To Live Vicariously (WP3)
My mom raised me under the wing of stories. Reading was a nightly tradition for us: up until early middle school, she’d read me progressively more complex books once it got dark. From Harry Potter to Greek and Norse myths, our sessions matured as I did. It was the purest form of knowledge-seeking for young me, built on trust and a desire to grow from others’ authentic experiences.
It was comforting, and towards the latter end of those years, I continued the tradition by occasionally reading to my younger sister before she went to bed as well. She began to share the same excitement I gained from my mom for language and discovery, and also still consistently reads for pleasure nowadays, despite us both being much older and having new responsibilities and priorities. Without my knowing it, the foundation of my identity — my passions and values — was built upon storytelling.
In my eyes, much of the power of storytelling comes from an audience’s varying interpretations; it has no concrete purpose that resonates with everybody, and it morphs to hold new significance for every listener. And while I can respect detailed, pragmatic definitions, I’ve come to disagree with them.
The article “Serious Storytelling — A First Definition and Review” claims: “The reasons people tell stories are manifold: to entertain, to transfer knowledge between generations, to maintain cultural heritage, or to warn others of dangers.”
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, storytelling is used “to get insight[,]…build empathy and reach [the audience] emotionally.”
National Storytelling Network describes it as “the interactive art of using words and actions to reveal the elements and images of a story while encouraging the listener’s imagination.” The more research I do into the topic, the more academic and convoluted it seems to be.
To me, reducing storytelling to a scientific concept is a misguided overcomplication; its beauty and nuance transcends neurological evaluations or historical patterns. Michael Borgstrom explores this concept in his recently published book, Befriending the Queer Nineteenth Century: Curious Attachments, adopting a refreshing approach for a book of literary criticism — not by being uncritical, but by seeking to “reconnect, on a very basic level, with some of the enthusiasms that had brought us to our discipline in the first place: …to acknowledge literature’s ability to rearrange our various worlds and worldviews” (Borgstrom 2).
His work examines our RELATIONSHIP to stories, not their objective purpose. He views those forms of connection not dissimilarly to friendships — ones that develop and evolve over time, and can reshape our OWN perspectives as well, as we come to better understand who we are in relation to them. He advocates for the pursuit of growth to be driven by enthusiasm — a love for the story rather than a desire to bluntly analyze.
Borgstrom perfectly encapsulates the warm spirit of letting curiosity and passion guide my intake of knowledge: “We reach out to texts for a variety of reasons (to learn, to feel, to listen): efforts that I describe as acts of textual ‘befriending’” (21). His ambiguity while defining others’ pursuits of knowledge is essential, because at its core, storytelling is simply an amorphous INVITATION into somebody else’s life. A way to share their experiences. A way for diverse identities to intertwine; amalgamate; mix like paints to create a deeper understanding of the world around us.
I’ve devoted a large portion of my life to appreciating and attempting to understand that art form. But I’ve realized recently that I’ve been misguided. The emotional aspect of storytelling isn’t something you can selectively shape or modify. For the vast majority of my life, I fought tooth and nail in an attempt to change that inalterability. As I’ve intellectually matured throughout the years, I’ve struggled to abandon a nagging sense of mental micromanagement. A desire to seek predictability in my life. A way to know EXACTLY what to expect.
But in order to embrace who I now know myself to be, I needed to learn how to escape that pitfall. I didn’t know it at the time, but continually searching for a fleeting sense of control is counterproductive to fluid intellectual growth. To become a storyteller, as an actor and individual, I’ve had to comprehend and embrace the idea of surrendering myself to others’ stories, experiences, and struggles, in the hopes of expanding and redefining my own.
That journey didn’t come easy to me. As a child, I was obsessed with structure: foreseeable conclusions and expected outcomes. In fact, rather than seeking it out, I flatly rejected any meaningful conflict or strife — anything that gave power to the story or elevated it into a challenge to overcome.
As my mom mentions in “The Beginning: A Podcast-Interview”: “You loved the repetition of the stories. So we would read the same books again and again, and that was somewhat…a phase of childhood, but I feel like you took it a little bit to the next level where…you memorized these stories early on [and] you wanted ME to memorize them as well.” I was enamored with the knowledge that I would know exactly what events happened at what time, and I despised widely loved children’s stories and films such as Star Wars because of the constant conflict and unhappiness, despite subconsciously knowing that things would resolve themselves eventually.
My philosophy was simple: “If you avoid contact with the difficulties of life, you can pretend they never existed in the first place.” I was completely content with renouncing hardship and staying in my personal, privileged bubble. Granted, I was a kid, much too young to know any better, but I took the concept to the extreme by completely shielding myself from anything even remotely distressing. I was effectively in denial. By being so selective about my media intake, I was impeding upon any empathetic development that could happen in my early childhood. Authors were inviting me to share their experiences and concepts, and I blissfully refused.
