Nigerian Novelist on Why We Need All Our Stories

Chimamanda Adichie, Nigerian novelist, makes a dramatic argument on the danger of a single story. This is worth 18 minutes of your time! I’ve watched it three times.

She argues that when we think we know someone’s story, we limit them. When we try to make our lives fit some story, we limit ourselves. We need all our stories. We need to tell them, listen to them, search and preserve them.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

Chimamanda Adichie was born in Nigerian in 1977. Her novels are Purple Hibiscus and Half a Yellow Moon.

Truth Better Than Fiction OR Vice Versa?

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” –William James

And who isn’t wise enough to gloss over a few things when we tell our stories? Ah, but where is the line between applying a little wisdom and telling a story that never happened?

I will confess that I loved the movie Julie and Julia, about Julia Child and a cooking blog by Julie Powell. I liked the idea that the movie was based on real events. That doesn’t mean that I expected every single detail to be true. That never happens. My husband and I can come home from the same dinner party and remember the evening entirely differently. Everything we do is colored by memory, expectation, our differing feelings and experiences. Not to mention whatever wisdom we’ve applied to the things we’d rather not recall. Nevertheless, when I picked up the book Julie and Julia and read the disclaimer that parts of the book had been fictionalized, I put it down again. As a reader, I didn’t want to wonder which parts.

The following article from thedailybeast.com argues that some true stories are better as fiction. I agree. I also like memoir. Mostly I want them to be clearly one or the other. However, wisdom aside, even that may not be as easy as it sounds. See what you think . . .

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-19/why-some-memoirs-are-better-as-fiction/?cid=topic:featured1

Stodgy Vs Story

I had a great aunt whose idea of entertainment was to bring out the family photographs and carefully repeat the names, “This is cousin So-and-So.” A man’s wife was always “Mrs. So-and-So,” never a first name, who was called something else before she was married and something else after she re-married. Of course, Mrs. So-and-So was related to someone else I was supposed to know . . .. I was worse than bored. I grumped and slumped until my great aunt finally excused my bad behavior saying “very likely I was just too young to remember.”

Hardly.

I also had an uncle who twisted nursery rhymes into ribald limericks. Since no one would explain why they were funny, I had to remember them until I was old enough to figure it out on my own.

Mary had a little lamb

She tied him to a heater

Every time he turned around

He burned his little peter

will run through my head the rest of my life.

Names and dates don’t stick: never have, never will; but, once in awhile, my great aunt got distracted and told me something interesting, like the fact that one of my ancestors was a Viking pirate. Of course, when I asked to see a picture of him, she didn’t have one, which meant she was forced to fill-in. “Our family came from Denmark, not the regular part of Denmark, but a little island off the coast with a hidden cove—a favorite Viking hideout. There were pirates plundering nearby ports from that little island far longer than from the Barbary Coast,” she claimed.

Turns out that’s mostly true, but, even if she was still alive, I doubt she’d be impressed by the fact that I’ve been to that little island, checking out her pirate story, among other things. She was less about truth and more about application. When she told a story, she made sure it made a point.

“We are luckier than pirates,” she told me. “We have so many new things, such wonderful inventions, these days a pirate wouldn’t know what to steal.”

Turns out my great aunt also kept a journal. She names her first boyfriend, Alonzo Eckersley, and tells how they spent one summer together:

Every night we would take a ride on my horse and then dream dreams of what we were going to do in the future. One night his dog was poisoned. Both of us surely did cry.

She doesn’t say what happened to Alonzo. Instead, she shifts to how she went away to board for high school. She lived with a family named Stewart and took piano lessons but didn’t like making music. She names her best girlfriends: Mildred Rhule, Grace Ritchie, and Ruby Ward.

They had a car and so did I. We had a good time that summer with all the boyfriends! I guess there were too many boyfriends because I got so I hated them all. They were all alike, how disgusting, and they all acted and talked alike.

The year happens to be 1922, but the tale is timeless.

We take photographs, sometimes feverishly, trying to hold the moments that matter, but, nearly always, when I tell someone that I’m gathering the family stories, I get a puzzled response, as if that is not a task for the serious. Names and dates on genealogical charts, fine. Copying the family photographs, encouraged. Stories? Why stories?

Because two pages of her journal were enough to change my impression of a stodgy old aunt.

Story Quote # 12

The storyteller is one whose spirit is indispensable to the people.

—N. Scott Momaday, Kiowa

Mark Miller Guest Blogger: Good Stories Gifted or Stolen?

Bozeman, Montana author and friend, M Mark Miller and I have been having a discussion about good stories. Thought I’d let you listen in . . .

Of course you’re welcome to borrow my tagline: “All good stories are true. Some of them contain facts.” But I must disagree with your assertion that “all good stories are stolen.”  If what you mean is that writers of good stories should expect others repeat them, then we have no quarrel.  In fact, I hope to tell good enough stories to inspire that.  But if what you mean is that writers approach their work with larceny in their hearts, then I demur.

