I’ve been reading, “Bully for Brotosaurus,” a collection of essays by scientist/humourist Stephen Jay Gould. He is one of those rare men of science who writes quite remarkable and informative science based articles and essays in an often very humourous and seemingly light and easily understood manner. It is my belief that his kind of writing reaches and teaches far more people with the information of science than those who write in a more staid and dry fashion using mostly the special languages of science. Here is an excerpt from his essay titled, “Literary Bias on the Slippery Slope.” His words inspired me to write this, my own essay about stories and story telling. My own words within his quote are inserted thus [xxxx].
“Most of our existence is eating, sleeping, walking, and breathing. Even the life of a soldier, if expressed in real time, would be almost uninterrupted tedium – for an old motto identifies this profession as long periods of boredom interspersed with short moments of terror.
“Astute scientists understand that political and cultural bias must impact their ideas, and they strive to recognize these inevitable influences. [It’s very sad that so many in our media adamantly refuse to be so astute.] But we usually fail to acknowledge another source of error that might be called literary bias. So much of science proceeds by telling stories– and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we so rarely recognize what we are doing. We think that we are reading nature by applying the rules of logic and laws of matter to our observations. But we are often telling stories–in the good sense, but stories nonetheless. Consider the traditional scenarios of human evolution–tales of the hunt, of campfires, dark caves, rituals, and tool making, coming of age, struggle and death. How much is based on bones and artifacts and how much on the norms of literature?
“If these reconstructions are stories, then they are bound by the rules of canonical legend making. And if we construct our stories to be unlike life–the main point of this essay–then our literary propensities are probably derailing our hopes to understand the quotidian reality of our evolution. Stories only go in certain ways–and these paths do not conform to patterns of actual life.
“This constraint does not apply only to something so clearly ripe for narration and close to home as ‘the rise of man from the apes’ (to choose a story like description that enfolds biases of gender and progress into its conventionality). [This phrase, so commonly used in discussions of the evolutionary changes leading to homo sapiens, is patently incorrect and misleading. It is somewhat equivalent to saying that you rose from your own distant cousin, a physical impossibility. The more accurate way to word that phrase is, ‘the rise of man and ape from a common, distant ancestor.’ We are more surely distant primate cousins, descendants from a root species.] Even the most distant and abstract subjects, like the formation of the universe or the principals of evolution, fall within the bounds of necessary narrative. Our images of evolution are caught in the web of tale telling. They involve progress, pageant; above all, ceaseless motion somewhere. Even revisionist stories that question the ideas of gradual progress–the sort I have been spinning for years in these essays–are tales of another kind about good fortune, unpredictability, and contingency (the kingdom lost for want of a horseshoe nail). But focus on any evolutionary moment and nothing is happening. Evolution, like soldiering and life itself, is daily repetition almost all the time. Evolutionary days may be generous, but as the Preacher said, one passeth away and another cometh, but the earth abideth forever. The fullness of time, of course, does not provide a sufficient range for picking out rare moments of activity and linking them together into a story. But we must understand that nothing happens most of the time–and we don’t because our stories don’t admit this theme–if we hope to grasp the dynamics of evolutionary change. (This sentence may sound contradictory, but it isn’t. To know the reasons for infrequent change, one must understand the ordinary rules of stability.) The Burgess Shale teaches us that, for the history of basic anatomical designs, almost everything happened in the geological moment just before, and almost nothing in more than 500 million years since.
“Included in this ‘almost nothing,’ as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet–an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being.” [end of quote]
Stories, stories, stories and still more stories–the system by which we communicate virtually all information–are perhaps the very first thing we learn to do with words as a small child. The next thing we learn is to word the story in such a way as to achieve the desired effect–that is, the value of fiction. The small child soon learns that when faced with a question like, “Who wrote on the wall?” a story of denial may parry a painful response. Fiction quickly becomes integrated into the child’s story telling as surely as night follows day. This incorporation of fiction into human thought processes at an early age is a natural, survival strategy both powerful and inevitable. People in politics, the law, advertising, and the media especially have tuned this fiction into a very high art to promote, empower and enrich themselves. The rest of the populace is not exempt from using self-serving fiction, and for the most part, recognizes generally that they are being played with loaded dice by many of those around them and especially by those mentioned. In general, people living in our world of stories told strictly to promote the agenda of the story tellers, have learned to believe that which they want to believe and disbelieve that which they don’t want to believe. “Don’t bother me with the facts. My mind’s made up.” is a human mantra of long standing and most certainly not a new thing.
