One of the downsides of checking into my Yahoo email account is the full frontal news assault which I can’t escape during the two step process to my inbox.
Early in the morning it’s relentless and gratuitous. ‘Grandmother finds axe murderer in spare bedroom.’ ‘Five-year-old savaged by bull terrier.’ These stories are at the hard news end and they’re barring the way into my day.
They could be playing out in Willenhall or Wellesbourne, Solihull or Sierra Leone. I’ve no idea how they connect with my life and right now I haven’t time to wonder. They’re leeching my attention while I’m trying to do something that matters and so their gut-wrenching irrelevance is flagged up. I switch off.
Maybe I should try harder. In olden days my eye would be caught by the front page newspaper headline on the mat. The font size told me ‘this is the biggest news of the day and you need to know it’. Fair enough. Thirty seconds is enough to scan the standfirst and skim the content for the main facts of the case. But Yahoo doesn’t sleep and doesn’t have a copy deadline. 24/7 the stories keep coming even though there’s still nothing new under the sun.
Just replay after replay of the same old, same old human dramas.
This has been going on for a long time. More and more, journalists are talking brazenly about stories; a good story, a breaking story, an incredible story, an inspiring story. Do you have any stories? True or surgically enhanced… it makes no real difference. It’s all in your mind. Compulsive news-eaters will gobble them up, hungry for lurid stories to entertain the idling corners of their brains.
The places where imagination used to lurk.
Morning stories? The characters living them don’t think they’re fiction. Their stories are real and messy. And although you’ll never get to see, feel or taste the reality of them, they usually involve hardcore stuff like blood, drugs, weapons, tragedy, rampant egos and pointless loss of life. Swallowed whole with your Shreddies.
No wonder genuine storytelling is in revival. Stories that make you picture good and hopeful things, the heroic struggle against enemies followed by moral or actual victory, the glow of achievement and reunion with loved ones at the end. You know the sort of thing. Stories that make you feel good.
Happy ever after? All stories should be. Otherwise they’re incomplete and not ready for the telling.
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This is a really thought-provoking piece. I feel I too am being assailed by the very stories that are intruding on your day.
ReplyDeleteI think Alison used the words 'elegant' to describe your writing. I would like to borrow her very apt description and use it again.
Even though this a quite a dark piece of writing, your use of language, turn of phrase, and sentence construction is wonderfully elegant.
I feel you have a lot to say with your writing - and have a lot more to say. i do hope you too continue to write and keep writing.