The Art of Sims Storytelling

Okay so honestly I am terrified of looking at the last page of posts because my brain is telling me that you all hate me. I don't need reassurance. I know my brain is wrong and that it's being irrational and that the Bad Times are over. I just need time to convince my brain that the Bad Times are over and that it's safe now.

But I was pondering about writing and fiction and literature some more, and I wanted to share my ponderings.

What I'm finding in my googling is that I am working from some very different base assumptions than other people are. Like I said before - I wasn't socialized into mainstream culture, so my brain doesn't have the same basic thought structures that I see in mainstream culture brains in my interwebs wanderings. I kind of forged my own brain out of the Appalachian foothills. ;)

So when I talk about literature, what I am talking about is Sacred Story.

I think that Story is the most sacred thing that humans have. And I have been a priestess of it all my life. I still have my second grade journal, and at three different points little 8 year old me wrote about how I was "thinking about being a true story writer".

Going back to the LotR movies - you could feel it, sitting in that theater. It was packed, and every human there was silent and enraptured and living in the Story being presented to them. It was deeply human, and it said things that mattered to them, down in their souls.

I haven't created anything like that yet. It is my deepest wish, but I haven't done it yet. I don't know if I can, because my brain is so weird. I don't know if I have enough access to the shared human experience to create a story that would reach the souls of so many people.

But I do know that my work has reached a few souls, and maybe I should be happy with my portion of the sacred.

So when I talk about literature and work that has worth, that's what I mean - work that serves the sacred story. And it can be done with every medium and with all possible tools, and a story can be sacred no matter where the marketing people shelve it or where it's posted online or where it's told to a gathering of humans.

If I were to define the profane...I'd say it's stories that do not serve the sacred. It's stories that exploit and abuse and that cater to the worst in humans. And sometimes you find the two mixed together, where the author reached for the sacred but they were limited by their prejudices and their assumptions and what they had internalized from their society. There are older works that I really enjoy for what they have to say while also flinching at the racism and sexism and dehumanization of the Other.

I think maybe, at least for me, the point of Story is to humanize the Other.

I found this quote the other week and I found it very relevant to my work:

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular” - Carl Jung

So I know that Surreal Darkness maybe doesn't appeal to everyone, but for me, at this time in my life, it's how I am reaching for the sacred. It's how I am trying to bring the shadow to consciousness and reach enlightenment.

By the way, I know the first chapter doesn't come off like that at all, and maybe I should think about these things before I start a story because the first bit of it always ends up making me worried that people won't continue reading and that they won't see what the story became, but on the other hand I don't think I could do it differently because the story and its meaning reveals itself to me as I write it. I have to write the awkward first bit to see what it is that wants to be communicated.

And heck, we all have to live the awkward first bits of our lives before we begin to grow up.