Once there was a boy who saw the world as a place of limitless wonder and bountiful possibilities. The dreams of becoming his heroes from the silver screen, or box-set TV connected to the 5-channel antenna on the roof and top-loading VCR that sat atop it, were almost tangible in his vivid imagination. It wouldn’t be long before his appreciation for the artful craft of the stories in which his flickering idols of light resided would begin to shape his world view; though he wouldn’t be aware of it for several years later. What would Luke Skywalker do in a given situation? How would Egon rationalize something? Is it possible that this is a circumstance that even Indiana Jones could not overcome? Could Superman even handle it? Tested by a world that seemed bent on burying the naive optimism of his youth, this now grown man began to see patterns in the greatest of stories featuring the most fragile of characters…
A character in a situation… a story. I teach my students that there are three core literary elements from which all others evolve: Plot, Character, and Setting. Something has to happen to someone and it must happen somewhere. Of these three, setting is the one that we tend to skimp on. Think about a friend telling you their story about something that they experienced – do they go into intricate detail of the setting? Chances are that they do not. But, when you visualize their story do you place it in a setting in your mind’s eye? Chances are that you do. SPOILERS, the young boy referenced above is me (shocking, I know), but he is also you – even if you’re a girl. The art of story, regardless of the medium, is to explore universally true thematic elements of human nature. You can break down all of the academic theory and its accompanying jargon from classical archetype to post modernism, and everywhere in between, but the simple truth is that something is happening to somebody somewhere. The something is, at its essence, something that each of us has faced in our own lives. Whereas we may not be clinging to life over an infinitely deep chasm with one hand as we learn that our father is the most evil person in existence, we have felt hopelessly abandoned and struggled to come to terms with the duality of a person in our life not being who or what we thought they were. So what’s the variable? Setting. Setting is the only difference between a budding Jedi and a “Psycho” that mans the front desk while his mother’s corpse watches him from her bedroom window… but what a difference it is.
The magic of story is that we use it as escapism, but the reality is that we are actually looking at ourselves in the very circumstances that we’re attempting to escape from… just with different set dressings. Most people are content in not looking too deeply behind the thin facade that separates themselves and the mirror into which they gaze to escape the stresses of their own existence, willingly ignoring the truth in the reflection that they may glimpse. However, in the spirit of the season, as masterfully depicted in my favorite version of the Dickens classic through the Ghost of Christmas Past, “Truth lives.”