In keeping with Gould’s reference to evolution, here are a few stories with that subject that illustrate his comments about long periods of inaction and very short periods of change. Most people know of the Galapagos finches and how a single species has evolved into so many variations in a relatively short time geologically on the islands. In any event, the story is easily understandable and illustrates his salient point. On one of the islands, somewhat isolated from the others, there was a single species of seed eating finches. For whatever reason, the finches had a wide variation in bill structure from thick, heavy, and strongly muscled to thin, light and delicately muscled. Those with the heavy bills ate mostly large seeds with hard shells while those with lighter bills ate smaller seeds with thinner shells. Both types of seeds were found in abundance on the island and the range of bill sizes and shapes varied universally within this single species.
When an unusual period of drought destroyed all of the smaller plants with the small seeds, the finches were left with only the large, hard-shelled seeds as food. Unable to open the large hard seeds, all of the finches with the smaller range of bill sizes starved and soon had completely disappeared from the island. The surviving finches all had the heavy, strong bills. The resulting genetic “drift” of the finch gene pool selected for birds with strong beaks. Birds born with genes for small bills soon died before they could mate and their genes were gradually removed from the pool. By the time the drought was over, several years later, the small beak genes were virtually gone from the gene pool and all finches sported heavy bills. This was a rather quick evolution of a single species cause by the removal of all small bill genes by natural selection. It illustrates how isolation, environmental changes and time can alter a species’ gene pool and force a species on an evolutionary path toward a new species.
Forest moths are another example. The location, species of moth and time frame of this story are irrelevant to the implications of this true story. In a forest of trees with dark bark a single species of moth is colored exactly like the dark bark of the trees and is thus, very difficult for birds, their chief predator, to see. Enter a bark beetle carrying a fungus that killed the trees with the dark bark. In time, the trees that grew and replaced the old trees had extremely light, almost white bark. Moths with the dark coloration stood out against the white bark and birds found and ate them quickly. There had always been some variation in the color of these moths and a tiny percentage of them had very light coloration. These were usually eaten by birds as soon as they appeared on the dark bark. Now, the situation was reversed with the light moths hard to see on the light bark while the dark moths were easy to spot. Soon the numbers of moths rose up to where it had been before only this time the light colored moths were in the vast majority. Once more, an evolutionary change came about because of survival pressure. In time, and with long term physical isolation, it is virtually certain that two separate and distinct species of moth would evolve, one light and one dark.
A third and final story, better known to most, illustrates the reasons for these evolutionary changes. Bacteria are much smaller creatures and have far fewer genes than finches or moths. They also reproduce much faster so that any evolutionary changes can be much more evident on a human time scale. That certain bacteria have become resistant to many antibiotics is well known and a cause for genuine concern. This is evolution on a small, familiar scale that warns of possible serious dangers to our health care systems, particularly as related to the treatment of infectious diseases. Here’s a description of the subject of this story.
MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)? Some staph bacteria are resistant to antibiotics. MRSA is a type of staph that is resistant to antibiotics called beta-lactams. Beta-lactam antibiotics include methicillin and other more common antibiotics such as oxacillin, penicillin and amoxicillin. While 25% to 30% of the population is colonized with staph, approximately 1% is colonized with MRSA.
The cause of disease resistant microbes is simple and straight forward. It is one of the simplest and most evident demonstrations of ‘natural’ selection forcing evolutionary changes in a species. The mechanism is actually quite simple: take a billion or more microbes (Staphylococcus aureus in this instance) and subject them to repeated doses of penicillin. The first dose may kill all of them, but eventually a few will survive and begin to reproduce. The genetic variation within billions of individuals will eventually generate some with a natural immunity to the drug, particularly if it is administered in small and repeated doses. As long as these naturally immune individual cells are a tiny percentage among billions they pose no problem. When all the other cells die off things change. Resistant cells begin to multiply and eventually become the only ones living. At this point they can replace the normal cells in a population and create an entirely new medical problem. Repeated treatments with the causative antibiotics make available sources of infection become completely populated with resistant bacteria; the old antibiotics simply do not work. The old treatable bugs have been completely replaced with new strain that cannot be killed with the usual antibiotics. Currently, new antibiotics make such infections treatable, but as bacteria evolve resistence to these new drugs the problem becomes more serious. Increasing numbers of bacteria are developing into strains largely immune to many antibiotics. One of the most dangerous of these is tuberculosis which now threatens to expand and make a once deadly disease deadly once more. This is one example of cellular evolution that could be devastating to all primates on the globe.
