The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Influence

  • Stories to Keep the Mind Engaged

    Because the human brain is what it is, we need stories.

    I think the first stories started as oral history – life lessons and wisdom passed down through generations. The history of our people is important. In theory, it helps prevent us making the same mistakes over again. Stories can impart morals by example – the Boy Who Cried Wolf being one of my favorite examples. Also, it seems easier to remember facts if they are presented as a tale rather than facts. People retain the enjoyable and interesting, not the dry and boring.

    Stories are also of value because they help people relate their experiences to one another. As humans, we all need validation. If we tell a story, and someone else has a similar story, we are affirmed and feel right. We can also share our stories so that our memories live on. Someday, I’d like the next generation – maybe my own children – to know what happened to me in my life, so in a way I am immortalized. (more…)

  • Stories of the Mind

    The world needs stories for a simple reason. Stories define us. Forget about the books you read or the movies you watch. Those aren’t the important stories. The important ones are the tales that never see the light of day. These stories exist only in the minds of every person everywhere, shaping our lives.

    I’m going to throw out a statistic here that I made up on the spot and is probably wrong. 99.9% of all stories will never been seen or heard by anyone other then the storyteller.. They’re the stories we tell ourselves, the fantasies we concoct when bored or the dreams we have in that awesome moment of sleep where we can kind of control what’s going on. They’re the lies we imagine about ourselves and others in order to stay sane. No one will ever hear them, no one will ever know them, but they are stories essential to the well-being of the mind.

    Stories are how we sort through our problems. When something goes wrong, this is how we cope. We make stories about difficult situations and potential resolutions. The point of these stories isn’t to find an actual solution, but to explore every possibility, and maybe relive some of the best ones, in order to get rid of the dredge so your problems don’t effect the rest of your life.

    The world doesn’t need stories as much as the individual needs stories. We need the narrative in our lives in order to get our way through the boring parts and relive the great parts. Unlike real life, stories almost always have happy endings. Even the ones that don’t end happily at least make sense and end with a purpose. Isn’t that something we all strive for in our own personal story?

  • Stories Are A Luxury

    My writer friends may take exception with this, but I don’t think the world needs stories.

    Stories are a luxury.

    This idea that stories (and any other form of art) are somehow a necessity is false. It’s a notion that we artistic types often perpetuate because we’re trying to assuage our own insecurity about the career path we want to pursue. It’s as if we still need to be convinced that being an artist is legit and worthwhile.

    Here’s the stone cold truth, people: Art is not a required staple. It is not food nor is it shelter. The world will continue to spin even without the stories we tell.

    (more…)

  • Base Instinct

    evolution-406x226Why does the world need stories? I don’t know that we have a choice in the matter. Stories seem to be the thing that separates us from the animals. Forget about writers for a moment. Forget about books and movies. All of that is just an extreme extension of a base instinct. Even if you took that all the way, we are a story species.

    When you see someone you haven’t seen for a couple of days, the first thing you do is tell a story of what you did last weekend. When you get up in the morning and look at the paper, you are reading a story. When you get in the car and turn on the radio, regardless of your listening preferences, you hear a story.

    Our religions are based on stories, some of the most archetypal stories in history. Our philosophies are based on narratives. Decartes meditated in the form of narratives. Plato put forth his theories in the form of fictionalized dialogues of his teacher Socrates. Everything we know and do is based around a story, a dream, a narrative powered by aspirations and advertising. (more…)

  • Do We Need Stories? (Week of February 3)

    Imagine ancient man, sitting at a campfire with his family and friends. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider what happened next. He started telling a story. Whether it was a recounting of the days hunt, or a wish for a plentiful summer, it is highly likely that early man told stories.

    And we still do today.

    But are stories really necessary these days? We’re connected as never before in a web of communication. We have facts and data at our fingertips. Scripted television seems to be dying, replaced by reality shows. The media has made celebrities of people whose lives are recorded and viewed for our pleasure.

    This week, we’re asking the writers in the Cafe to ponder the imponderable: “Why does our world need stories?” Can humanity survive without them? Are they necessary to our existence? Are they a frivolous luxury for the rich and idle who are not working?

    We hope you enjoy our responses to this question. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.

    Until next week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Backwards, Forwards

    Disclaimer: Given I’m always late on my submissions, I get to peek to see what everyone else is doing during the weekly assignments. I see that many folks are looking at all of the various assignments and weighing in on the entire body of work that is Confabulator. I, however, originally thought the question posed to us was intended to focus upon only our own postings, so that’s all I originally looked at while working up my answer. As a consequence, my musings below may seem a bit egotistical. That’s not at all the case. I get at least as much enjoyment and food for thought from my fellow contributors as I get from my own efforts.

