Thursday Thoughts...

“There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.” 

Margaret Atwood 

What a delicious description of story in all of its guises. 

I often times think that we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves - I can't draw; I'm a fly by the seat of my pants kind of gal; I am not logical etc etc and yet when we dig deeper we have probably just told ourselves these stories because they suited us at the time; or they helped shield us from some other things we weren't ready for; or we didn't like the association with what we negating. Or perhaps we even thought the response made us sound more interesting than we thought we were!

The way Ms Atwood suggest that any story is the sum of all these additions, subtractions, calculations and  emphases feels to me like a truly accurate description of any story we tell.

Whenever we go to tell a story we select the highlights; we set the context by deciding which bits 'matter'; which bits add to the story best; and of course we leave things out.

I imagine for any writer, there would be an interesting mapping project to look back over the development of a written piece or a book, and track all the decisions that show what was left out, what was told, what was emphasised and dramatised and the decisions taken about how the story would be told.

A couple of recent Thursday Thoughts have been simple enough notions; yet their deep complexity in reality has really made me pause.  Pause in awe and wonder at how humans manage to develop, interact and mercifully remain mostly conflict-free in their daily interactions given the millions of decisions that take place about these sorts of things.

by Poppelwell, 2009.  Seen in Auckland in 2012.