fictionsmith

Let me tell you a story.

Let me take hold of your imagination.

Let me give you something to mentally chew on.

Let me add to the sum of your experience.

Let me change who you will become.

Does this scare anyone else?

I have a dream of being a professional storyteller.  People like stories.  People quote stories be they personal experience or recorded on their DVR of choice.  Perhaps this is just a paranoid side of me, but what we let into ourselves adds to our experience, and thus shapes who we will become (because, yes, I still believe that we are mostly made up of what we experience and how that meshes with our biological makeup).

Lately I’ve abandoned the idea of starting a story with “what I want to say to people,” in lieu of instead exploring what I don’t understand and mentally working through it via a story… a sort of cause-and-effect playground, if you will.  And if that helps people, then that’s wonderful.  I think it’s healthy to think critically instead of disengaging the brain to be mildly amused.

I don’t feel right manipulating people to think like I do.  I’d rather that if they like something in my life, then they’d make that choice themselves instead of me telling them that they should be like me and choose my life choices.

Does this make me wishy-washy? I don’t know. But right now I by no means feel like I have it all together to the point that I’d feel comfortable telling someone to be like me… or to watch a movie I make to try to tell them what I think about something.

I’d rather my art invoke a question in the viewer: “If I were in this situation, would I do the same thing?  If so, why?  If not, then why not?”

But also, I’m young.  I’m 25.  I’m liable to look back at this from the ripe old age of 26 and say, “Ryan, you fool.” I’ll reserve that right, forever and always, because I’ve also learned that due to my tiny amount of all of the world’s experience, there are many, many, many things I don’t know, and it would be foolish to disregard that idea that there are things out there that would change the way I’ll think about what I think about now…

…so perhaps I’m afraid of telling people to be certain things that I’m not sure I’ll still believe next year…

On the other side (and thus possibly doubling back into a touch of hypocracy) there is something I believe to be much larger than myself.  Something that doesn’t change from year to year… and so there is a bit of faith that it will continue to not change even when I do… and that alone is enough to keep me from feeling overwhelmed in a sea where feeding creativity means experiencing new and different things as often as I can to add to that pool of experience that produces “new” and “different” art.

-R