Story Time

 

Twitter is the Lust of Dante’s Circles of Social Media. It’s still hell, but things could be a lot worse.  Amongst the trolls and doom and Capital One promotions, one does find some interesting stories and glimpses of humanity. Maybe a better metaphor is Twitter is the Marshalls of social media: it’s not a pleasant place to be, and you're going to wade through an awful lot of crap, but there are a few decent items to be found.

One such decent item is Story Club by George Saunders, which came to me courtesy of Maria Bustillos. It’s essentially an English class held on Saunders’ substack. It’s behind a paywall, but it’s great value for money if you’re a fan of the written word, and/or if you believe that engaging with stories in a thoughtful way might be an important and helpful thing to do, especially at this particular moment. We started by reading a Hemingway's “Cat in the Rain,” one paragraph at a time over the course of a week: kind of the antithesis of the Twitter experience.

There are writing exercises as well. Last week, the assignment was to write a story of 200 words (exactly 200, not 199 or 201) using only 50 unique words. So you keep a running tally of the words you’ve used, and once you get to 50, you have to start re-using words (or go back and swap out another one, but the grand total can’t exceed 50). And you're supposed to do this in only 45 minutes. Judging from the comments, many of my fellow students had the same experience I did: you hit 50 words pretty quickly (I think I was at around 90 total words), and then you find yourself in an awkward spot.  But then some interesting things happen as you wriggle free.   

My attempt:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, and I am happy to welcome you aboard on today’s flight to Oahu. Our flight time today will be only two hours, and Connie and her team are here to make your flight as pleasant as possible.

And I would like to go ahead and welcome you newlyweds aboard today! Congratulations! Time flies. I remember. A good time. A pleasant time. 

A time you would think would go on and on being good and pleasant. Right, Connie? Go ahead and remember. Our time was good and pleasant. This was our time. You think you are happy today, but I would like you to remember. You and I are right. You and I are a team. We would be happy. I am speaking here. Your captain is speaking to you. 

And to you newlyweds: your time is like this flight. Be happy here, but the hours will go and go. Hours and hours. You are here. This is possible. Today will welcome you. You have this today and you think you are happy, but remember: today is only today. Today will go. Make your today right. Go ahead.      

Have a pleasant flight. Mahalo!”