    I like this assignment. It encouraged me to go back through the last year of Confabulator posts and revisit them, which allowed me to recognize how much insightful commentary and inventive fiction we’ve generated as a group during the last twelve months. It’s pretty damn impressive. (more…)

  • Post in Review – 2012

    I have to admit to something you might not know about me: I have a terrible memory for things I read and especially the things I write. It has to be exceptional for a detail to really stick out in my mind. Or I have to read it multiple times. So I’ve had to glance through my own posts to even remember what I’ve written.

    Of my own posts, my favorite is the character interview week from the second week of October — Everything In Its Place. It was fun to write from the point-of-view of my favorite minor characters, and to explore a post-novel scenario I hadn’t really given much thought.

    In fact, that was probably my favorite week to read. Check it out; it started October 8th with Jack’s Meeting With Mitch. We’ve discussed before how writers are sort of insular — I’ll write most of my novels while making every effort to avoid divulging concrete details. That particular assignment revealed a lot about not just what sort of writers we are, but the sort of characters we write.

    Generically, any assignment that gets into the depth of our processes and systems is fun to read. I like seeing not just how we’re all different as writers, but how we’re also the same. Even though some of the other writers tackle genres that I don’t usually read, the process that get us all to the end product isn’t so different.

    Its been a fun year, doing this with a writing family that’s supportive, fun, and talented. Here’s to another year!

  • Confabulating is a Calling

    http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/03/rainbow-brain-map-science-aaas.jpg
    Somewhere in there are the stories waiting to be discovered and told. Some of them are beyond me right now and that’s pretty exciting.

    It’s been a year since we launched the Confabulator Cafe. The meetings we had leading up to this launch were fun and filled with lots of writers who were interested in contributing and some others who were looking for something different from the group. It took us a while to separate the Cafe from the writer’s group but that’s finally happening thanks in part to NaNoWriMo but that’s another story for others to tell.

    Over the first year of the Cafe we’ve covered a ton of topics and done a lot of writing. By my count I’ve written well over 45,000 words for the site on everything from the politics of writing and storytelling to flash fiction to my influences and so many other things. I’ve unknowingly echoes thoughts of my fellow Confabulators and been far afield from the majority, too. I’ve learned a great deal about how I write, why I write and even when I write best.

    As a storyteller, the monthly fiction assignments have been the most fun. I missed one assignment early on, but I’ve had the most fun writing every story. Being ‘forced’ to write short/flash fiction on a monthly basis has been sometimes nerve-wracking, but it’s always paid off. I’ve always gotten something I can be proud of despite the amount of sweat that’s gone into the writing.

    (more…)

  • Sleeping Through Class

    I have a confession to make.

    I have not been a very consistent Confabulator Cafe reader.

    Because I have a life, and sometime between that and keeping up with Facebook and LOLcats posts, the Confabulator Cafe just keeps stacking up in my feed reader. I have to choose how to use my time— do I want to write for the Cafe, or do I want to read it? Pick one.

    And so, with a heavy heart and no small amount of guilt, every few months I declare blogroll bankruptcy and Mark All Read. No more Crunchy Betty. Sayonara Captain Awkward. Goodbye Unf*** Your Habitat.

    I expect things will be somewhat better from now on, though. I’ve taken up Editor Minor duties at the Cafe. Another year of Nanowrimo has reinforced bonds of friendship and resparked my interest in how other writers do their thing. I’ve reoriented my blogroll away from cute cat videos and more towards literature.

    We started this experiment a year ago. We’re still here. This exercise in group writing, which could easily have died of neglect well before the last frost date still has a dozen active participants. We still like one another, we’re each still posting pretty much every week, and we have yet to run out of things to write about. So let’s keep going and see how far this road will take us.

  • Greatest Hits of 2012

    Pencil on calendarWhen I started writing for the Confabulator Cafe in January of 2012, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d had my own website, my own blog, and I’d worked on several others as a contributing writer or editor. The Cafe, however, took me into experimental territory.

    The idea for the Cafe was born out of the Lawrence writers group, specifically Sara Lundberg (our editor-in-chief and founder). She proposed a group blog where our collective writing experience could be shared with the world at large. It seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t know if nearly a dozen people could write each week on a single topic and not come off sounding derivative or repetitive.

    I shouldn’t have worried. While we did have weeks where we seemed to be singing the same note across the board, we also had weeks where differing opinions created serious tension in the Cafe.

    (more…)