The Anecdote, Part 2

Confession: I feel guilty when I throw away paper towels or napkins that are only barely used, but I'm not so environmentally conscious as to save them for later.

Reading:

• "L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story," by Lauren Groff
  
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
  

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Hitches a Ride" - 1,520 words (Estimated completion 17%)
• "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold" - Outline 100%
  

Revising:

• "The Revenant"
  
• "Cora and the Sea" - Third draft 50%

Four days on, and the Tea lady is silent. Maybe she's drinking tea. Or maybe she read this blog, which reveals the story was originally about coffee. (Horror of horrors!)

No matter. I had a homework assignment, and now I'm going to turn it in. I did hear a really good anecdote today. The best kind office anecdote--gossip! I won't reproduce it in full here, since I'd like to keep my job, but it had a few elements that I'd like to point out.

First of all was the setup. "I've got a good story about that," he said, just before relating the anecdote. "Back when I first met her...." And thus the story began. Since the anecdote was part of a larger conversation, the speaker first indicated that the impending narrative related to the topic of conversation. He did something else, too--he claimed the floor. There were five of us in the room, carrying on a couple of conversations at once, but when the story began, we all fell silent, ready to listen.

Finally, he established the time of the story, in the indefinite past. Since the story was about a work colleague, we assumed that the setting was the workplace. We were almost ready to go.

One more detail... the speaker commented about an aspect of his physical appearance at the time which differed from his appearance now. This was vital to the understanding of the narrative, and it was introduced at an early stage.

Now that the stage was set, the narration began. It was a short reconstruction of dialogue between the two characters, and I must say, the narrator of the story did a pretty good impression of his colleague's voice. As expected, the detail of the physical appearance served as the fulcrum of the story; without it, it would not have made sense, or got a big laugh.

Once the climax had occurred, we all felt licensed to comment on the story, expound on it, or generally return to conversation. The anecdote was over, and conversation resumed.

What I found intriguing about the whole business was the behavior of us, the audience. When the story began, we let it be told. And it would have been rude to interrupt. We accepted the initial detail of the physical appearance even though it had no bearing on the conversation up until that point. Why? Because the very first sentence put us into the framework of a story, and that's what we expect.

I think a lot of the way that people react to the written word comes from our reactions to spoken narrative. We are not expected to contribute, only to pay attention. We can accept unconnected details as relevant, even if they have no bearing on what comes before. The presentation of dialogue is easily understood, and with minimal speaker tags.

Of course, there might be a little bit of the chicken and the egg in this. After all, who's to say how much of our style of telling anecdotes is influenced by a lifetime of reading?

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 5
  
• Accepted: 1.30?
• Rejected: 2
• Pending: 1.70?

The Anecdote

Confession: I correctly guessed that someone had been dismissed based on a single use of the past tense. And who says grammar never gets you anywhere?

Reading:

• "L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story," by Lauren Groff
  
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
  

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Hitches a Ride" - 1,520 words (Estimated completion 17%)
• "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold" - Outline 100%
  

Revising:

• "The Revenant"
  
• "Cora and the Sea" - Third draft 50%

Well, still nothing from the Tea lady. I'm beginning to think that she just signed me up on a bunch of telemarketing lists as a prank.

In the mean time, I started thinking today about anecdotes, the little stories you tell about your life and the people around you. So what is an anecdote?

It comes from the Greek word ανέκδοτα, meaning "unpublished account." (But of course you already knew that.) It's used to refer to a story that someone tells in conversation, or an eyewitness account of an event. It can also mean circumstantial or substantiated through experience but not testing, as in "anecdotal evidence."

As people, we talk. We talk a lot, to each other, to ourselves, to friends or to strangers. I haven't studied conversational theory, but it seems to me that natural language takes several forms. There are questions as a request for information, and the corresponding answers. You have questions after health and well being, which form the tapestry of politeness. You have negotiation of meaning, to achieve the same mental construct of a concept between two individuals. No doubt there are many others.

And buried in there, somewhere, is the humble anecdote. Its purpose is mainly to entertain. Possibly to educate, but mainly to entertain those around you. It follows a narrative structure, first setting up the scene and then moving to action, dialogue, and finally a climax--the "point" of the anecdote. And in most cases, this all occurs in only a few minutes.

Wow! That, right there, is narrative structure, being created on the fly by someone speaking aloud. That's amazing! If there is an ancestor to the modern novel and short story, I believe it comes from the anecdote.

And there are two different kinds of anecdotes too. There are things that happened to you, which you tell in the first person. But you may also be talking about something that happened to a friend, in which case it is told in the third person. See that? The roots of POV, buried inside the anecdote.

Here's another example. What tense are anecdotes told in? The past tense, of course! You can't tell a story about the present. (Well, you can if you're on a cell phone and describing a scene as you witness it. And there may be other examples. But you get the point.)

I'm going to give myself a homework assignment. Tomorrow at work, I'm going to listen to the stories told around me, and break down the anecdotes into their narrative components. Also, it will be easier to make it through a work day when I can think of office chatter as stories being created all around me.

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 5
  
• Accepted: 1.35?
• Rejected: 2
• Pending: 1.65?