{"id":7612,"date":"2013-02-08T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2013-02-08T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=7612"},"modified":"2013-02-08T06:00:09","modified_gmt":"2013-02-08T12:00:09","slug":"getting-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=7612","title":{"rendered":"Getting Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tumblr_m6o8rdALXy1qhwhfl\"<\/a>I like to be entertained by stories. I want to be taken away to a place I\u2019ve never been or to see place I\u2019m familiar with in a new way.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not asking too much, is it?<\/p>\n

Now, don\u2019t get me wrong – we need all kinds of stories. We learn from them, we are informed by them, hopefully we take them to heart and not too seriously. Except when we should. It\u2019s complicated.<\/p>\n

But it shouldn\u2019t be. We should be able to discern which stories are entertainment and which are informative. The blurred lines of our society right now make that sometimes very, very difficult.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m all over the place, but let me bring it in for a minute.<\/p>\n

We need stories for all sorts of reasons but the reason I love them is when I get to escape for a little while. Movies do this pretty well but reading a good book can be every bit as effective.<\/p>\n

Except it\u2019s becoming apparent that people don\u2019t read a lot of long-form stories any more. We live in a culture of information bursts, 140-character notes that ask us how we feel and now what we think. I suppose that a doomsayer might argue that we are losing our stories to short attention spans.<\/p>\n

Another might argue that news stories are more entertainment than news these days and that\u2019s due to the short attention-spans, too. I suspect it\u2019s more to do with our need to be constantly entertained. It\u2019s rare that the average reader pursues a story to learn something. That doesn\u2019t mean the stories aren\u2019t being told in long forms, it doesn\u2019t mean that books aren\u2019t being published. They are. And people are buying them, they\u2019re listening, they\u2019re watching.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t know if they\u2019re inspiring more stories.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I like to be entertained by stories. I will watch a movie or TV show, listen to a story on NPR or read something on the Internet and latch on to a phrase or an idea, really just a nugget of something, and then I will be inspired to find out more or extrapolate a situation from that bit. Occasionally, I\u2019ll come across a story that has so many throwaway ideas in it that I will watch or read or listen multiple times. I\u2019m always looking for inspiration to tell another story or to include in one I\u2019m working on.<\/p>\n

Your mileage may vary, but I suspect it\u2019s the same for most of us. We want to be entertained, taken away someplace we aren\u2019t at the moment. When we want to know something or be informed, it\u2019s usually because we want to change something in our lives and we\u2019re seeking to get away. Maybe not.<\/p>\n

But we almost always find what we\u2019re looking for in a story of some kind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like to be entertained by stories. I want to be taken away to a place I\u2019ve never been or to see place I\u2019m familiar with in a new way. That\u2019s not asking too much, is it? Now, don\u2019t get me wrong – we need all kinds of stories. We learn from them, we are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[119,750,766,1063],"class_list":["post-7612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influence","tag-books","tag-news","tag-npr","tag-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}