The Nature of Stories

The thing about stories are that they give you a world of your dreams in which you can live and do the impossible things that you wish you could do. They give you a freedom and your imagination a free reign. You take to your heart your favorite characters, and slowly and secretly you live their lives as if their life was inseparable from yours, as if they were but one. You feel their anguish and their happiness, you cry with them and you laugh with them. Their emotions are your emotions, their success yours, their failures your failures. That is why we love them, we embrace them and we crave them.  That is we are hurt when they are hurt and that is why we flood our eyes when their heart is laden.

Have we not all begged in agony when we knew that our hero was walking into a trap, have we not consoled our hero when he blamed himself for the sad demise of his trusted companion, have we not sneered and cursed the villain who tortured our hero’s beloved. Is it the hero that makes him so amiable to us, is the story that drags us towards it and them submerges us in its intoxicating world or is it ultimately us the reader who has taken upon his heart the courage to lose himself and decide to adore and love the story and its hero. Somehow the story, the hero and the author are immaterial to the reader.

The reader weaves his own story every time, he makes his own castles and give his heroes the face of his creation. He crafts the enchanted forest and despicable moors.  The story of any story is the creativity and imagination of the reader not the creativity and the imagination of the author. It’s the reader who weaves the story and who gives it a life force that is capable of animating the whole world and it’s ultimately the reader who breathes life into the story and makes it come alive. It is the reader who fathers the story, the author is but a guide who lightly guides him through the altogether unfamiliar world the reader has conjured up. That is why a truly great story is one that is open for interpretation in as many ways as there are fertile minds there in the world.