B Story Bingo
Okay, it’s not actually bingo. I just liked the alliteration. And calling some of these B stories might be a stretch, but you get the idea. Anyway, here are some over-simplified B stories from well-known movies. Can you guess the movie?
A high school girl fulfills her dream of becoming a meteorologist.1
A best-selling children’s book author quits his consulting job after being subject to a toxic work environment.2
After eliciting the help of a law student, a women gets her dog back from her ex-husband.3
A hired kidnapper is killed by two men running from debt collectors.4
After making a false report, a rule-following high school girl is arrested and gains a new outlook on life from a fellow criminal.5
Based on a True Story
I have limited my reading and writing almost exclusively to nonfiction. That’s not to say I don’t like fiction, I just like learning about real people and events.
But a few months ago, a comment by Robert McKee hit different.
If you don’t know, Robert McKee is a renowned expert on storytelling. He has taught all kinds of seminars (including one where the requirement is to watch 62 episodes of Breaking Bad) to non-famous and famous people alike. Anyway, here’s the comment he made in an interview on the Longform Podcast that has made me consider more deeply what nonfiction is.
Short version
To one degree or another, all stories are fiction.
Longer version
That word “real” is suspicious immediately. What the hell is real? Every belief that human beings have is an interpretation of reality. So when you start with something . . . that actually happened, the first thing the writer has to decide is what genre is this? You know, is it a crime story? Is it a love story? Is it a family drama? Is it a war story? A social drama about problems in society that need curing? An on it goes. And that’s an interpretation that . . . the nonfiction storyteller has to make, because that reality has infinite possibilities. You have to choose.
Do I emphasize the inner struggles in this character? Their personal relationships—family, friends, lovers? Their social conflicts with the institutions in society? Their physical conflicts with the environment in some fashion? Or some combination of all those levels? Which is the most important? Which is not? And so forth.
What does this character want, really want, out of life? And so that’s an interpretation of real life people. You have to interpret them as if they’re characters.
What I gather from his comments here is that any story about true events must be laced with fiction, or at the very least authors/directors must make key decisions about which details to include and exclude. Webster’s Dictionary defines fiction as… jk lol.
This is why you can have two (or more) different books or documentaries or news articles about the same thing with completely opposite points of view. This is also why movies that are based on true stories include fictional characters or events that help move the story along. Unless we’re talking about Norwegian Slow TV, stories need to skip over the hours of monotony between the interesting bits.
Slice and Dice
To put a fun spin on this concept, let’s pretend we live in a world where the shows The Office and Parks and Recreation are documentaries of real workplaces and people.
If you take these “true” stories and insert some mood-manipulating music, add some commentary, and cut the footage to only include certain parts, you can tell completely different stories from the original facts.
Sentence of the Week
Today’s sentence is straight from my current favorite children’s book: P is for Pterodactyl.
Thanks for reading,
Braden
Mean Girls
Elf
Legally Blonde
Dumb and Dumber
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off