If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
When somebody tells you a story, as long as that story lasts, you're caught in this sort of timeless moment.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.
It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.
We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
The telling of stories creates the real world.
Our pasts so many times determine the value of what is happening today. Everybody is midway in their story.
We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
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