Narrative is a tremendously powerful tool; it is communication at many levels, and that's even more true of visual narrative like a film. A well-crafted story grabs at the heart, the gut, resonates with one's own experiences, inner hopes and fears. But to do so, a story must indeed be crafted. It doesn't just happen; you have to carefully balance the story elements, make the characters both believable and sympathetic, so your audience will identify with them, get that emotional resonance going. You have to balance the pacing, how fast things happen, when characters learn what, how much the audience knows versus how much the character knows. You build tension that way, and suspension of disbelief, and if you get all those elements woven together just right, you have people staying up past midnight to finish your book, or leaving the theater in tears.  

But as compelling as a good story is, the truth is far more powerful. Real people. Real stories. Experiences that aren't carefully crafted, but raw and unedited. The emotional resonance doesn't have to be coaxed and timed just right -- it leaps out and grabs, it pulls you into another person's life, their pain, their joy, their experience, because it's real, and you know it. It's why "reality" shows (the "reality" of which is highly questionable) get the audience they do - because even when staged and edited for entertainment, the stories of real people are still more enthralling than scripted stories about characters played by actors that we know aren't real at all.

There are hundreds of thousands of 9-11 stories, and they're all real. Vibrant. Painful. The people who were there. Those of us who saw it on television, either when it happened, or when it was replayed, over and over and over, in the days that followed. Those of us who knew someone in the Towers, or on the planes, or in the Pentagon, or know someone who knew someone... Those who did the search, rescue and cleanup afterwards. Those stories aren't the whole story -- they're individual stories, intensely personal, and they're all true.

Those stories resonate far more intensely than any dramatization... no dramatization can even come close, all it can manage is a faint echo of the truth. Granted, that shared experience, the memory it is designed to resonate with is very recent and very strong, and so the echo is pretty strong too. But the real thing is still stronger. It unites instead of divides. It uplifts instead of crushing down. It reaches out. It can overcome the fake drama and spin. The stories have to be told, shared, printed, and re-told.

This is really getting a bit rambly... I only meant to give a kind of introduction to something else, a livejournal post that had me in tears earlier... talking about truth versus docu-drama, history and getting it right. Well worth reading, and passing on (I'm putting it in a box so it stands out a bit more from all my ramblng here, since this was really the point.)

I Remember Townsend, by liz_marcs

Keith Olbermann speaks for me.