Radical Transparency

My sister is reading the The Iliad for class, and she started telling me today about the way that story ends. 

It doesn't end in resolution.  It doesn't end when the action ends.  It doesn't end with Hector's death. 

It ends with a funeral, an epilogue, a reflection, a moment of mourning.

We wondered to what extent that ending has influenced literary endings since.  And we wondered how we end our day to day stories, if a resolution or a punchline is ever really enough.

And we're still wondering.  So much to wonder about stories.

The pic below is me mid-story.  It's the best man speech from about a month ago.  Mongolia.  Sheep's lip.  Snuggling with Hesh in our tiny little tent.

The newlyweds sent everyone the link to the wedding photographer's site a few hours ago. I didn't want to pay USD 17 per photo to own the high res files, so I took a screen capture instead.  I figure the extreme high quality of the digital image combined with the low quality of the screen capture will produce a wonderfully Regular picture.

Worth noting that that story didn't end with the punchline either.  It drifted from sheep's lip to the tent and then back to the present, to how excited I am for my next adventure with Hesh, to Hesh and Becky and their adventures to come.

Filed under  //   best man   endings   epilogue   giuls   storytelling   the iliad  

Filed under  //   best man   django   fluther   mongolia   sheep   storytelling   the oral tradition  

Back in the office and in what I think is a pretty high gear considering the fact that time away from The Carrot Project and Acorn lets me sleep less than work work. 

Wondering about collaboration and the speech I gave on Saturday.  I was best man for one of the people I love most, and the festivities were arranged such that my toast happened at the absolute last moment before the party erupted onto the dance floor and never looked back.

Between the post-ceremony photo shoot and the exodus from the front lawn to the tent out back, I pulled my most trusted advisors (my sister and cousin) aside, went through the speech, and asked for last minute advice. 

Their feedback was beautifully specific.  They pointed to a moment at which an extra drumbeat of pause might help.  They asked for extra emphasis on a word that they thought had the potential to get a huge laugh.  They told me to repeat a line.  And they suggested a tighter ending, one that circled gracefully back to the introduction and tied it all beautifully together.

Somehow, I took the advice.  I paused.  I emphasized.  I repeated.  I trusted their instincts, and the audience loved it. 

But I didn't take it all.  I didn't end it the way they thought I should.  I could have.  I thought about it.  And it would have been fine.  But I went instead with a third ending, something not far from either my initial idea or their suggestion, but something certainly different.  And it worked.  Worked well enough, in fact, that my sister told me she was glad I hadn't taken her advice.

It was collaboration that worked.  They listened well enough.  I listened back well enough.  They made reasonable and implementable suggestions.  And I incorporated them, fully embracing many and partially accepting another, letting it inform a key adjustment to my initial idea.

Maybe this is way too obvious.  It's just the way editing works, and there's nothing exciting here to find.

Maybe it makes no sense outside the context of the speech.  I'm writing to myself only and shouldn't expect this to inspire any thought of any kind in anyone but me, unless maybe they happened to have been at Matt and Becky's wedding on Saturday.

But maybe in here somewhere are some essential elements of collaboration.  Maybe I can get better at listening by returning to those moments before we joined the receiving line.  Maybe Giuls and Zach can get better at giving advice by considering the specificity of their ideas and the ways the time urgency of the moment forced them to focus their thoughts.  Maybe we can all learn from the advice not taken: learn that there's nothing wrong with imperfect suggestions, that two suboptimal ideas might merge to form something much better, that it might be important to have a single owner of a collaborative effort, a final deliverer of the speech, someone naturally seeking to maintain what was good and authentic and originally intended about the first stab ending even after recognizing its overall failure and need for adjustment.

And maybe this only applies to best man speeches when the groom is family enough to invite the minds most in tune with that of the best man.

Regardless, however, I've been thinking about it, and I figured I'd write it down.  Just in case.

Filed under  //   advice   best man   carrot project   collaboration   giuls   nevada bobchinsky   storytelling  

Filed under  //   best man   part of the solution  

Filed under  //   adventure   best man   hesh   jerry seinfeld   standup comedy