MFSA054: Not How I Would Write It

Events can at times unfold in an unexpected manner. There is surprise and novelty to be found in the gap between expectations and reality. Truth is indeed often stranger than fiction, if only because the bar for plausibility is so much lower in real life than it is in storytelling. At least in my experience, things that are hard to believe happen all the time, and usually when least expected. Do we get to write our own stories? To some extent perhaps we do, at least insofar as we are able to control our interpretations of events. Psychologists speak of the locus of control, referring to the degree to which we believe we have control over the outcome of events in our lives. The thinking goes in part that those of us who recognise that we largely control our own circumstances are less likely to stress and freak out than those who feel their lives are largely at the mercy of external forces. But what about those stranger-than-fiction sequences of events over which we truly have no control? For those times when disbelief must be overcome rather than suspended, it can helpful to think about how one might tell the story to others in future, in a manner that will not create disbelief at the time of its retelling.