Movie Reviews for Writers: Stories We Tell

While technically Stories We Tell isn't a movie about a writer (instead an actor), it is 100 percent a movie about storytelling, and that is part and parcel of the writer's craft. 

In this amazing documentary Sarah Polley tries to make sense of her family history in a sort of Rashomon style by interview, well, more like interrogating her family and letting viewers settle the "mystery" of it all in their own minds, sort of like Poirot not having the big reveal scene. And it works. Tremendously. 

The movie begins with this quote from Margaret Atwood: 

"When you're in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all but rather a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you're telling it to yourself or someone else."

The opening scene itself is a bit of a reveal as well, as Polley's dad, Michael, walks very slowly upstairs to record his own voice-over for the film. The things he reveals make almost no sense until the unfolding of the film itself, and that's completely intentional. 

If the theme of Stories We Tell is anything, it's this:

Stories don't make sense at the beginning. They only make sense in the act of telling and in the act of looking back, and even then, it's all pieces and parts (thank you Rashomon) and open to interpretation. 

The same holds true for my work and yours. As writers, no one story tells the full scope of our work. No one novel can be condensed into our quintessential piece. That's the work of reviewers and scholars to decide and argue about. Not ours. 

Just as Polley's story only makes any semblance of sense in total by looking back, our stories only tell who we are as writers by looking back and seeing how they all mess together as a sort of literary DNA. And that's okay because that means that story we really feel we flubbed big time doesn't ultimately matter. It's just a single strand of our story. But it also means that the big story we love so much doesn't hold any additional weight in our ultimate story either. It too is just a single strand. 

Another item from the film that caught me was this bit from Polley's sister, Sarah: 

"I guess I have this instinct of who cares about our family... but I think it is interesting to look at this one thing that happened and how it's refracted in so many different ways."

I can't tell you how often I hear writers question their work by saying something along these lines: "I don't know why this would be interesting to anyone, but..." In other words, "Who cares about our family?" And again, the trick is to remember that no individual strand is the measuring stick of your body of work. It's the sum total of the work, i.e., "how it's refracted in so many different ways."

If we only accepted C.S. Lewis as "that Narnia guy" we wouldn't have his Till We Have Faces or A Grief Observed. If we only accepted Ed McBain as the 87 Precinct writer, we wouldn't have Matthew Hope. Sure, the publishers will always tell you to produce more of that one line that sells (and it's never a bad thing to get more Easy Rawlins, of course), but that's never the only strand in a writer's body of work, nor should it be.