Every File Tells--

Our Lives Are Made of Stories, and Stories Sift Out the Meaning of Our Lives

“Nobody was makin’ any money yesterday.” The woman’s voice had a Southern lilt. Her words stayed with me for half a block or more, echoing against my steps…Nobody…was…making…any…money yesterday.

What happened yesterday? Were they trying to make money, or not trying? Was it a big debauch, a day of folding, giving in, forgetting capitalism, a rained out farmers market, or a long day of cops scaring away the local trade?

When I worked as a mortgage underwriter for a major bank—making decisions on home loans—we had a saying: every file tells a story. I was right out of grad school with an MFA. Stories were my jam! The job was so easy! Look for the big indicators: Income trending upward, income nonexistent. Overspent, poor credit, great credit, new job, better qualified this round. A loan application is a collection of details meant to spell out one thing: trustworthy. I saw the file of a professional motivational speaker, complete with his bloated yacht loan and the leased Jaguar. He was living on the borrowed value of social signifiers.

I saw the file of a guy who was just back from Afghanistan, now working in a sawmill in the middle of the high desert, newly married to a local bartender. They were so hopeful. Every file tells a story…

Sometimes, I spent more time than the applicant would ever know wondering about the missing details of their life story, well beyond income and debt. Those files were like reading experimental fiction, decades written only in the trajectory of money.

So—today. Let’s take today, for example. Or tomorrow, or yesterday.

Maybe you’re out taking a walk and pieces of something still unnamed start to come together in your mind. You’ve overheard a passing stranger, saying, “If there’s one thing you should know—” or “I promise it won’t happen again, but—” and these fragments make you want to pick up that conversation, to put two characters in a place with their past and their future, wanting something, holding something else back.

Maybe you remember a particular day, or miss an old friend or you’re terrified of a sinister political movement or…the starting point starts to matter less than where it’s all going. A collage of ideas and sensory details crowd to your heart and mind, and you want to capture that collection on paper, in words, to share a worldview.

How do you know what shape your ideas should take? Is the form meant to be a novel or a short story? What would be gained by elaboration, what would be gained through compression? But compression is relative to scale, and even a novel can be compressed.

Or…could you cut to the chase with an essay? Or is the very idea of cutting to the chase of anything in the world of ideas misguided?

If you’re writing an essay, how much room is there for showing the details of a life in personal narrative and how much space is there for articulating big ideas?

I’m a fan of using the techniques of fiction to illustrate the ideas of an essay. Truthfully, sometimes for me revision is then about compressing and trimming back those scenes, leaning into “big voice” to clarify ideas for readers instead of relying on the rhetoric of storytelling to carry the entire delivery.

Are you writing?

How do you decide your approach?

I’m thinking about these things today, as I read manuscripts and move my own work forward.

Writing or not writing, walking or not walking, painting or dancing or observing or talking or enjoying silence, I wish you all the best in all humanity and I mean it.

xo