Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Life versus Fiction

“Your life will not make a good story. Stories are stories. Life is life,” I wrote once on Twitter. It seems that if something special happens many say:
It was just like a movie!
It was like something out of a dramatic telenovela
It sounds like something from a novel, but it was real

Sometimes, I doubt if its life that influences fiction, or if fiction influences life.

Literature classes have taught us that stories have plot, climax, rising action, resolution, and all that. But daily life doesn't work that way. It is dull and repetitive.

Once, while searching the net for pictures of the thousands of paper lanterns in Miag-ao, I stumbled on a blog entry by a frustrated girl. She didn’t go to the event even if she wanted it bad because her boyfriend was being a bitch. Okay, but as I was to click to the next website I saw she wrote that she missed her Tangled moment. That she always dreamed of a prince to save her from her situation. Oh please no, I thought. We girls grew up watching Disney princesses, but its unrealistic to apply that to life now. Ladies, we won’t wait to be saved if we can get out the muck ourselves, and meeting Prince Charming won’t be the end of problems (sometimes, they’re the start of problems). Ah, well, maybe its just a girl’s ordinary thoughts I don’t have the right to mock... If she expected a prince, she was setting herself up for disappointment.

As they say, “Expectation is the root of all frustration.”

I love stories. All kinds: books, manga, movies, including gossip. Fiction is from life. We learn from stories. But to expect our lives to pattern with ideal and impossible situations in stories to the point of delusion isn’t reasonable.

I feel like I haven’t gotten clear at the point I’m trying to make here. My mind seems floating in another dimension...

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