Most evenings, Dad and I watch Rawhide or Matlock or Perry Mason. Sometimes we watch Have Gun-Will Travel, Bat Masterson, or The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. The production and writing qualities and the historical accuracy vary greatly, but I get sucked in regardless of how much I don’t really like westerns (I do, however, like murder mysteries and seeing bad guys get caught.)

I also decided that Rawhide and Star Trek (the original series) are fundamentally the same in spite of their differences. Basically, bantering crew travels and encounters psychopaths and oddballs. Adventures ensue. Trail boss and captain win.

The stories, however thinly written, pull me in. The cruelty of the villains or the ignorance of even the good guys outrage me. I have to say something about the hypocrisy or stupidity or sadism of what’s happening. Sometimes I think I draw or wash dishes while watching just to distract myself from how deeply I feel about these fictional stories from (for the most part) before I was born.

Dad shrugs. “It’s a tv show,” he says. “They gotta have a story.” And “It didn’t really happen. It’s made up.”

Well, of course. I know. (It’s what people say to me when I get upset if I foolishly watch a horror movie. My brain knows it’s fake. It’s just TV. My nervous system goes haywire anyway.)

It’s interesting to me though when a story does get under Dad’s skin. He watches Survivor, and I noticed that most of the lying and manipulating of the participants don’t matter much to him. “That’s the show,” he says. But every so often a character tells a lie that angers him. The story they’ve told makes Dad frown and say, “That ain’t right. I don’t like them.” Suddenly, he can’t dismiss the story as that’s the show. The person has gone too far and talking about editorial choices and the entire show’s premise doesn’t matter.

Some of my students have said they can’t watch old movies because they get distracted by the terrible special effects (doubly so if the film is in black and white). My brain just doesn’t care. Wonky sets? Studio backdrops? Characters in a car that obviously isn’t really on a road? (At least on Matlock the characters have really had coffee in their cups!) I laugh when a student expresses surprise that they liked a movie that is old. “A good story is a good story,” I say. They look skeptical.

Plenty of people seem to have more discriminatory powers than I do. They get pulled into good stories but can shrug at the deaths of bland or flat characters. They don’t care. And it makes sense that they don’t. The story creators haven’t earned it. But it’s like I’m still five years old and struggling to convince myself that my dad’s story about Santa being at church isn’t true. Dad is convincing and I’m a sucker.

In any case, I googled about the sensation of the brain reacting as if the stories were true, and I found this and this and this. These articles gave me some answers though I still don’t know why I fall for so quickly into a narrative and other folks don’t.

How sucked in do you get into stories? Do certain types of stories get you more easily than others?

I hope I can write stories that pull people in. Will readers care about my characters? Feel the elation or heartbreak I want them to feel? I don’t know, but I’ll keep trying.

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