Reflection #3

When writing a story, the most inspirational factors to the origins of that story is what happens around the author. I believe that everyone is an author in his or her own way. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone writes. When people are put out into the world they like to make things up about people. They see someone and start creating a life for him or her without even knowing who they are. When living in a big city such as New York, it’s not that difficult to see hundreds of thousands of different people a day and giving them a life you made up for them. It’s all about assumptions people make. When sitting or standing in a crowded train with nothing but your thoughts, you start to make connections and theories about a person to keep yourself occupied in the long commute. If you see a person dressed in a clean-cut outfit you think they are wealthy and perhaps well mannered. If you see someone dressed in a shoddy outfit you assume they are jobless or an artist perhaps. And while your describing their background in your head you start to think of a character these people play in your mind. Your mind creates it’s own movie by just one look.

In Robinson’s If You Invent The Story, You’re The First To See How It Ends, she starts off the story with how her mind makes all these outrageous assumptions with just a few minutes of looking at another persons actions. “I supposed of course that they were fighting. The long blond hair suggested someone who was beautiful, or anyway someone who invited admiration and was used to it. I thought that the man might be her husband, or her lover and that he was pleasing with her. I thought she was turning cold to him; perhaps she was ending things completely, and that he was trying to win her back. I felt sorry for the man, who was trying so hard to reach her, to save things” (page 192). This is an example of how someone thinks when a situation is placed in front of him or her. She does not know who the man is but she created a complicated life for him.  We do this sometimes. When life just doesn’t feel interesting enough we use our imagination to amuse ourselves. People think wild imaginations ends when we are children. I think it never ends until we die.

This essay reminded me of the movie Date Night, with Steve Carrell and Tina Fey. In the beginning of the movie, the couples go out to a restaurant and play a game. They look around their restaurant setting at other couples or families and giggle about how they think the people around them are. This also reminds me of the Television show, Up All Night, with Will Arnett and Christina Applegate. In their suburban neighborhood, a new couple moves right across the street from them and the couple watches them from their window and automatically assumes that they’re a “cool” couple. From the way they dress, the main characters start coming up with wild theories of how their lives are and how they must think of everyone in the neighborhood as yuppies. When people watch these scenarios. They laugh because they know they’re thinking the same thing.

What is even more surprising is how wrong someone can be once he or she gets to know the actual situation. We hope for something that is filled with drama and excitement when it could be the most plain or common scenario there. “This time, at last, she turned toward him. She leaned over and licked his nose. She was a Golden Retriever.” (Page 193). When I read this, I was in shock. I was thinking the same things the author was about the man and his so-called wife or lover or daughter. I never would have thought it was a dog he was talking to. This whole essay relates to the stalking assignment assigned to us. When writing down what we see in a person we also write what we think they could have been doing as well. When we see dark circles around someone’s eyes we can either think it’s drug related or that person is insane or perhaps has insomnia. “All this beauty and fury makes the family a rich literary source. Much of our greatest fiction comes from conflicts within it: look at Oedipus Res, King Lear, Anna Karentina, The Sound and the Fury, To the Lighthouse, the Rabbit quartet. These works reveal us to ourselves, and it seems to me that this is who we are: we’re people driven, damaged and tortured; we’re people elated, sustained and nourished, all by the powerful, devastating, inescapable bonds within the family.” (Page 196). In a sense, sometimes the story we create is either what we want for ourselves or what we view our life to be.

Robinson, Roxana. “If You Invent the Story, You’re the First to See How it Ends”. Writers [on Writing]:  Collected Essays from The New York Times with Introduction by John Darnton. 191-197. Print.