Stories Talk Good
Being an introduction to this here website
Hi. I’m Sam. I’m a documentary filmmaker and a writer.
Stories are a way of talking; nothing more and nothing less. In the words of Westley “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
My favorite stories tend to be lenses and mirrors.
Stories as lenses.
Lenses help us see the world. Think of good photography: a good image has the things the photographer wants you to see in focus and the rest out of focus. These images are more pleasing to us because we know where to look. It seems we as humans are beautifully limited in that we can’t take in the meaning of an entire image and so we must focus in on specific things in order to feel something, understand something or perhaps just enjoy how truly lovely it is.
The stories I love are the same but instead of images they are about events (plot), people (characters) and places (settings). In the seeming chaos of all the possible events that can happen, people we can follow and places we can visit, which do we focus on? And by focusing on them can we understand what the author meant when they chose this story, this person and this place?
Which can lead us to start asking questions of ourselves. . .
Stories as mirrors.
Mirrors help us see ourselves. The stories I love are the same in that within the events, the characters and the places I see something of my own life. It is beautiful when a storyteller through their tale seems to say “I see you.” I think it’s even better when a storyteller seems to say “I see you here, now look over there. Isn’t it beautiful? Let’s go there.”
Should every story do that? Probably not.
Sometimes I just want to watch John McClane beat up some bad guys and jump off a building with a firehose tied around his waist. That matters too.
But it is stories of the “lens and mirror” variety I find myself thinking about the next day and the next day and in amazing cases even the day after that. From there, it’s probably going to stick with me for a while. Maybe even the rest of my life.
I’ll try to tell and discuss both here (via film, writing and podcasts) along with the occasional nonsense. I also host a podcast with my sister-in-law where we discuss children’s literature.