But this was to be about stories, not evolution. After seventy-eight wonderful, but sometimes painful years of life, I have many stories stored in my memory. Most of these are probably of interest only to myself, a lesser number to my family, an even lesser number to my friends and a very few of general interest. These stories, as Gould states, “only go in certain ways–and these paths do not conform to patterns of actual life.” They are about those rare moments of interest and excitement amongst an otherwise docile, uneventful passing of the time. Stories must contain some unusual, exciting, stimulating or otherwise interesting content or no one would listen to or read them. Watching paint dry is an oft used description of an activity without a real story. Falling or jumping off a bridge while a tornado passes in the midst of an earthquake on the other hand makes for a more interesting tale. Only if true would such a tale carry much interest.
Describing a sea battle could certainly be woven as a story. Describing the reproductive behavior of a single celled animal would certainly be a far more difficult story to write and hold the same range of interest. One of the earliest story tellers would doubtless be one of the first humans to gain the power of speech. Pop comes home from the hunt with a deer slung over his back and a story on his lips of how he hunted and killed it. Mom then tells the story of watching and protecting the kids while gathering berries and roots. Pop then heads over to the big communal cave and tells his story in paintings on the cave wall. History is told by story for interested humans thousands of years hence.
At any meeting where humans congregate, story telling runs rampant. Funny, “Did you hear the one about...” Gossip, “Did you know that so and so...” Incredulous, “Can you believe that...” Informative... “You take five of these...” Virtually every component of every conversation is a story. Some are even true. Story telling runs the gamut from the answers to, “How are you?” to the minister’s sermon on Sunday, and from a politicians ranting to driving directions for a friend to the sales pitch of a used car salesman. Each has its own fictional as well as factual content. And each listener has his or her own set of rules as to what to, who to and what not or who not to believe. Accuracy in reporting is frequently very low on the scale of what is important in a story. The communication is more like a wrestling match between what the story teller really wants the recipient of the tale to believe and the recipient’s belief as to the intent of the story teller. When the honesty of the storyteller is unknown, the recipient has to guess how much to accept as factual and how much to label as BS. Thus is the never ending shell game of human communication.
Story tellers have a wide range of balance between fact and fiction with some having a complete disconnect from facts, choosing to tell even supposedly factual stories designed only to achieve the desired effects. Politicians are notorious for doing this. Another way to achieve the same results, but be technically truthful is to use only those facts which enforce or support the story teller’s agenda and completely ignore those facts which do not. News media people are real masters at this. The rest of us follow a wide range of personal communication rules to determine just how much of the content of our stories is fact and how much is fiction. That also varies as to the recipients of our stories. We are far more truthful with some than with others. There is also the question of being believable. Small children frequently tell stories with little or no concern for this. Often, they are surprised to find people doubting their most creative and outrageous fictions. With a little experience they will soon learn to be more realistic and plausible with their fictions.
Recently a successful author was challenged–indeed charged with a crime–for including some fictional statements in a book that he originally tried to publish as fiction, but whose publisher insisted he call his memoirs. So remember, children, it is far safer to call your work fiction than to take the risk that some anal retentive wimp on the Internet might discover a slight inaccuracy in a work you have called non-fiction and cause you grief. Story telling when it gets into print can be a minefield for the tale teller in some instances, particularly if you are successful. There’s always some losers out there hiring unscrupulous lawyers to take your money away from you if they can figure out the legal angle to use to do so. The legal profession is loathe to do what can easily be done to prevent this from happening. As a group they are far too greedy to keep this easy money from being secured by and for the losers in their profession.
So, story telling fiction is rampant even at a very early age. How does one determine when a story is fiction or has fictional content? The vast majority of stories, like the ones which convey directions to a place or information about baseball scores, are usually true to the knowledge of the story tellers. Likewise, most stories which can easily be checked out are usually true. Fish stories and stories of youthful exploits are among those most likely to carry fictional elements. Then there are those individuals who literally would tell a fiction even when the truth would do just as well. This is just one of several special cases of individuals who will shade the truth for various, sometimes unusual reasons. We all know a few individuals who seem scrupulously accurate and honest in all of their stories. Don’t be too sure. It may be that they are just too careful or clever to be caught. Story tellers that use fiction judiciously may never be caught. Those that don’t are always caught. Then there are those that you wouldn’t believe under any circumstances for a multitude of reasons. Some people believe all stories are fictional and some believe anything they hear. Both are right on occasion and wrong on other occasions.
