Conflicting Stories

Conflicting Stories:

In Communal Writing, I told a story of the OON - how it brought people together, and how it served the needs of a small community that was often under pressure from outside.

Of course, that's just one story about the OON, and others might remember other versions, or at least, other facets of the life of the newspaper and The Valley.  Was it always rosey and harmonious?

Of course not.  The Valley as a whole, and its various interest groups, had enough conflict and diversity - personal, age, gender, political, cultural, ethnic, and religious - to keep a posse of professional mediators in full time work.  In fact, most of the mediators were amateurs, and were often deeply enmeshed in the conflicts they were supposedly settling.  Everyone had their own story to tell and to weave into the larger story of life in the Valley, as well as a story of where that community sat in the world at large.

It seemed, from my vantage point behind the bars and counter-tops of the two wateringholes in The Valley, that there were more stories than there were people to tell them, and even such a small community would have furnished more than enough material to keep a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky happily employed for a lifetime or two.  Thurber would have recognised many of the characters there, too.

Often I would be privileged to witness the birth of a new story.  Some evenings, such a story would grow from an acorn to an oak tree within a dozen retellings, gaining weight and breadth with each new influx of willing listeners, and I could detect no crack in the sincerity of the author's voice, no matter how different the latest edition was from the first.

I have, too, heard stories about incidents that I was myself present at - versions so opposite in their tone and content that it would be hard to reconcile either with my own memories.  Each contained some truth about the original, but it was a truth that was filtered by, and made to fit, the story that the particular narrator lived within.  For we, and all the characters we write about, live within a story of our devising - one that charts and explains the journey so far, and dictates the course we choose into the future.  One man's hero can all too easily be another man's fool.

Was Prometheus, as Hesiod portrayed him, a liar and a thief who brought suffering down upon the heads of mankind?  Or, were Shelley and Aeschylus correct in painting him as a hero and saviour who was unjustly punished by a jealous Zeus?  Did Oliver Mellors save Constance, or she him?  Or did they both drag each other into darkness?  Was the felling of the Tower of Babel an act of righteousness, or fear?  Is there ever a simple answer?

Is not every story, no matter how complex, still merely a version of a larger truth, trimmed and simplified to fit within our limited understanding of the infinite?  How do we write stories to convey the truth that we think important?  How much fact is lurking within every act of fiction?  From my own experience, quite a bit.

Do I have to "stick to the facts"?  Or change them so as to "protect the innocent"?  I am struck by that meme that occasionaly surfaces on the internet - the one along the lines of "never upset a writer, lest he puts you in his next book, and kills you"

Why should I be nice to the people who have wronged me in the past?  What awful demise can I devise for them - and could it become a best seller?  That meme led to those thoughts, and onwards, page by page, along a road I had never thought to travel - crime writing.  And what an interesting journey it is turning into - a few strokes of the pen have despatched an old foe to an ending I cannot yet reveal (you'll have to buy the book, when it comes out). A few pen-strokes more have revealed some of the motivated, and their motives, and the road promises to have some interesting curves, bends and crests, before the body is found and the truth surfaces.

And yet, truth is stranger than fiction, and the journey through a fictional crime will be more believable, and safer, than revealing all the truths I learned in that Valley.