The Non-Story of Sarah Hough and I
By Jake Sweet
It is hard to tell stories now. The reason is that life no longer happens in stories. Maybe they never did. But especially not now. Not in the era of digitized humankind. Not in the era of SMS, GPS, social networking, video game addiction, Photoshop, free Viagra samples.
So how do I tell you about Sarah Hough? She sent me a message on Facebook. We texted for a few days. We met. We fucked. We never talked again. This leaves little material for storytelling in the classic dramatic sense. It is architecturally impossible to model an experience of so little substance into a Freytag's Pyramid. There's no conflict and there's no anticipation. There's no tension and there's little dialogue. Especially dialogue that isn't typed. There is no plot. It happened quick and easy.
Nor is there much room for stylistic flourish. I could painstakingly compile a string about the way the slick cold touch screen responded with its tidy satisfying click sounds, the way the graphic interface buttons dimpled in with every flickering tap of the thumbs. Concoct long descriptive sentences about the mechanical events of three days to inflate the word count. Google synonyms of words and choose the ones with the most syllables to wipe off the prose with the grease of sophistication. Would that interest you? Didn't think so.
And finally there is no emotional impact, no depth of feeling before or during or after our brief flossy relationship. This could be corrected artificially. I could implant words like beautiful and memory and anxious and longing and hurt and bitter and guilt and frustration into the piece. But that would be inauthentic. And if there's one thing we all know as New York Times Book Review readers it's that authenticity is the badge of Serious Writers everywhere.
In a distant mythic time people spent years piling pages thousands high just to scratch the breadth of the human experience. Today I wrote five paragraphs and it was still too sprawling not to smother the hollowness of it.
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Jake Sweet lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. He spends all of his time writing stuff. For more, visit him online at www.jakesweetwriting.tk
By Jake Sweet
It is hard to tell stories now. The reason is that life no longer happens in stories. Maybe they never did. But especially not now. Not in the era of digitized humankind. Not in the era of SMS, GPS, social networking, video game addiction, Photoshop, free Viagra samples.
So how do I tell you about Sarah Hough? She sent me a message on Facebook. We texted for a few days. We met. We fucked. We never talked again. This leaves little material for storytelling in the classic dramatic sense. It is architecturally impossible to model an experience of so little substance into a Freytag's Pyramid. There's no conflict and there's no anticipation. There's no tension and there's little dialogue. Especially dialogue that isn't typed. There is no plot. It happened quick and easy.
Nor is there much room for stylistic flourish. I could painstakingly compile a string about the way the slick cold touch screen responded with its tidy satisfying click sounds, the way the graphic interface buttons dimpled in with every flickering tap of the thumbs. Concoct long descriptive sentences about the mechanical events of three days to inflate the word count. Google synonyms of words and choose the ones with the most syllables to wipe off the prose with the grease of sophistication. Would that interest you? Didn't think so.
And finally there is no emotional impact, no depth of feeling before or during or after our brief flossy relationship. This could be corrected artificially. I could implant words like beautiful and memory and anxious and longing and hurt and bitter and guilt and frustration into the piece. But that would be inauthentic. And if there's one thing we all know as New York Times Book Review readers it's that authenticity is the badge of Serious Writers everywhere.
In a distant mythic time people spent years piling pages thousands high just to scratch the breadth of the human experience. Today I wrote five paragraphs and it was still too sprawling not to smother the hollowness of it.
- - -
Jake Sweet lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. He spends all of his time writing stuff. For more, visit him online at www.jakesweetwriting.tk
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