The Power of Story and
the writing of The Mountains of the Moon
Stories come in a myriad of forms, both written and
spoken: short stories, novels, plays, the comic strip in today’s paper, your uncle
recalling the events of 60 years ago, your seven-year-old telling you about his
dream. Man is a story-telling animal. It’s how we communicate, how we connect
with others.
Stories can entertain, letting us visit another place or
time, or a place and time that never existed. They can help us find the humor
in the bleakest situations. They let us explore new ideas from a safe distance;
if you don’t like where the story’s going, you can always close the book—or throw
it across the room, if that’s your preference. Stories can teach us facts,
values, coping skills and problem solving. They can be used for religious or
moral instruction, or just to pass on culture in general. They can be
cautionary, like so many of our “fairy tales,” showing us how not to behave or what happens if we break
the rules. They can help us understand ourselves, by holding us up to a mirror,
or showing us characters we don’t want to emulate. Stories can encourage,
inspire, and even offer healing on many levels.
All of us are story-tellers, tale-spinners, almost from
the time we discover language. Most of us learn early how to self-edit, to
present our stories in such a way that our intended audience will listen.
Listen to that seven-year-old telling his dream adventure, which may be greatly
embroidered from the original experience. He’s learned from experience that if
he just rambles on and on, his audience will soon drift away. So he throws in
vivid descriptions and tries to arrange his material to build up tension, to
keep you wondering what happens next. Bingo. The kid has already invented the
page-turner novel.
The child’s only motive may be to hold an audience, to
experience the sense of empowerment and self-worth that accompanies someone
being willing to listen to him. But stories
are more than sharing experiences or making a connection with a chosen audience. They’re the way we pass on our culture, our
values, our view of how the world works. They may be designed for a specific
purpose, such as Aesop’s Fables with their built-in morals. Much of our
religious instruction is done through stories; pastors delight in “sermon
illustrations.” Folk tales and fairy tales often carry lessons or illustrate
how the world works—at least in the story-teller’s viewpoint. Whether or not
the stories are literally true, they embody “truth” in the form of shared
wisdom.
Even if the author’s intent is primarily to entertain, without
thought of an instructive purpose, his story is going to going to partake of
his thoughts, his values, his world view. And that’s not even considering the
part the reader or listener brings to the story. Story-telling is interactive. Humans
look for patterns and meanings in everything. We look at the stars and see
mythical monsters and heroes. We find pictures in the clouds, or shapes and faces
in vegetables, rocks, you name it. A story becomes a collaborative effort
between the story-teller and the reader or listener. I’ve put up stories for critique on the
Critters internet writing workshop, and received as many as 40 responses, all
different. It’s as if there were 40 different stories, and in a sense, that’s
true, because each reader injected his or her own views into the story I
thought I was telling.
We shape our non-fiction accounts into story form, one
thing leading to another, perhaps suggesting meaning in events that otherwise
could be viewed as “just a bunch of stuff that happened” to quote Homer
Simpson. We hunger for meaning, and we’ll find it, whether the author meant to
put it there or not. Just look at all the shared quotations on Facebook or in those
viral emails. Someone read those words and said “Aha! This has a deeper, more
profound meaning. It expresses how I
feel. It must be a Universal Truth. I’ll share it with the world.” Writing fiction, and particularly
speculative fiction or fantasy, may free the author from dealing with
troublesome facts, but these stories, like their non-fiction counterparts, can
also embody “truth” in the larger sense. If my story resonates with the reader,
if she can connect with the character or situation and see the correlation with
her own life, perhaps find a solution to a problem or at least another way of
looking at it, then my story is “true” for that reader. Whatever the author’s
intent, a story can inform, inspire, encourage a change of behavior, comfort or
heal.
Mostly I write stories just for fun, or because I want to
experiment with an idea or characters and see what happens. I often find that
the characters I’ve created tend to take over the story, heading off in
directions I hadn’t anticipated. It’s like a role-playing game or a group of
children playing “let’s pretend” with each of them offering script prompts as
they go. If my readers choose to assign a deeper meaning to that, that’s their
choice.
I’ve written my share of instructive or illustrative
stories, for Sunday School use or the sort of inspirational books you find in
Christian bookstores, but I’ve mostly kept that separate from my fantasy or
science fiction “just for fun” writing. The first story in what became the
“Hall of Doors” series was a little different, in that I wrote it for a
specific purpose.
I followed a pattern for some years, of bringing my
Portland granddaughter a new story on her birthday. She had just turned seven
when I asked what sort of story she wanted for next year. I expected her to mention fairies or unicorns
or something of that sort. Instead she said “Write about a little girl like me,
whose parents split up and her cat died.”
That hit me like a punch in the stomach.
I realized that was the situation she was dealing with at the moment,
and she was looking to me for answers, for some way to make sense of it all. That
was a tall order, and I thought about it for months. What did she need to hear
from me? What could I tell her that would help?
I eventually came to the conclusion that when children
lose someone, whether from death or abandonment, they naturally fear more
losses. They’re afraid of being deserted, of having no one to take care of
them. They also, being pretty self-centered at that stage, feel guilty,
thinking the loss is somehow their fault. So I needed to work into the story
that she wasn’t going to be left alone, that there were lots of people who
would continue to love her and take care of her, and that none of the situation
was her fault. I couldn’t do too much
about the absent parent—I love my stepson, but, like his father, he has a bit
of a Peter Pan complex and can’t be counted on to take responsibility. As for
the cat, since I had the freedom of a made-up story, I applied the magical
question, “What if...” What if the cat in my story didn’t die, but went off to
some magical place to have adventures?
The granddaughter usually spent a week at my house during
the summer, but that year she had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t make it. I
had already arranged for time off from work, so I had no excuse for further
delay in writing her story. I did it as a mini-book and emailed her a chapter a
day. I had no idea what was going to happen each day until I wrote it. It began
with a little girl hunting for her missing cat, who had a habit of disappearing
when the moon was full. My characters took it from there. When the mother
repeated her mother’s possibly joking
comment, that the cat must have “climbed up a moonbeam to go walking on the
mountains of the moon,” I knew the cat
had to actually climb a moonbeam—or at least a magic pathway masquerading as a
moonbeam. Of course the little girl had
to follow the cat; how else would she know about the other world? And so it
became a simplified “hero’s journey” in which the hero travels to the other
world to gain wisdom, which has been the pattern for the subsequent books in
the series.
The granddaughter, who is now a college student, says the
story helped. Stories can inform, comfort, and heal—and still be fun to read.
The power of story.
