Last night two friends and I went to dinner and to see a writer enact parts of his new book. The idea was clever, and he was very good, but my friends missed the give and take of an author in conversation and a question and answer period. Inacting one's own words seems formidable, and you become a character instead of a narrator. I certainly wouldn't choose my own words to act out, when so many great writer's words are available. Yet maybe he has a point. Whenever you tell a story, it's removed from the actual event and dressed up and edited. So the story is not the truth, it's the flower from the seed of something that happened to you. We are performing for an audience, either in a blog, as is the case here, or when we tell what happened yesterday at the grocery store, or write down our memory of our father talking to us about his eminent death. There is a translation and a performance.
So I believe the event last night was much deeper and wiser than it first appeared, and I just bet I'm going to be thinking about it in relation to my life and how I "tell" it.
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