Stories Beget Stories

We are stories begetting more stories, begetting more stories.

Today a friend was writing some fiction with me and she bemoaned that we were coming to the end of the tale we had been developing over the past months. As I handed off part of the story for her to resolve, she said that it made her sad to have to end it. And I felt that too, but it also prompted me to remind her of all of the stories that would have to follow after this one, because this one exists. There are characters and places and situations and worlds that have come into being because we gave them life and specificity and named them and trapped them in a timeline until they told themselves. Every little thing that came to pass had a before and has an after and bumped against something else with a story too.

Stories are fractal. They’re like living spirals in multi dimensional spaces. A story births another story not when you bottle it up and prevent it from ending, but when you tell it and prevent it from still-birth.

I was always afraid to tell my stories. I just wanted to dream them. For so, so long. I still carry that fear for my personal work, but I know what it is now. I still feel safe in the shallow end of the pool with the collaborative RPG writing, but it’s moments like this I look into the deep and and almost give myself permission to let them fly and accept them for who they are, these ugly mangled twisted things inside me that I’m too afraid to push out into the world. I’m not quite ready to give them names and force them into a place and make them decide to be and choose their beginning, press out their middle, and follow them to the end.

Stories beget stories. We are fleshy breath containers, eddies of breath spiraling off from previous eddies, initiating new ones, and we will fade as the breath rolls on.

What are we if not stories telling themselves?