Some types of individuals–politicians, opposition lawyers, used car salesmen etc–are always suspect. Some–like ministers, your doctor, your own attorney etc. are almost never suspect. Most others lie somewhere in between these two extremes.
To contact the author for any reason, Click Here!
“Most of our existence is eating, sleeping, walking, and breathing. Even the life of a soldier, if expressed in real time, would be almost uninterrupted tedium – for an old motto identifies this profession as long periods of boredom interspersed with short moments of terror.
“Astute scientists understand that political and cultural bias must impact their ideas, and they strive to recognize these inevitable influences. [It’s very sad that so many in our media adamantly refuse to be so astute.] But we usually fail to acknowledge another source of error that might be called literary bias. So much of science proceeds by telling stories– and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we so rarely recognize what we are doing. We think that we are reading nature by applying the rules of logic and laws of matter to our observations. But we are often telling stories–in the good sense, but stories nonetheless. Consider the traditional scenarios of human evolution–tales of the hunt, of campfires, dark caves, rituals, and tool making, coming of age, struggle and death. How much is based on bones and artifacts and how much on the norms of literature?
“If these reconstructions are stories, then they are bound by the rules of canonical legend making. And if we construct our stories to be unlike life–the main point of this essay–then our literary propensities are probably derailing our hopes to understand the quotidian reality of our evolution. Stories only go in certain ways–and these paths do not conform to patterns of actual life.
“This constraint does not apply only to something so clearly ripe for narration and close to home as ‘the rise of man from the apes’ (to choose a story like description that enfolds biases of gender and progress into its conventionality). [This phrase, so commonly used in discussions of the evolutionary changes leading to homo sapiens, is patently incorrect and misleading. It is somewhat equivalent to saying that you rose from your own distant cousin, a physical impossibility. The more accurate way to word that phrase is, ‘the rise of man and ape from a common, distant ancestor.’ We are more surely distant primate cousins, descendants from a root species.] Even the most distant and abstract subjects, like the formation of the universe or the principals of evolution, fall within the bounds of necessary narrative. Our images of evolution are caught in the web of tale telling. They involve progress, pageant; above all, ceaseless motion somewhere. Even revisionist stories that question the ideas of gradual progress–the sort I have been spinning for years in these essays–are tales of another kind about good fortune, unpredictability, and contingency (the kingdom lost for want of a horseshoe nail). But focus on any evolutionary moment and nothing is happening. Evolution, like soldiering and life itself, is daily repetition almost all the time. Evolutionary days may be generous, but as the Preacher said, one passeth away and another cometh, but the earth abideth forever. The fullness of time, of course, does not provide a sufficient range for picking out rare moments of activity and linking them together into a story. But we must understand that nothing happens most of the time–and we don’t because our stories don’t admit this theme–if we hope to grasp the dynamics of evolutionary change. (This sentence may sound contradictory, but it isn’t. To know the reasons for infrequent change, one must understand the ordinary rules of stability.) The Burgess Shale teaches us that, for the history of basic anatomical designs, almost everything happened in the geological moment just before, and almost nothing in more than 500 million years since.
“Included in this ‘almost nothing,’ as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet–an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being.” [end of quote]
Stories, stories, stories and still more stories–the system by which we communicate virtually all information–are perhaps the very first thing we learn to do with words as a small child. The next thing we learn is to word the story in such a way as to achieve the desired effect–that is, the value of fiction. The small child soon learns that when faced with a question like, “Who wrote on the wall?” a story of denial may parry a painful response. Fiction quickly becomes integrated into the child’s story telling as surely as night follows day. This incorporation of fiction into human thought processes at an early age is a natural, survival strategy both powerful and inevitable. People in politics, the law, advertising, and the media especially have tuned this fiction into a very high art to promote, empower and enrich themselves. The rest of the populace is not exempt from using self-serving fiction, and for the most part, recognizes generally that they are being played with loaded dice by many of those around them and especially by those mentioned. In general, people living in our world of stories told strictly to promote the agenda of the story tellers, have learned to believe that which they want to believe and disbelieve that which they don’t want to believe. “Don’t bother me with the facts. My mind’s made up.” is a human mantra of long standing and most certainly not a new thing.
