Ben Myers' Bio and Response

My name is Ben Myers and I grew up playing soccer in Rohnert Park, CA. My two focuses at Stanford are my majors, Creative Writing and Flea Studies. If I cannot publish a novel then I desire to start a traveling flea circus. All kidding aside, I love double decker peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and telling stories!

I personally do not like to dig far enough down into the story vault to discover whether there is really only one type of story or several. I once heard in a movie (The Amazing Spider-man) that all stories are about identity. While this was given by a high school English teacher (or rather an actress playing a high school English teacher) I find that it has an enormous weight, like a boulder chained to my foot. But the more I think about, the more I find that stories do seem to involve some sort of identity. Finding lost love, for example, can be viewed as someone's desire to define themselves in relation to another person. This kind of self cultivation can also be found in tales about revenge, tragedy, and zombies. Conflicts in any of these stories alter the status quo for the characters, forcing them to redefine their roles in the new world.

As I start to connect different stories to this notion of identity, I harken back to our discussion in the first class about what makes a story. Sure a story is words on the page, characters and a plot, and those are the bare essentials. The characters and the plot are more essential to the creation of the story, rather being the only pieces of the story itself. At its base, a story is made up of human or human-like characters and the story is driven by conflicts involving these characters. One could say that a story about a guy who works at Taco Bell does not have a conflict because that just tells the reader about his everyday life. The conflict, although it might not look like a screaming match or a missing puppy as we might imagine, is his need for money, and under that his need for food and shelter, which can only be satisfied with money. People need things in order to survive, whether it is a cup of water or an intergalactic star cruiser, therefore they must have conflict in order to obtain those things.

While characters need conflict in order to survive, stories need characters in order to be read. If characters were not humans or did not have human characteristics, then the reader would not be able to relate to them. Writing as an animal would force one to write using a human voice, since animals cannot talk as far as we know (at least, not with us). A counter argument to that would sound something like "Oh, Ben, what if I wrote from a third person omniscient narrator?" Two parts to that answer: 1. If you were truly detached from the animal, you could write that, but it would probably be called a field guide 2. You cannot escape the fact that you are telling the story from a human perspective. Sure, you could give your character a strange voice that feels alien to a reader, but telling that story in a language that we understand only tells the reader more about that person and cheats human qualities. While characters need conflicts and stories need characters, therefore stories need characters and conflicts, I do not necessarily think that there is only one type of story. Stories need those essential components, but I do not think that a story about a boy looking to fulfill the rites of passage in village is the same as the story of a space pirate hunting down a barrel of oranges. I think the fun of a story is trying to figure out how the writer uses those components as a reader or trying to figure out a new way to use those components in your stories.