be considered tangential.