Stories and Other Things Untrue

Someone famous said something like this, and I heard it somewhere: the greatest flaw or failure of literature is that it puts a structure into an actually very mad world.

 In school, they taught us the formula for a good story. You start somewhere, some seemingly meaningless event, and then you add a bit of tension, until this tension explodes into a conflict. In the end, you either resolve this conflict or lead your reader to a certain truth. One of the teachers recently used the phrase, “a deeper awareness of the truth.” I really like that. Everything I have ever written, no matter how silly, attempts to arrive at a place of knowing more, of knowing better. All except this one. Tonight is a night of not knowing.

I’m not even sure if this is right, my grand summary of Fiction 101. I skipped classes a lot to, well, immerse myself in the mad world and collect my own set of truths. This is not bad in itself except that these truths all came in story format. They all started, rose to the heights of madness, withered, and died. And then it started again, exploded again, and died again. And again. All in the same formulaic manner that tragedies and comedies are written. And I told myself I had a deeper awareness of the truth having arrived at a place of knowing better.

Thirty-two is probably the best age to break that irresistible habit of writing stories that only you read. I take that back. Maybe the best age is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25. I take that back again. You should just never do that. Not even at 17.  Because once the logic of fiction becomes your manual for understanding what happened before, what’s happening now, and what happens next, you will find yourself sitting at a computer desk with a cup of coffee wondering why you are so confused and disappointed all the time.

In certain types of fiction, antagonists are supposed to suffer some form of punishment in the end. Protagonists either live happily ever after or die in the name of something immortal like love, honor, or justice. At the very least it will attempt to make sense of all that is out there.

So you sit around thinking yourself the protagonist (of course)  partly expecting that promised happy ending,  partly wondering whether you are in fact the antagonist (oh no!), and partly force feeding yourself this truth: life is madder than fiction. And your life doesn’t come in bite-sized stories that follow a formula. It may never make sense. Ever. And all those stories you wrote, none of them had any resemblance to what actually transpired. You should quit writing stories for the rest of your life because literature is always flawed. It always fails. A bad thing written beautifully doesn’t become good, chaos can hardly ever be explained, and this is all the truth you will ever need. This night of not knowing may have just become a night of knowing better.

Fine. But if I am going to be without my literature, I’m going to need at least one prayer