The Fact of Fiction
The room went completely dark. That’s how she knew the time had come. Disparate spotlights illuminated the scattered potential of a life-long dream now stretched out on the mat before her. Ever since she was old enough to direct her attention and perform her own first awkward somersault, she had been fixated by gymnastics — every spare second spent practicing tumbling, flipping, and vaulting across any surface she found herself on. She never thought to ask herself why she loved it… Wasn’t it same reason why anyone loved doing anything? A search for that one second in the midst of the stricture where they could find release and freedom — that one moment dancing across what she imagined to be the very stage of Heaven, venerating her existence by defying the cosmic forces that held so many others stagnant, captive, upright to the ground.
This was that moment. She was now 17 and it was the final pass of her Olympic routine. In fact, it would be the very last competitive routine of her decorated career. She had saved the best for last and would now attempt a combination never before executed at the Olympic level — a roundoff and back handspring into a triple back tuck. Only eighteen and a half yards now stood between her and immortality, echoing the precise precariousness into which she was born. Her breath was heavy with the weight of her task and her eyes, though fixed on nothing in particular, scrutinized the cumulative landscape of her life leading up to this instant.
In tune with the crescendo of her accompaniment, she launched into a sprint towards the opposite corner, her feet gripping the mat as if to soak up the aspirations of every drop of sweat laid down in countless prior routines. She didn’t need to tell herself what to do. Innumerable hours of practice had seen to it being all but completely involuntary. And that’s what she wanted anyway — to transcend the moment, walking the line between possible and probable, capable of more than complete control could allow. Eighteen thousand spectators now rose to their feet in palpable anticipation, desperately hoping that, somehow, her adventure could vicariously ennoble them too. Her body moved on its own accord, displacing space and even time around it, demanding that even destiny itself capitulate to her creative will. Then it was over.
She found herself again on the other side of the mat half expecting to be face down outside the boundary, but as she opened her eyes, she saw her feet placed squarely within the red-striped right angle. Unsure of how long she had been standing there, she immediately pivoted and raised her hands, coercing a tentative smile and waiting for the audience to reflect a distinction between failure and success. Slowly, the deafening noise of thunderous applause crept into her cognition. Without exception every soul in the stadium had erupted into deafening acclamation, congratulating and thanking her for the courage to both set forward and model the most venerable of standards.
It wasn’t relief or fulfillment that flooded over her, but rather something more. She felt in that moment like a 20 watt bulb in a 100 watt socket; more meaning than she could bear to conduct emanated from, refracted through, and zipped around her. She left the stage only because all must — to move on to greater things — but that was enough for the day.
Here’s an interesting statistic — here on Medium, the topic of Fiction has almost 200k followers, while the topic of Facts has less than 10k…
Have you ever wondered what’s the value of a good story? We instinctively know they have immense value, but it’s not always so obvious why. No one needs to be taught how to appreciate a Disney film or given a metric for a Tolkien or Rowling novel. No mere sequence of flashing images or words laid out on a page could inspire society to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to bear witness to their glory. So then what is it about stories that have the capacity to generate such a religious following? What enables the whole to amount to more than just the sum of the parts?
In some sense, we are all curiously creative beings brought into the world to figure out what to do when we don’t know what to do. Even consciousness itself appears to function as a biological mechanism for exploring the potential outcomes of actions without the necessity to first enact them. So we fracture ourselves into characters, modeling the terminals of each mode of being, weeding out most and refining some. It’s not that the antagonists are so distant from us, but rather they personify the vista of a path that some days we are all too familiar with. They give us something real to run away from, not just something to run towards. And the protagonists would certainly not be so if they were merely the impressions of that which we already are, or even worse, if they were perfect. They instead manifest the distillations of what we find to be the admirable and optimal purpose of a failed agent in a broken world. Because everyone plays an actor of their own ideal. Some days we direct ourselves with more integrity than others, and some days it’s all we can do to stave off absolutely overwhelming regret.
All great stories involve not only a single character, but everyone, and wraps up so comprehensively the hopes and fears of a generation to where they cannot be ignored. They show us who we are and who we want to be more completely than even reality in its complexity can. They sublimate both our nature and our will, and concentrate our very being. Their value lies in the exploration of the questions we ask ourselves every day. We desperately want to dialogue with a character battling against the same apathy and pain that are native to us. Could it be that there is a methodology for being that would mitigate those things? Could it be that the course of human history has distilled narratives that communicate access to the most honorable forces within ourselves? Could it be that doing something with good intentions when you don’t know exactly what to do is more meaningful than even doing something good when you know exactly what to do? Maybe this distinction isn’t so useful, since the world would certainly be substantially improved even if everyone consistently chose the latter. It is also fair to say, however, that most of us do not always know exactly what to do, and for many that can be paralyzing. Either way, these are the types of questions we look for answers to in our favorite characters.
Imagine your reaction to being notified periodically in a narrative interlude to your favorite fictional series that the events involved didn’t really happen and the characters you came to know and love never really existed — just in case you started to get a little too invested in the story. Imagine how frustrating that would be! It couldn’t possibly matter less! We don’t care that “those things really didn’t happen”… because they’re happening inside of us all the time! The fiction becomes fact in the way it interacts with our own character —how it influences and changes us.
The truth is that this life does a number on all of us, exacting tolls on the passage of our souls and accelerating the senescence of living on borrowed time. To guard the heart above all else means to preserve our connection to the divine — the will to be better, to do more, to believe that there is more to your story than has already been written, and to stake your very existence on the extent of your purpose for good. I am convinced the reason you want so badly to be who you want to be is that you were created and knit together in your mother’s womb by the very God of the universe to be it! A hero is no hero without a defining struggle, and a creature is no human without the same. What matters is that you preserve the resolution to always try again — to speak truth, act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Mic. 6:8). Take time to appreciate everything that manifests itself to be appreciated. Be in constant wonder. Live strong. Love without fear. Write your story well.
