REAL REALITY, REALLY?

 

Friends of mine, living in Israel, told me their GPS has stopped working.

 

“It keeps insisting we are in Beirut,” they said.

 

They called their phone carrier and also the makers of the app, who gave them the runaround and finally admitted the IDF has been scrambling navigation in order to foil the GPS-guided missiles coming from the northern border.

 

Before they got the real answer, I suggested different possibilities, including an IDF action, as to why their phone set them in a neighborhood in Lebanon’s capital. My last suggestion, tongue in cheek, was inspired. “Perhaps,” I said, “you are in fact in Beirut and you’re the only ones who don’t realize it?”

 

This would make a good novel, I think.

 

This got me thinking about the real-life couple who followed GPS blindly, which led them to fall into a hole in the ground. Another family took Google Maps voice navigation straight into a dead-end desert road.

 

All of these would make good stories and should be developed further into tales of digital worlds replacing our flesh and blood eyes and ears experiences.

 

And speaking of the rare but real flaws of digital navigation, our schools have stopped teaching a new generation how to use printed paper maps. For all the real-time information they lack, they remain an important tool. For that matter, learning to orient with the stars should also be part of basic education. Just sayin’.

 

Because you never know when the next time the digital masters will decide to re-set our reality.

 

Oh, wait. They are doing it in many ways already.

CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE MEDIA

 

All last week, in our parched California, the news media (online, in print, and on the air) blared from every possible corner: RAIN IS COMING! (Triple exclamation, but I’ll stick with one.)

 

It’s a big deal, after two years of miserably low precipitation.

 

The day before many times a day the news stations wouldn’t stop talking about it. Even Queen Elizabeth’s funeral preparations made for small breaks in what really mattered—

RAIN IS COMING, and it’s going to be BIG RAIN.

Get your umbrellas out of the closet. Be careful on the roads. You’ll be awakened by possible thunderstorms. Stay inside and bake cookies on Sunday and be careful going to work on Monday.

 

I awoke early Sunday and looked outside. Not a drop. I checked in the back yard where I have a rain collector. Not a drop. It hadn’t so much as sprinkled overnight.

 

I went to the curb to put the garbage and recycling bins out for Monday’s collection. On the other side of the street, I saw a young man walking, holding an open umbrella over himself and wearing a raincoat. It was as dry as could be.

I wondered if it was just me or the world had lost its senses.

 

Many hours later, it did rain. It rained a little. Then the sun came out. Later, it rained once more. Also, just a little.

 

Monday came, and the sun was shining. The hourly news kept telling us not to be fooled. The sunshine could and would turn to showers at a moment’s notice.

It never did.

 

I was happy for the bit of rain. As I said, we needed it. It also meant I can skip a single yard watering, and every bit counts. But it made me think of how media lives to augment and distort reality. Not because they got a weather prediction wrong (this happens), but because even as reality outside said otherwise, the news kept insisting in real time that it was Noah’s flood.

 

I thought about the  raincoat-wearing man with the open umbrella who preferred to believe the news rather than his own eyes.

Many analogies, on the left and the right, popped into my mind. This is what occurred to me: it is immoral to live off intentional propelling of hysteria.

 

I made a note to self to always pay attention to what I am experiencing, and less to the hyperbolic tendencies of the media.

 

And when the next rain comes, I will say, “Welcome. Glad you’re here.” That, and no more.

Stories and Real Life

A writer friend lamented that she gets feedback from readers who complain that her stories are open ended. “Isn’t that what real life is?” she said.

Yes, sort of, maybe. But there are real differences between real life stories and stories about life, real or otherwise.

Stories have a beginning and an end. As we live, we experience many beginnings but few solid resolutions.

Stories may have an unreliable narrator. Think of the Books Shutter Island and Gone, Girl, (both made into good movies) or in kidlit— When You Reach Me. In real life we are all somewhat unreliable narrators, only we rarely get to figure this out like omniscient readers do.

Stories make sense. If they don’t, they fail. In real life, we leave that overall sense to the originator of all things. Hard as some try, making sense of everything all the time makes Johnny or Sally insufferable.

In stories, every detail must count. In real life, while the details that turn out to count are more memorable, they are also few.

We need stories to make sense and give meaning to experiences. This is why stories are organizers of experience.

Okay, back to organizing.

Why REALITY is All the Rage

When James Frey couldn’t sell his excellent story (A Million Little Pieces) as fiction, he presented it as nonfiction and it sold with an explosive marketing campaign. What followed was Oprah’s endorsement and NYT bestselling status until...

A website called The Smoking Gun exposed it as fictional, after all.

Every story has some of the writer’s reality in it. But if you label it non-fiction, you should stick very closely to documentable events. Where you take liberties, such as name changes to protect people or omissions for the sake of expediency, you must acknowledge this right off the bat.

Even when reading fiction, the reader wants it to be real. We secretly think that though the writer states this is a work of fiction, it’s *likely, mostly, basically, please-be* a true story.

This is why the how-to books admonish not to start a story with a dream sequence or a flashback. A reader invests in what is happening, only to find out it was just a dream or something that happened long before the main narrative. Na-ah. Not nice. Don’t do it to them.

Readers want that “happening now” feel, an exclamatory phrase CNN uses with abandon. It is much easier to sell a story if the storyteller prefaces it with BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

Long ago, the sight of an old Victorian house in an adjacent town inspired me to imagine a ghost story that could have occurred in it. Actually, I based the story on something a friend told me did happen to the family that lived there.

The next time I walked by with my kids, (then five and eight years old) I told them the story. Don’t be alarmed, it was a kid-friendly version. They were riveted.

{Full disclosure: photo is not that very house^ but one very similar looking J}

Then the question came. “This I a true story. Right, Mom?”

The way they phrased the question begged me to lie. But they were my kids, not some nameless unseen readers. I told the truth.

“Well, no. I made it up. But the house inspired it.”

The instant deflation of their spirits testified to how much it mattered.

There are ways to sort of get around this.
Think of the lines that precede the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code. It’s a list of two little-known things that are factual, investing the reader in what is a work of fiction.
The Movie (and made for TV series) Fargo begins with “this is a true story,” but phrased in an enigmatic way that works as a disclaimer, too.

Because if we are to follow a narrative we need to believe it. At the very least, we need to have our incredulous nature suspended for the duration.