The Truth in Storytelling

The relationship between Beauty and Truth in Stories

I love to tell stories. I want my stories to be beautiful tales about men and women that have moved out of the ordinary. What relationship does beauty have with my stories? Keats related beauty with truth. One cannot say what he exactly meant by the two terms. I can only say that there is a certain beauty associated with truthful storytelling. What is true will automatically be beautiful because it will be revelatory. All art must reveal. That should be the aim of art; it must reveal truthfully. What seems ugly to some can also be beautiful if it is truthfully revealed. Similarly, what is traditionally considered beautiful can be less than true. Moreover, it can seem put on, pretentious, artificial, and so on, though it need not always be that.

Why Stories are differently told in every new age

Stories should play an important role in every age. They must reveal what was not truly understood earlier. Every age or phase of human history has its own parameters of understanding things, phenomena, values, morality, and character. Or, you might simply say: every age understands life differently. Storytellers should take readers ahead of the previously held truths. The role of women in society has undergone a colossal change. Stories must show the truth of what women are in their new avatars. They must likewise reveal how the concept of the human male is changing; what is it to be a man today? How it is different from what a man was expected to be in yesteryears?

The relationship between Beauty and Truth now

This is an age of fake news and ours is a post-truth world. But stories contain truth with a sugar coating. They don’t deal with factually correct incidents but that which is generally true. They tell the truth beautifully; through a form that is artistically invented. Where there is art, there will be little factual truth. Even history will be distorted on the face of it. The distortion will be necessary because it will make possible a general truth, a beautiful truth that has been missed by most others. The storyteller should be able to see beyond the factual truth and should peer into the truth that has been perceived beautifully. In the world of such storytelling, the place of morality and tradition will take a backseat and truth will be beautiful even if it seems lies to some.