In keeping with Gould’s reference to evolution, here are a few stories with that subject that illustrate his comments about long periods of inaction and very short periods of change. Most people know of the Galapagos finches and how a single species has evolved into so many variations in a relatively short time geologically on the islands. In any event, the story is easily understandable and illustrates his salient point. On one of the islands, somewhat isolated from the others, there was a single species of seed eating finches. For whatever reason, the finches had a wide variation in bill structure from thick, heavy, and strongly muscled to thin, light and delicately muscled. Those with the heavy bills ate mostly large seeds with hard shells while those with lighter bills ate smaller seeds with thinner shells. Both types of seeds were found in abundance on the island and the range of bill sizes and shapes varied universally within this single species.
When an unusual period of drought destroyed all of the smaller plants with the small seeds, the finches were left with only the large, hard-shelled seeds as food. Unable to open the large hard seeds, all of the finches with the smaller range of bill sizes starved and soon had completely disappeared from the island. The surviving finches all had the heavy, strong bills. The resulting genetic “drift” of the finch gene pool selected for birds with strong beaks. Birds born with genes for small bills soon died before they could mate and their genes were gradually removed from the pool. By the time the drought was over, several years later, the small beak genes were virtually gone from the gene pool and all finches sported heavy bills. This was a rather quick evolution of a single species cause by the removal of all small bill genes by natural selection. It illustrates how isolation, environmental changes and time can alter a species’ gene pool and force a species on an evolutionary path toward a new species.
Forest moths are another example. The location, species of moth and time frame of this story are irrelevant to the implications of this true story. In a forest of trees with dark bark a single species of moth is colored exactly like the dark bark of the trees and is thus, very difficult for birds, their chief predator, to see. Enter a bark beetle carrying a fungus that killed the trees with the dark bark. In time, the trees that grew and replaced the old trees had extremely light, almost white bark. Moths with the dark coloration stood out against the white bark and birds found and ate them quickly. There had always been some variation in the color of these moths and a tiny percentage of them had very light coloration. These were usually eaten by birds as soon as they appeared on the dark bark. Now, the situation was reversed with the light moths hard to see on the light bark while the dark moths were easy to spot. Soon the numbers of moths rose up to where it had been before only this time the light colored moths were in the vast majority. Once more, an evolutionary change came about because of survival pressure. In time, and with long term physical isolation, it is virtually certain that two separate and distinct species of moth would evolve, one light and one dark.
A third and final story, better known to most, illustrates the reasons for these evolutionary changes. Bacteria are much smaller creatures and have far fewer genes than finches or moths. They also reproduce much faster so that any evolutionary changes can be much more evident on a human time scale. That certain bacteria have become resistant to many antibiotics is well known and a cause for genuine concern. This is evolution on a small, familiar scale that warns of possible serious dangers to our health care systems, particularly as related to the treatment of infectious diseases. Here’s a description of the subject of this story.
MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)? Some staph bacteria are resistant to antibiotics. MRSA is a type of staph that is resistant to antibiotics called beta-lactams. Beta-lactam antibiotics include methicillin and other more common antibiotics such as oxacillin, penicillin and amoxicillin. While 25% to 30% of the population is colonized with staph, approximately 1% is colonized with MRSA.
The cause of disease resistant microbes is simple and straight forward. It is one of the simplest and most evident demonstrations of ‘natural’ selection forcing evolutionary changes in a species. The mechanism is actually quite simple: take a billion or more microbes (Staphylococcus aureus in this instance) and subject them to repeated doses of penicillin. The first dose may kill all of them, but eventually a few will survive and begin to reproduce. The genetic variation within billions of individuals will eventually generate some with a natural immunity to the drug, particularly if it is administered in small and repeated doses. As long as these naturally immune individual cells are a tiny percentage among billions they pose no problem. When all the other cells die off things change. Resistant cells begin to multiply and eventually become the only ones living. At this point they can replace the normal cells in a population and create an entirely new medical problem. Repeated treatments with the causative antibiotics make available sources of infection become completely populated with resistant bacteria; the old antibiotics simply do not work. The old treatable bugs have been completely replaced with new strain that cannot be killed with the usual antibiotics. Currently, new antibiotics make such infections treatable, but as bacteria evolve resistence to these new drugs the problem becomes more serious. Increasing numbers of bacteria are developing into strains largely immune to many antibiotics. One of the most dangerous of these is tuberculosis which now threatens to expand and make a once deadly disease deadly once more. This is one example of cellular evolution that could be devastating to all primates on the globe.
