More Stories
At a recent dinner party, a sports fan suggested to the rest of us, non-sports fans, that we would be happier people if we watched sports. “It gives you something to root for. It gives you hope,” she said.
I said, “Well, it is true, that a game is a great story—conflict, crisis, suspense, resolution.”
Within the last week, The Boston Globe ran two articles that confirm the human need for stories. The first article tells how David Isay, founder of StoryCorps, has “been responsible for helping approximately 15,000 people…record their stories…These aren’t full biographies…they are instead slices of life, as when a Korean woman tells her daughter how she and her husband learned to express love in the English language…”
The second article is about Jay Weaver who keeps a blog about his life as a paramedic. The Globe printed one of Weaver’s blog entries, about his ambulance being called to the Tobin Bridge when a man was getting ready to jump. Weaver writes, “The man looked at me. I could tell he’d been crying.” The man, Weaver explains, didn’t understand why his wife decided to break up with him on Christmas Eve. “She couldn’t wait two or three more days?” the man asked.
As a reader, I am in suspense—hoping the man will not jump. Weaver continues, “Suddenly the man performed an incredibly thoughtful act. He didn’t want us to feel as if we’d failed. Pointing to each of us in turn, he said, ‘It’s not your fault, and not your fault, and not your fault. But I’m going.’ With that, he leaped headfirst over the edge.”
Conflict leads to a crisis that leads to suspense. The suspense keeps us on the edge of uncertainty. We seem to like being there. And that uncertainty can last and last until, in a heartbeat, the outcome becomes certain. The outcome makes us laugh or sigh; it makes us gasp or cry. Inevitably, that outcome leads to some new crisis, which takes us again to the edge.
Into a new story.
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