Working on my recently published book, Adventures in Yellowstone, and my next book, an intermediate grades novella titled Uncle Bird, has led me to think a lot about the origin of stories.

A friend who studies American Indian storytelling traditions commented that she liked my introduction to Adventures. She noted that I began by talking about my grandmother’s tales of visiting Yellowstone Park in 1909 and her grandfather’s trip there in 1880. This, she said, established my right to tell the stories.

An Indian tale usually begins, she explained, with an assertion that it comes from “my people,” or “my family.” With such an introduction, the teller establishes that she owns the story or at least the right to tell it. Stories told in this way are not stolen––they are gifts.

For Adventures I collected first-person accounts of early travel to the area that is now Yellowstone National Park. These accounts are more than a hundred years old so I decided to edit them extensively for today’s readers. It was obvious that the stories were riddled with errors, exaggerations, and downright fabrications. My initial reaction was to footnote such things, but I soon concluded that would do more damage than good. I disavowed being a historian and labeled myself “a storyteller.” I’m glad I decided to present the stories as they were told, not as historical documents.

We writers spend much of our time looking for stories to tell. (We call it research.) My motivation for writing Uncle Bird was to salvage some of the stories I had collected for Adventures. My publisher restricted Adventures to just a dozen stories but my research had yielded hundreds.

Many of the remaining stories weren’t strong enough to stand on their own so I decided to create a 14-year-old boy to bring some of them together. Stories of that boy’s adventures indeed are stolen or at least borrowed.

I’m glad we agree that all good stories are true and many of them contain facts. But not all good stories are stolen. Some stories are told by the people who lived them, some by people who received them as gifts, and some by people who earned them through research.

I hope the stories I tell ring true. I try to make them irresistible. Welcome to them.

– Mark Miller

Still Love Tiger Lilies!

First time I saw tiger lilies, I was visiting an elderly friend of my mother’s who had a row of them blooming along her driveway.They were so bright and colorful they took my breath away; I remember feeling stunned at such beauty. I wanted my mother to notice, but she was busy, doing adult things, I don’t remember what. I was six-years-old, and might as well have lived in a different universe. However, the lady noticed. She made my mother wait while she put some bulbs in a box. I kept the bulbs for years, tucked in a safe place, believing they were precious, but not knowing how to turn them into flowers.

Saw tiger lilies in a bouquet yesterday. Stops me, every time, with that remembered sense of wonder.

Stella Goes Out for Coffee

Larger than life is a term applied to heroes. They leave an impression. Stella, our three-legged Great Dane, does that. She can go out for coffee and come home immortalized as a cartoon by Boulder’s Shoney Sien.

Stella’s big, but gentle. She has a brown eye and a blue eye–not common in Great Danes. She likes to be petted but still manages to give the impression that she’s aloof, not needy.

Treats?–her highness needs a tester. The owner of a highbrow dog boutique offered Stella the house specialty–a liver brownie. She took it politely; then set it on the floor. It was only after another dog tried it that she decide to give the goodie another chance.

Every culture has made-up stories of clever animals. It is said that we project human characteristics onto the animals when we tell those stories. I’m more inclined to think animals draw out our better qualities.

Story in 25 Words

Llama pisses on guy next to me.

20 years pass.

Me: “I’ll never forget that llama pissing on you.”

Guy: “You REMEMBER that?”

–Roger Ebert

Who Decides Your Family Story?

I was teaching a class on novel-writing. One student was writing about three generations of women who all married men they didn’t love. The book was largely autobiographical. For that reason she was unwilling to make many changes. As I continued to listen to her, I realized that her family seemingly encouraged stories of my-misery-is-worse-than-your-misery. That meant marrying a man you didn’t love was a prerequisite and the novel was actually a one-up in those tales of woe.

In my family, we tell love stories. My husband and I polished a small incident from our courtship as our contribution. Also unlike my student, as a child, I was never allowed to tell an oh-dear-me more than once. I could get it off my chest, so to speak, but not repeat it.

Who decides how the family stories will be told?

I never got my student to see the pattern in her book, but I’ve been haunted, ever since, with the idea that family stories shape us. We expect our lives to turn out like the stories we’ve heard.

Story Quote # 11

This story shall the good man teach his son . . .

But we in it shall be remember’d;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Henry V, Act IV, Scene 3

William Shakespeare knew that if you want to motivate, you inspire with a story, a new one suggesting the way things will be . . .

King Henry stands before his ragtag army. They are vastly outnumbered. Every man knows and fears that, but they also have long bows. Their bows can give them advantage over the horse mounted French, if they stand. Henry must make them stand and fight. How does he do that? By telling them a new story–the one that will be told of their victory. The story that will be repeated every St. Crispin’s Day from this time forward.

Do stories matter? Ask Shakespeare.

PS: Check comments for video of an even better performance of St. Crispin’s speech!