On the Bus: Anecdote into Story

“‘Anecdote’ means ‘unpublished,’ which means informal, without shape or polish. Your own story is, well, yours; it’s a work in progress, connected to you like a Siamese twin and, in a sense, not really yours to set free, even if you’ve told it many times before. Anecdote is so private that it’s doomed to fail at the things that a story can best be: free, and art.”—Anita Sullivan

The Highest Cauldron

By Anita Sullivan

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—1/28/2013—During the past year, I’ve been riding the city bus a lot to keep from using the car. This puts me in touch with what you might call a representative swatch of the community. Mostly, I ride back and forth to the downtown library and its adjacent city-center grocery store (which has the best deli in town).

At the municipal bus terminal across from the library, dreadful opera music is broadcast across the perimeter sidewalk to keep people from gathering and hanging out there. Signs are up on the streets in winter to let people know which nights the homeless centers will be available for sleeping. Groups of teenagers sometimes cluster in alleys, sitting on sleeping bags. People smoke alone in the backs of buildings. It’s a pretty typical urban core of a contemporary middle-sized metropolis that’s operating with an outrageous budget shortfall.

Many of the people I see on the bus are obviously not doing very well: they hobble, waddle, jerk spasmodically, have difficulty talking, are overloaded with children, have holes in their clothes or backpacks. Rarely do I see anyone forget to offer a courteous “thank you” to the bus driver, or to show a general polite awareness to their fellow passengers.

Because I’m a writer, I ache to know the stories of each and every person on the bus as I look at them, one by one. My weird and wonderful fellow humans, each one dragging her little shop of horrors behind her like an invisible burlap sack.

But what I want is not what they would be able to tell me.

“Anecdote” means “unpublished,” which means informal, without shape or polish. Your own story is, well, yours; it’s a work in progress, connected to you like a Siamese twin and, in a sense, not really yours to set free, even if you’ve told it many times before. Anecdote is so private that it’s doomed to fail at the things that a story can best be: free, and art.

So, if some stranger manages to sit you down and tell you “a story,” (which almost certainly means a segment of his or her ongoing life), the result can turn out to be disappointing, and you’re not always sure exactly why, even if it’s filled with the same kind of drama, pain, pathos, triumphs and failures you would see in print or on the screen.

On the bus, what I really want is the “published” (the ekdotal) version of each of these people’s lives. But paradoxically, that means I want the real story, and you’d think no matter how much else the person is lacking, at least that’s the one thing only they know best. But no, we really only know the anecdotal version of our lives. The non-fiction version, if you will, is “true” as far as it goes, but doomed in the telling to be forever incomplete. There is absolutely no way that a person can truly, completely, tell his story. Somebody else has to do it.

An anecdote is like a candidate for sainthood. After being properly vetted, verified, probed, polished, and ornamented with festoons of other possibilities that could have happened instead, the anecdote may finally break loose from its teller and become a full Story Candidate. Now, it can roam the streets with its credentials, hoping to attract the Story-River Monster, who comes along to gobble up such recruits. Only then can it enter the crucible and eventually emerge fully formed.

A finished story tells itself. It is a whole world. If somebody starts to spin you a yarn on the bus or in the living room or around the kitchen table in a conversation, even if it’s got a really bizarre plot (a “My father was struck by lightning . . . .” kind of thing), the problem is that the teller already knows the ending. And you, the listener, know that she knows. Therefore, there’s no secret. End of story.

So, as I ride the bus, I’m in turmoil. I long to know, very specifically, who each of these people is and what it would take to make their stories have a happy ending. I long to pluck each festering anecdote from its soul and hand it over to the Story Monster. Instead, all I can do is listen, watch, be courteous, and go home to the people I know, with renewed humility and love. And try to write down as much as I’ve learned before I forget.

Note: the photo used to illustrate this column is titled “Homeless in Sugamo 1”, and is the work of Jim Fischer. It may be accessed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimfischer/204974657/