Starting up a new feature here. Writing To Muse To. It's basic. It's good writing that makes me feel like trying to write good things, too. Some people's muses are other people. My muses: Great music and great storytelling.
The inaugural W2M2 installment: Tim O'Brien writing about telling war stories from his masterpiece book The Things They Carried. These are various sections from the chapter titled "How To Tell A True War Story," sections I underlined and re-read a dozen times. If you can, read the whole chapter. Read the whole book. But these are passages I marked, passages I have re-read and re-read and will re-read again, passages that make me want to do nothing but sit in a monastery on a mountain somewhere and just keep writing sentences until I can write things as good as these.
Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife's breathing. The war's over. You close your eyes. You take a feeble swipe at the dark and think, Chris, what's the point?
...
You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, "Is it true?" and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.
For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen—and maybe it did, anything's possible—even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute concurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man," and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened.
Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon's face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must've thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather raound him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree, if I could somehow recreate the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must've been the final truth.
...
And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special wy that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, selected from pp. 78-81
Life
Stories are all that matter—not what we think or feel, but what we do. That's something that's really gotten into my heart lately, and it's working its way into every part of my life. So expect more stories around here, and less opinion. 