But this was to be about stories, not evolution. After seventy-eight wonderful, but sometimes painful years of life, I have many stories stored in my memory. Most of these are probably of interest only to myself, a lesser number to my family, an even lesser number to my friends and a very few of general interest. These stories, as Gould states, “only go in certain ways–and these paths do not conform to patterns of actual life.” They are about those rare moments of interest and excitement amongst an otherwise docile, uneventful passing of the time. Stories must contain some unusual, exciting, stimulating or otherwise interesting content or no one would listen to or read them. Watching paint dry is an oft used description of an activity without a real story. Falling or jumping off a bridge while a tornado passes in the midst of an earthquake on the other hand makes for a more interesting tale. Only if true would such a tale carry much interest.
Describing a sea battle could certainly be woven as a story. Describing the reproductive behavior of a single celled animal would certainly be a far more difficult story to write and hold the same range of interest. One of the earliest story tellers would doubtless be one of the first humans to gain the power of speech. Pop comes home from the hunt with a deer slung over his back and a story on his lips of how he hunted and killed it. Mom then tells the story of watching and protecting the kids while gathering berries and roots. Pop then heads over to the big communal cave and tells his story in paintings on the cave wall. History is told by story for interested humans thousands of years hence.
At any meeting where humans congregate, story telling runs rampant. Funny, “Did you hear the one about...” Gossip, “Did you know that so and so...” Incredulous, “Can you believe that...” Informative... “You take five of these...” Virtually every component of every conversation is a story. Some are even true. Story telling runs the gamut from the answers to, “How are you?” to the minister’s sermon on Sunday, and from a politicians ranting to driving directions for a friend to the sales pitch of a used car salesman. Each has its own fictional as well as factual content. And each listener has his or her own set of rules as to what to, who to and what not or who not to believe. Accuracy in reporting is frequently very low on the scale of what is important in a story. The communication is more like a wrestling match between what the story teller really wants the recipient of the tale to believe and the recipient’s belief as to the intent of the story teller. When the honesty of the storyteller is unknown, the recipient has to guess how much to accept as factual and how much to label as BS. Thus is the never ending shell game of human communication.
Story tellers have a wide range of balance between fact and fiction with some having a complete disconnect from facts, choosing to tell even supposedly factual stories designed only to achieve the desired effects. Politicians are notorious for doing this. Another way to achieve the same results, but be technically truthful is to use only those facts which enforce or support the story teller’s agenda and completely ignore those facts which do not. News media people are real masters at this. The rest of us follow a wide range of personal communication rules to determine just how much of the content of our stories is fact and how much is fiction. That also varies as to the recipients of our stories. We are far more truthful with some than with others. There is also the question of being believable. Small children frequently tell stories with little or no concern for this. Often, they are surprised to find people doubting their most creative and outrageous fictions. With a little experience they will soon learn to be more realistic and plausible with their fictions.
Recently a successful author was challenged–indeed charged with a crime–for including some fictional statements in a book that he originally tried to publish as fiction, but whose publisher insisted he call his memoirs. So remember, children, it is far safer to call your work fiction than to take the risk that some anal retentive wimp on the Internet might discover a slight inaccuracy in a work you have called non-fiction and cause you grief. Story telling when it gets into print can be a minefield for the tale teller in some instances, particularly if you are successful. There’s always some losers out there hiring unscrupulous lawyers to take your money away from you if they can figure out the legal angle to use to do so. The legal profession is loathe to do what can easily be done to prevent this from happening. As a group they are far too greedy to keep this easy money from being secured by and for the losers in their profession.
So, story telling fiction is rampant even at a very early age. How does one determine when a story is fiction or has fictional content? The vast majority of stories, like the ones which convey directions to a place or information about baseball scores, are usually true to the knowledge of the story tellers. Likewise, most stories which can easily be checked out are usually true. Fish stories and stories of youthful exploits are among those most likely to carry fictional elements. Then there are those individuals who literally would tell a fiction even when the truth would do just as well. This is just one of several special cases of individuals who will shade the truth for various, sometimes unusual reasons. We all know a few individuals who seem scrupulously accurate and honest in all of their stories. Don’t be too sure. It may be that they are just too careful or clever to be caught. Story tellers that use fiction judiciously may never be caught. Those that don’t are always caught. Then there are those that you wouldn’t believe under any circumstances for a multitude of reasons. Some people believe all stories are fictional and some believe anything they hear. Both are right on occasion and wrong on other occasions.
Some types of individuals–politicians, opposition lawyers, used car salesmen etc–are always suspect. Some–like ministers, your doctor, your own attorney etc. are almost never suspect. Most others lie somewhere in between these two extremes.
To contact the author for any reason, Click Here!
posted by HoJo | 9:26 AM
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