The thing is, my distaste wasn’t strictly limited to my childhood, either. My specific media consumption carried on throughout elementary school, middle school, and high school. By my early teenage years, I’d discovered my affinity for acting, but that was no different — I could read the script ahead of time. I knew exactly what to prepare for. The sense of structure I so desperately craved was handed to me on a silver platter. Cold reads (being requested to read a script with no preparation for an audition) were terrifying to me because I never knew what to expect. In fact, I often went out of my way to find online PDFs of each script I was auditioning for in an effort to predict what scenes I might have to read. Simply put, I didn’t trust myself. What if I made the wrong choice? What if I grossly misinterpreted the character in the heat of the moment and only realized hours after?
As a storyteller, I was trapped in a husk that prevented me from embracing my creativity, stifling my authentic self. As an actor, I needed to infuse the character with my own experiences and emotions, but I was so determined to secure stability that I didn’t allow for spontaneous expression. As I mentioned in my article, “Pedagogical Freedom,” “Individual characters’ stories can foster a deeper understanding of the unique yet interconnected lives of those around us.” I wasn’t TOTALLY off the mark in my fear of cold reads or my desire to prepare, and I don’t mean to understate the importance of context and preparation, but to learn to vulnerably tell a story, I had to discover what it meant to completely surrender myself to the moment. I hadn’t yet built that innate sense of unyielding trust required for what I planned to do with my life.
With time, I was introduced to it in a poetic way: through a character that ALSO functioned as a storyteller. In my sophomore year of high school, I undertook a new role: Man in Chair, in the show The Drowsy Chaperone (the plot of which is linked here). It was a unique experience for me, as I’d never before tackled a character so nuanced and complex. His life IS the invitation: the show is told entirely through his imagination and descriptions.
Playing him required an unparalleled amount of trust, both in myself and in the audience, to allow them into my life to share my experiences and passion through the subtext of each line. While the structure I craved so much was there, as the entire show was (obviously) scripted, by the final performance, the narrative began to feel alive to me. I wasn’t reading lines off a page; I was humbly serving as a guide for the audience to live vicariously through my story. I wasn’t giving a rehearsed speech, I was just conversing with them, humanly, as myself.
I always thought that as an actor, ACTING would be the breakthrough that I needed to shape my intellectual identity and come to terms with my authentic self. That would make sense, right? I mean, I claimed in the very first sentence of my WP1, “As an actor, I’ve had the opportunity to expose myself to a variety of conditions and cultures I wouldn’t have otherwise learned about through an education in high school.” I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I knew what made me passionate about it, and it made me feel like I was seeking knowledge meaningfully. But, surprisingly, I learned to let go of my desire for control through a new, unexpected medium: story-driven video games.
The most notable identity-altering revelation I had through a game was during my playthrough of Ori and the Will of the Wisps earlier this year. I thought I knew exactly where the game was headed: the storyline was building towards a perfectly executed villain redemption arc, and I was excited for it to itch the part of my brain that was fascinated with beautifully foreshadowed conclusions. It was a fantastically built plot; predictable, sure, but all good plots should be at least a little bit predictable. It would mean that apt context had been provided to create a sturdy foundation for its ending. I’d seen the same plotline dozens of times before, but I thought stories needed to follow that formula to feel fulfilling. And I loved Ori for it. The “happy ending” was justified, and I was thrilled to witness it happen.
Until it didn’t.
I touched upon my emotional response to this conclusion in “The Ending: Exploring Expectation and Tragedy in Ori and the Will of the Wisps,” but I was DEVASTATED by the brutally tragic ending to the game. I had never felt so blindsided by such a deceptive sense of predictability. In the article, I explained my reaction: “As a person who’s always been drawn to the comfort of structure and foreshadowing of a conventional plot, this storyline reversal completely flipped everything I understood about effective consequential storytelling on its head. I’ve experienced and enjoyed tragedies before, but the setup of a redemption arc with the exclusion of that final resolve really bothered me.” It was, in essence, what I feared most in a storyline: pouring dozens of hours into an experience, expecting a framework I recognized, only to receive a slap in the face at the very end by excluding the final resolution.
It took me a couple days to figure out how I felt about Ori’s ending. Some may find it silly to have such a viscerally emotional response to something as seemingly trivial as a video game, and I did too at first, but in the process of writing about it, I’ve come to realize its validity. As I’ve mentioned, the strength of a story is in its audience’s response. Others may not have found it as identity-shaking as I did, but the vulnerability that resulted from pouring dozens of hours into the resolution of this particular storyline was ABSOLUTELY sensible. It’s why I disagree with any attempt to list the goals of storytelling. An invitation to share an experience cannot be received in a finite number of ways. Just as our identities differ, the ways stories resonate with us do as well.
