This week’s Mod C is from Caringbah High School’s 2022 Trial. It’s very much the same as the last few, asking about stories and their value (I think I’m going to stop answering sample questions that focus on this because I’m bored stiff with it).
Stories matter. Stories can be used to empower and to humanise. Stories can repair the broken, illuminate, educate and inspire. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche.
Use this line as a stimulus for the opening of an imaginative, discursive, or persuasive piece of writing that explores the importance of stories.
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I was on a bus the other day talking to a man about Guaranteed Minimum Income. If you haven’t heard of this, it’s a social welfare system that guarantees all citizens an income that’s (just) enough to live on, regardless of whether they’re employed or not. In Australia, it would be something like $30,000 and everyone over 18 would receive it, simply for being an adult citizen. Sure, it’s not enough to get fat on, but it provides you with the absolute barest minimum income and isn’t Centrelink. All the ‘good’ countries (i.e. Scandinavia) have done small scale trials of it and found that people used the money to upskill themselves or improve their offering to the wider community. Some people used it just to take the edge of financial necessity.
The man on the bus was incensed. ‘Money for nothing?’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work like that, life. People’d just bludge. To value anything you gotta work for it.’
I pointed out that the trials had shown the opposite of that, and said that anyway, thirty large wasn’t going to let anyone bludge as luxuriously as he feared. But he stuck to his guns. It, he argued, didn’t work like that. Or shouldn’t. Or couldn’t. Even when it did.
What he really meant was that the story in his head, titled ‘How Life Works’, didn’t go like that.
The Story of How Life Works, according to Bob T. Super, was this: Once upon a time there was a young person who worked hard, saved hard, relied on their parents, and didn’t break too many laws. They kept their head dodwn, got a bit of seniority in their gob, and eventually put down a deposit on a house, spouse, and coupla kids. Dog optional. Everyone worked hard, including Optional, the dog. They got a boat, a caravan, and a house up/down the coast. They got a middle-aged tummy. They worked hard. They retired and met Wayward Youths on buses who needed to be Put Straight. They kept on imparting this story until oxygen grew short and they went off to their (pre-paid) funeral.
Repeat as needed per child.
It was, essentially, the Australian Dream, populated by stout-hearted larrikins and No Funny Business. Just deserts all over the place. No one ever sat down and said, ‘Look, Mikey, here’s how it works.’ But when we get directions from someone in charge of us, what they’re really telling us is their story of how the world works and why we should share it. Or else.
The same thinking is probably behind the failure of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. There’s a story which goes: Bad Stuff happened in The Past. We said sorry and They get a lot of freebies now. Freebies cancel out Bad Stuff, and in Australia we don’t want one group getting uppity. Especially not Them. Readers of the Sydney Morning Herald know about master narratives and postmodern skepticism, but it seems that five-dollar thinking hasn’t penetrated the Bush yet, so the referendum failed.
The point is that we’re all controlled by the story called How Life Works. You become an adult when you recognize what particular version of the story controls you. (This means that many people never become adults, no matter how old they get). Even if you continue to hang onto it, that’s OK because you’ve actively chosen it. This means that endings might disappoint you, but you won’t be surprised.
Stories can also alert us to our dissatisfaction with the narratives that control our lives. When we come across another narrative that chimes true for us, we realize how thin and false the old one has been. For me, it was reading Peter Wessel Zappfe’s short allegory about a prehistoric deer, ‘The Last Messiah.’ Without going into it, I read it and thought, ‘That’s exactly it. That’s how things really are.’ Ironically, another epiphanic story for me was the parable of the Good Shepherd, which perfectly articulates how I’ve wanted things to be so many times in my life. Put the two together and you have a pretty good idea of why my c.v. raises more laughs and questions than admiration.
Then there are the legions of lesser stories which help us pass the time, particularly when we’re in bad places. Right through childhood, for example, and through school. Reading was definitely a way of escaping the awful reality of formal education in two continents.
I can’t remember which popular novelist said that writers had a very sacred job because it was to their books that people turned in the darkest times – in hospitals, when we’re alone, depressed, unsure, or despairing. That’s why I dislike most popular writing – it’s created only to make money from people’s boredom or unhappiness. The millions of ‘Try These Plot Hacks’ pins on Pinterest show that we don’t need to fear the rise of A.I. because most people seem to write algorithmically anyway.
Of course, there are lots of great stories – I’m currently writing a historical novel, and made the mistake of reading John Williams’ novel Augustus. I spent a week depressed at the fact that I will probably never do anything as good, although I’m compelled to keep trying (which is the sort of mentality Peter Wessel Zappfe recognized).
I’m sure I’ve made clear that stories matter, and how they matter. I’d go further than that and say that stories are the matter – they’re everything, including our inherently narrative view of ourselves. Without that narrative framework, there is only the chaos of disparate and discrete moments in which things and people collide, meaninglessly, without memory of the past, purpose in the present, or thought of the future.
Even that’s a story.
The Craft of Writing 
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