When I was in my junior year of high school, I read a book called The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It was just a bunch of short stories about a man recalling his time from war. After getting interested in this man and his friends and the heaviness of what he went through, I came upon a chapter where he claimed that everything he’d written so far never really happened; it was all made up. Looking back now, some of the stories he told were insane and I can’t believe I actually believed them. Regardless, I felt so betrayed.
The thing is, nobody gets invested or puts their trust in a story where everything sane happens. A story has to be just insane enough to believe and for the audience to get into. Many true stories are in fact insane, that’s why they’re worth telling. Nobody cares about a story where nothing really happens to anyone; people like to feel some type of emotion.
One of the insane stories recalled in the book was of his friend named Lemon being blown up by a grenade while playing a game of catch with it. The loss of his friend created a punishment where his mates were ordered to pick his pieces off of a lemon tree. They climbed up the tree and collected pieces of their friend while singing a song called Lemon Tree. Thinking of it now, there is no way that happened but everyone that sat in my AP Language class believed it because it was so insane. I fooled myself into believing what I read. Was I gullible? Possibly, but I was a dreamer. I believed the impossible because I believed it was possible. I put my trust in an author I had never met, and I trusted him to tell me the truth. In the end, I was betrayed.
I don’t regret falling for it. It gave me importance on a plot. A good story always has to be a little over the edge, but not completely where I fall in the abyss below. It had to be just insane enough that I hung off the edge. Those types of stories are something worth listening to and reading about.