currently thinking about how decreasing literacy rates (especially media literacy) are coinciding with an inability to distinguish knowing about a story from reading a story. which i guess comes naturally with ai summarizing everything - just the essentials! - and the inane discourse about what’s “not necessary” in a piece of media (eg sex, mundanity).
but i am actually going to die on the hill that a story is not (only) its plot. it’s not a distillable sequence of events characters and themes that fits into a paragraph. a story - a narrative - is an experience, one in which the reader can choose to spend as much or as little time as they wish. a story is cocreated at the moment of reading by the reader and the text, mostly (yes there are obviously other variables). if you don’t read the story you haven’t read the story. which feels like a wild thing to clarify, but i probably should’ve seen this coming.
do you know what happens? sure. that’s the plot. that’s information about the story.
do you know how it happens? maybe. if you read the story. you could also learn this from consuming information about the story.
do you know how the story made you feel and think, and how it will impact your awareness of the world around you? how it is now shaping your story? only if you’ve read the story. if you know how a plot summary made you feel, then you know the above questions *for the story of the plot summary*. do you see what i’m saying?
a story is not infinitely reducible. a story is greater than the sum of its parts. and a story requires investment from a reader in order to fully become a story. some folks like know about stories, and that’s fine. some folks like reading stories, which is also fine, and different from knowing about stories.
(this is shaped by watching odyssey discourse pass by me in the night. respectfully, knowing about the odyssey is not the same as reading it. you can do both. one frequently begets the other. but they are not the same)
