If you had to pick one story which you felt would be the most helpful to share with the whole world, what story would you choose and why?
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fireside (
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July 24th, 2009
If you were given the opportunity to share one story with the entire world, what would you pick?
What do you feel would be the most universally understood and beneficial? Would it be a personal story or would it be a publication? Would it be an episode from history?
This question was inspired by Hambayuti’s question and my thoughts on how Joseph Campbell would have the entirety of Eastern and Western mythology to choose from if the question was asked of him.
Could you narrow it down to one story, or would you want to share a collection of stories?
What would you want people to get out of the story that you shared?
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11 Answers
The novella I am working on called Riding Shotgun with Evelyn. It has a lot of great anecdotes, and explains some of the better philosophies of being human, and it has a whole bunch of humor and feel good stories, some of it makes me laugh right out loud. When you can laugh at yourself and see the beauty of others, it makes it hard to want to kill them because they are somehow ‘different’ than you.
I would share @Darwin’s story as recounted in this thread followed by her post at the end of the thread.
That is the one I would chose because it illustrates a bunch of truths that I have learned in this life that I think are important.
1. Bad things can and do happen to good people.
2. Life is not fair.
3. We cannot always control our circumstances, but we can always control our attitude in meeting them.
4. Take life one day at a time. Try not to dwell on the past or the future.
5. Look for the little moments of beauty and love in each day. Those are the true gems of life.
6. The human spirit is capable of great triumphs in the midst of adversity.
answering the original post: something about taking a third option when confronted with two had choices. that no can “make us” do anything except arguably under rare circumstances like another person literally holding a gun to our head.
as well, we never “have to do” anything.
@Marina: I based my (uncompleted) book Honest John on points 2 and 3, and arguably on 4. well, arguably on all of them. apart from the “good people” because I do not believe in a simple good/not-good dichotomy in fiction (maybe in real life, it exists). so I made the protagonist a mix of all sorts of qualities. innocent malice, haughty spirituality, joyous hatred, et cetera. oh, yeah I did have one unambiguously good character. I made her insane and/or mentally retarded.
@Ria777 Interesting premise. Are you still working on it?
premise!? I posted nothing about the premise.
what happened, my MacBook which had the latest version of it died (warning to you all: please, please, please back up your data) and, finally, the thought of having the hard drive evaluated to see if they can recover it terrifies me. (I have not gone into some detail here, for the sake of not boring you all.) but no, I haven’t gone back to working on it. around thirty pages of a much earlier version exist physically and in head. I had written about a hundred but did not mean to write a long book anyway.
(I don’t work in a linear fashion. I had a full story in my head but would dip into it at times, add new parts, revise other parts when I got bored, etc., all in the same writing session, all possible with a terrific program called Scrivener.)
thank you for asking about it.
@Ria777 Sorry for the misunderstanding. Since you wrote, ”I based my (uncompleted) book Honest John . . .” I perhaps made an erroneous assumption.
Do you like Scrivener? Does it automatically put stuff in manuscript format?
answering your question in reverse, it has ready-made templates for plays, short stories, screenplays and novels and one you can DL for comic books. (as far as prose fiction, I try to make it look more like a finished book rather than a manuscript, so I did not use the novel template.)
for something like Honest John very useful. I would use my occasional distraction and stuckedness to my advantage and work on one section, then another, etc. for short form works I just use it as a word processor. I give Scrivener my highest praise, except it only works with Mac OS’es.
I would tell the story about how I didn’t want children and how God saw fit to give me one…and how even now I don’t think I’m supposed to be a mum and yet the evidence speaks the opposite! The moral of the story being that the very things we think we are not meant for might actually turn out to be the very thing that will teach us to find ourselves and our true calling…whether we like it or not…
…and it’s so magical being a mother..who was I to think otherwise!
The Giver by Lois Lowry. It written quite simply, but the premise is very humanist in the “make yourself” kind of way. I want people to stop waiting, for something, for others, and just do what they should do. It’s about being real to yourself and the truth.
I suppose different people can get different messages from the story.
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