Narratives

Lately, I've had the chance to read a few articles about manic pixie dream girl, and I've had the time to think a lot about narrative.

I am a writer. The first story I ever wrote my dad had to type because I didn't know how yet, I must have been about four. I never stopped. I write short stories, to me, they are perfection, a lot more so than a novel. I also think they require more work than a novel, and that they require a lot more patience to be digested than many novels do. This isn't a criticism to novels (not by far, I love the genre almost as much as I love short stories), it's simply a reflection of my love for short stories. I think of short stories as small, incredibly detailed and beautiful works of art. Somewhere, bound between two yellow covers, is a volume containing the short stories I had completed from the ages of 10 to 15. They are fairly disparate, some written in the first person, others in the third, some more realistic, some less (though I tend to go with realistic fiction), some with happy endings (though most not), some autobiographical, some not. With four notable exceptions, the main characters in all of them are girls or women. The four notable exceptions are as follows: a man who kills another man for playing Telemann's Viola Concerto in G Major, a boy whose aunt has died, my dog (this is probably my favourite of all my short stories, and I am the other main character in it), and a pawn and a doll who live in an attic and remember all battles (both of them female, yes, but not women). The four exceptions are notable because they are my most honest and possibly most violent story, my most magically ordinary story, my favourite story, and the story I first one a writing competition with. However, the reason for mentioning them here has little to do with that.

I identify with my main characters. They are all me, to a greater or lesser extent. Some of them are me as I was, some are me as I wish to be. Others have small parts of me details, but they're based on someone else. Still others, are me how I might have thought it would be cool to be, but I could never be. But they are all me, I identify with all of them, and humanly, I can understand all of them, their actions, their desires, their anger. They are (I hope) human, people, with their virtues and their defects, but fundamentally unique. And I hope that they are not a trope, a cast, a type.

It pains me when I read about narratives and I am told that characters in movies (or in books) are a "type" that does this and that and the other thing. I happen to think that this isn't true. A character is a person. Narratives are something else. Narratives are the expectations we create of people in our heads, the way we think our friends will react when we tell them what last happened to us, how we think our boss will praise us for our latest success or how they will punish us for our latest failure. They are something we create in order to cope with the world, because understanding and discerning as we may be, we cannot truly know another person. So we create a character, a character that is a lot like the person we know, but has a little bit of us, so we can understand the reactions and the actions. It's called empathy, yes, putting ourselves in the place of others, but it's also narrative.

It's important to understand that narratives aren't intrinsically bad. Some are more common than others, yes, and some seem to be applied to so many people they become annoying. But narratives in themselves aren't bad. They help us deal with the world. The problem comes when we believe the world to be our narrative. It's one thing for me to expect someone to react in a certain fashion, it's an entirely different thing for me to be angry because they didn't. I can be angry because of something done to me, but I shouldn't be angry because my expectations weren't met. After all, my expectations are in my head, they are part of me, not part of others.

It is often said that disappointment, and not anger, is the worst thing you can show a child. This is because we put so much stock into our narratives for others. We expect them to act in a certain way, and when they don't they usually disappoint us. We are not happy with how they have acted and we show it as their failure. As adults, we should learn it is not their failure, but our own. Our failure to see other people as they are, and our failure to accept them when they show themselves as diverging from our narrative. Of course, some people may surprise us. Some people will fit into a narrative in our heads and insist in jumping out of it, and creating a new character, a new narrative, something a bit more unexpected and a bit less predictable. These people, or rather, their effects on how we understand the world, are magical. They make us see that we are all different, that there is no general case, but more than anything, that as much as we might like narratives (I love them, I have one for each and every single person I know) we have to understand that they are not reality.

Narratives are fiction. Detailed, beautiful, complex fiction. They are how we know people, and (by a simple extension) they are also how we know the world. But beware: it takes a single experiment to disprove a theory, the world is real, independent of our perceptions and our narratives. We should never forget that.