As Borgstrom puts it: “Such variations [in perspective, opinion, or personal background] do not invalidate or discredit readers’ diverse attachments to literature; if anything, they highlight some of the epistemological and affective possibilities of reading across dissimilar experiences and subject positions” (Borgstrom 13). Through my journey to become a storyteller, I’ve learned that the power that the position holds is derived from the personalized takeaways that different audiences glean from different narratives. I find fulfillment by acting as a VESSEL of sorts, allowing others to develop their OWN opinions for their own reasons. To hold varying interpretations is to be human; if every experience and message was universal and unchanging, there would be no need to share them at all. And sometimes, you need to hear a certain story at a certain time, to affect you to the point of personal reinvention.
In this case, Ori and the Will of the Wisps was the push I so intensely needed to begin to dismantle my obsession with control and expectation. The unexpectedness of its antagonist’s death was emotionally powerful to a degree I had never experienced before. And my reaction to it made me realize: structure is good, but mental micromanagement is not, because life simply doesn’t work that way. It’s a hopeless task to attempt to regulate all the negativity that could possibly breach my life.
In essence: “[Storytelling experiences] are occasions…of merely being open: to possibility, perhaps to disappointment, and often to pleasure. Befriending is an overture; it is based in a fundamental curiosity about that which is external to the self and indicates a receptive bearing toward the possibility of social attachment, even when the consequences of such sociability cannot be predicted” (21). In order to live authentically and fully, I’ve learned I must EXPERIENCE it fully — the good and the bad. Because otherwise, I could be cutting myself off from reality — and a life of purpose — even if it is sometimes painful or unpredictable. As a storyteller, I have to accept the lack of structure and linearity that life inherently has, because otherwise, I would be looking at hardship and struggle two-dimensionally.
And, as it turns out, acting is the same. See, I’ve known for awhile now that one of my greatest weaknesses as an actor is my lack of spontaneity. I had a habit of planning out every movement, every interaction, every INTONATION for every line. And I was good at it — so good that to many, it was indistinguishable from real emotion. But it wasn’t authentic.
The Drowsy Chaperone provided a window, a gateway, into the feeling, but over the course of my time at USC as a theatre major, I’ve been learning how to completely rebuild my sense of self as an actor to attempt to live vicariously through a character. To allow myself to drop my internal defenses that stemmed from my distaste for the unexpected. To stop wrestling for control of the story and instead submit myself to it. To act as its guide, trusting the audience to resonate with it in their own individual ways. THAT sense of trust embodies my loose “definition” of storytelling: to accept the invitation into another world graciously, not hesitantly or tentatively, as I’ve spent the vast majority of my life trying to do. THAT is what makes it so fulfilling to embody the identity of a storyteller.
To me, the most shocking part of composing this autobiography was noticing that a staggeringly large portion of my major intellectual and personal growth was extremely recent; much of it occurred within this very school year. A year in which people have felt like their lives and education have been at a complete and total standstill; a year of total stagnation. But as I’ve discovered, with such unpredictability comes an unparalleled sense of personal redefining and upheaval. And it’s times like these, in a period of seemingly no forward momentum, that we can rewrite our own narratives, and create meaning within ourselves.
Like a story, the meaning of my life is ever changing, but I’ve learned to abandon the mentality that everything in life must be carefully structured and planned. With new experiences and new self-reflections come new narratives to tell. New stories to surrender myself to. The way I choose to define and find relevance in stories may completely change in a year — in months, even. My pursuit to find my identity as an actor and storyteller has led me to believe that authenticity isn’t something you can pin down. It has no structure. It can’t be categorized into a list. But that’s okay.
After all, no matter how much you think you’ve learned, there’s always another chapter.
Works Cited
Borgstrom, Michael. Befriending the Queer Nineteenth Century: Curious Attachments. Routledge, 2021.
The Drowsy Chaperone: Synopsis, www.mponstage.com/productions/
musicals/drowsychaperone/synopsis.php.
Lugmayr, Artur, et al. “Serious Storytelling — a First Definition and Review.” Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 76, no. 14, 2016, pp. 15707–15733., doi:10.1007/s11042–016–3865–5.
“What Is Storytelling?” Interaction Design Foundation, www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/storytelling.
“What Is Storytelling?” National Storytelling Network, storynet.org/what-is-storytelling/.
Williams, Trevor, and Anjali Williams. “The Beginning: A Podcast-Interview.” 7 Mar. 2021.
Williams, Trevor. “The Ending: Exploring Expectation and Tragedy in Ori and the Will of the Wisps.” Medium, 12 Mar. 2021, medium.com/wp2-the-storyteller/the-ending-exploring-expectation-and-tragedy-in-ori-and-the-will-of-the-wisps-3bc71dd44d06.
Williams, Trevor. “WP1: The Allure of Pedagogical Freedom Through Theatre.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2021, medium.com/writing-150-spring-2021/wp1-the-allure-of-pedagogical-freedom-through-theatre-4f24d0edae13.
