Break Full of Narratives

Narratives absolutely flooded my spring break. Being from New York, I don't get to hear much about what's going back on because I simply don't have enough time of day to be on the phone with everyone I know. So when I got home and finally met up with my friends and family, I heard a plethora of stories, many times the same ones over and over.

From one of my closest friends, I heard a story of his first father's weekend at Ohio University, which went entirely wrong. His first time explaining, he told me every detail of how he was with his father, and that he left him for about twenty minutes during that night, and he ended up being thrown in jail for breaking a law which actually did not exactly exist in the state. We laughed hysterically over it, and I would hear it about three times over throughout the week. The story itself took about fifteen to twenty minutes, but while listening to him tell it over again to other people, I could tell it had been shortened greatly. Obviously he wasn't trying to tell the same story over and over, and while understanding that, I learned how leaving out large amounts of minute details can shorten a narrative while not necessarily taking away from the the story's meaning and such.

I also caught up with a good amount of my extended family as my mom invited about 25 of my aunts, uncles, and cousins over for a St. Patrick's Day feast. I must've heard the story of my cousin's ROTC training maybe three times, all from different members of the family, with my cousin being the last of them all to tell. While I got the general idea of what happened during one of her combat simulations from my grandma and uncle, it wasn't until I heard my cousin tell the story that I really understood how difficult it must have been. She was able to really make me understand how difficult it was to carry a 220 pound man across a course after he had been 'hit by sniper fire,' and it really made me think about the whole narrative telling idea. The different perspectives from which a story may be told can really change how the listener interprets it. It may all be the same story, but the listening to a story from a secondary source may default the listener into feeling a different way than if she or he were to hear it from the primary source.

There's so many different methods and parts to a narrative that can change its dynamics so much. After looking back at how these narratives were told, I really see the differences between each individual telling, and I can use these lessons to better my own narrative writing.