The Heart of Every Story?

 I found on the Los Angeles Review of Books site (a rather good one and one I suggest you check out) Tell the Story: Learning from Disaster by Shelley Shaver. This is her thesis:

JUST AS EVERY argument between lovers is not really about the topic but about somebody not feeling loved, so every significant story we tell about our lives is, I think, under the surface really about survival.

Think of a story from your life. Not just any story. At the end of your life, if you had to pick one memory that would say “This is who I was” or “This was what life was like for me” — what would it be?

I like to think of my stories as eulogies, recording those and what that have gone. Still, I think Ms. Shaver has a point and has me thinking her thesis has relevance to my writing.

I suggest reading the whole essay where she describes the research for one of her stories. 

I  have one more quote for those of us who write or want to write stories:

How do stories bring us together? Increasingly, in our culture, language is wielded as a weapon, either offensive or defensive, each side sure they’re right. But let’s not forget how helpful language can be when we’re not sure, how helpful it can be in lowering defenses, not raising them. Words can provide a space for a communal working out of confusion and uncertainty, where we can pick up the broken strands and start weaving a new storyline. In my Dust Bowl story, people are feeling their way into a new language, trying to create a tentative grammar, a stumbling syntax, that might allow them to speak a new self. Like us on a bad day, only in their case, day after day after day, they have been left with nothing but questions. In the midst of enormous and identity-annihilating confusion, how do people learn how to speak not in anger, but in sorrow? What are the defenses people struggle to compose inside their heads when thrust into a world where nothing goes right and everything goes wrong? With the old cues gone, how do you find words for what you have to do to be a good person? Is there a core of goodness inside some people — if so, what strikes and evokes that core? Or is there no core, only a community of people fumbling toward acts of goodness?

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