Fiction
Written by Alice Phann
The most important rule of storytelling:
Make your characters suffer.
Have affairs and miscommunications and
Forces that make us fragile—
Because we are fragile—
And have us laugh because we will never live
In the world that they do,
And it makes our world look tame—
But for those of us who have the heart to face
That every fantasy cannot be thought unless
It’s some reflection of their life—
Explanations that could satisfy the coincidences
Of the world—
Which ripple so seamlessly we never notice—
Begin to see how much we do not know.
We often absorb ourselves within our own stories,
That we are afraid of what to do without
The systems which fill our lives—
And our interpretation of those systems;
The language is confusing,
We are all different, yet very much the same—
We must put people in boxes,
Yet we must bend our own rules to put them there—
We do not like having no boxes.
We blame the individual,
But never the story that surrounds them;
You glorify and disgust-ify—
Stuff words into mouths and get angry
When they vomit it at you—
The other rule of writing is quite simple:
Let characters write themselves.
