Stories

I love stories.

When I was very young (so young, in fact, that I can't really remember how old I was) my father used to read to me every night before I went to bed. He'd read me a single chapter from whatever book we were currently exploring. I'm told that Green Eggs and Ham was an early favorite of mine (to the point where he was sick of it) though my earliest memories are of "boy's own" adventure fare like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island. My mother occasionally read to me as well, but my dad had a real gift for delivering the words well and I always looked forward to the next installment of the story we were currently engaged in.

From this early start, I took to reading on my own before I went to bed. I honestly don't remember learning how to read. More to the point, I don't remember a time when I didn't know how to read. Obviously that time existed or there'd have been no need for my father's previous narrating skills but I remember neither the process of learning or ever looking at written page and not knowing what the letters and symbols meant. (In English, anyway.)

My nocturnal reading habits bothered my parents, as I tended to stay up fairly late in pursuit of finding out the all-important "what happens next." To this day I'm an incurable night owl. It's 2:32 in the morning as I type these words and I suspect I won't get sleepy for another 2-3 hours. For a while my parents would try to catch me reading and scold me. Most of the time I could hear them coming, slip the book under my pillow, turn off my night light and feign sleep before they made it up the stairs to my room. I became quite adept at hearing their footsteps as they approached the stairs. When I was caught, it was usually by my mother, as my father seems to have been the genetic source of my night owl tendencies and I rarely remember being able to stay up later than he.

At some point, however, both of them must have decided that I simply wasn't going to go to sleep immediately on being sent to bed. They eventually just stopped bothering to scold me, even when they noticed me reading into the night.

From this early start, my greatest source of entertainment and joy was always stories. The only things that have ever supplanted them are my lovely wife and my pets. And the lure of the story is always there in the background. I always want to know "what happens next."

My earliest experience with stories was, as I said, through my dad reading to me, so books, particularly novels, were my first way of experiencing stories, but they were hardly my last. As I grew older, I discovered short stories, television, films, comic books and even radio plays. I discovered, pretty early on, that I wasn't particularly picky about the medium through which a story was presented. To this day, I don't really subscribe to any sort of "high art/low art" notion of storytelling. I will wax philosophical about comic books as readily as I will about All Quiet on the Western Front or Ulysses. (I do, however, recognize that specific stories sometimes work better in one medium than another.) I've never really been interested in establishing or maintaining any sort of "hierarchy" of story mediums, just in exploring what each medium has to offer. I love novels, stories, comics, audios, television shows, movies and anything else that can convey an engaging yarn.

I also discovered, fairly quickly, that I like long stories. That's not to say the occasional short piece or vignette won't capture my attention but, to me, there's a real appeal to seeing a story unfold slowly over time, to see the characters, setting and even story itself change as time passes. I like the slow evolution of a narrative over the course of many installments. There's a balance to doing a long story, a happy medium between maintaining consistency and progressing the people and events of the story that I find fascinating. I love comparing early and late installments of a long story and examining which parts have changed but which are still consistent.

I soon found that I enjoy science fiction and, to a lesser extent, fantasy a lot. In contrast to some other fans of the science fiction genre, I must say that I only have a mild interest in science fact. I know people for whom an early interest in science fiction led them to want to explore real science and that's fantastic. The world's got a lot of problems and science is the best route for dealing with many of them.

When I was younger, I mistakenly assumed that, because I liked science fiction, I must like science. Why, then, did science class seem so boring? One day, during Mr. Nelson's science class in 6th grade, in the middle of taking a test (which wasn't difficult but was, as I said, boring) I was struck by a bit of a revelation: It wasn't the science in science fiction I liked but the fiction. It was the doors that science fiction opened, in terms of possibilities for storytelling, that appealed to me. Want to have your protagonist confront their inner demons? Don’t settle for simple introspection when a nifty alien device can cause those demons to manifest as real beings. Your main character is concerned with their legacy and what effect their actions will have on the world? Stick 'em in suspended animation and let them wake up three hundred years from now to find out if their actions made the world a better place...or made things worse. Science fiction and fantasy widen the parameters of what sort of stories you can tell and that's why I like them.

None of that, incidentally, is meant as a slight on poor Mr. Nelson, who was an excellent teacher and a really nice guy.

As an aside, I should note that, for all my love of stories and reading, I actually despised English class when I was in Elementary School. This is because early English class isn't about exploring what you can do with language. No, it's about grammar. It's about endless vocabulary tests and conjugations and tenses and the nuts and bolts of how to put sentences and paragraphs together. And I already knew all that stuff. (Ok, the need to avoid the run-on sentence may never have really sunk in. You've probably noticed that.)

As my love of stories progressed, I also acquired a desire to explore the mechanics of how they worked. I started to pick apart the tales I loved (and the occasional one I didn't think worked that well) to figure out what made them tick. I wanted to know why I liked them as much as I did, to explore which ideas really resonated with me and why they did so.

The purpose of this exploration wasn't to determine whether or not these stories were any good or not. I usually know whether I like a story without picking it apart and, bluntly, I don't get a lot of satisfaction out of slamming stories I don't like. I usually just, well, don't go out of my way to experience them anymore. I'm also enough of a (narrative?) relativist to believe that just because a story doesn't speak to me personally doesn't mean it's bad, just that it doesn't appeal to my tastes. My wife has a television show that she adores and that I can see is astonishingly well made...but I just don't enjoy watching it. But if she enjoys it, that's great. A couple friends of mine have, three times now, tried to turn me onto a sci fi series that they really enjoy. Three times I've tried to watch it. Three times I've given up because it just doesn't appeal to me, especially in terms of pacing. But I hope they keep making more of it so my friends can continue to enjoy it.

When I pick apart a story, it's usually because it's a story I know I like and I want to explore both why I like it and what sort of potential it has for leading to other stories I might like, be that as a part of a series I generally enjoy or as a model for a wholly different narrative that might play off similar themes and ideas.

So that's what I'm going to do here at the Lair of the Styrofoam Turkey. I'm going to take a good look at the stories I enjoy and explore them. I'm going to pick them apart and see what makes them tick, see why I like them and what potential they have for the future. I'm going to start with some of my go to favorites (namely Doctor Who and Marvel Comics) and then I'm going to expand into other fictional settings and explore those too.

It's going to be a fun journey and I hope you'll come along for the ride.

Next Post: Discovering the Doctor

Next Musing: Leaving "Is it any good or not?" Behind