One reason why being an adult is awesome

What makes a good story?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the different ways there are to tell a story.

I read/absorbed countless books when I was a kid. There is something special to me about the childhood reading experience; I remember it being this magical, unquestioning time where all I wanted on any given day was to be supplied with new reading material. I knew which books I loved and which characters I connected with and thought of as real people, but I didn’t yet have the awareness to pinpoint the elements that made a story great (or not so great) for me.

A fun, fascinating part of adulthood is realizing how many different ways you can tell a story and noticing when a story is told well and what elements make that happen. I never questioned books or movies or TV shows or songs when I was a kid. I didn't yet have the awareness to notice shifts in perspective, to think about how you can move pieces around, to reimagine how a story could be told.

I don’t think reading books and watching movies and TV shows as an adult necessarily means being more critical, but I do think that these experiences are richer when you approach entertainment and art in a thoughtful, curious way.

There’s nothing wrong with not liking a certain approach, as I found in my month of reading books in the fantasy genre. One of my struggles with this genre is that the authors I was picking up tend to approach stories in a non-linear way, jumping forward and backward in timeline. I won’t name titles, but I’m thinking of a specific read that wasn’t for me partly because the story was told with a lot of jumping around in timeline that I found confusing and distracting.  

A read where timeline shifts did work for me was the thoughtful middle-grade debut What Happens Next by Claire Swinarski (recommended here). I loved how part of the story in What Happens Next being told backward let me invest emotionally into the characters as I slowly learned what had gotten them to the breaking point where the reader first finds them.

It’s incredible to find those reads as an adult that pull you in for the immersive, captivating reading experience where you don’t want to put down the book – while also making you aware of the author’s craft. In the past year, I felt this way while reading Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic series; Tana French’s The Likeness; and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. For a long time, I was afraid that I would never have that I-can’t-put-this-down-but-I-also-don’t-want-it-to-end fiction reading experience that I remember so fondly from childhood, but all of these books proved that very wrong.

Being aware of whether or not I’m connecting with a story is also hugely helpful in navigating the TV landscape when there is too much to watch. I have to confess that I mostly operate on gut instinct to know if a TV show is right for me at that time in my life or not, and I’ve given up on many a show simply because it made me feel anxious, sometimes returning to it years later to complete the series, sometimes not. But awareness about story means that I don’t want to settle for TV I don’t find compelling when I know I have so many other options. I’m not going to finish watching Space Force on Netflix when I can pinpoint and list exactly what I didn’t like about it. 

This new, adult cognizance of story can sometimes be a bit like a fourth wall shattered, but it also makes me feel powerful and aware of the stories I'm taking in.

For readers of all ages who love middle-grade and for anyone always looking for magic:

While I was growing up, library shelves were generally clumped into children’s books and adult books, with young adult just starting to grow as a genre in its own right when I was a teenager. Today’s kids have a wonderfully expanded “middle-grade” book world that is increasingly diverse and shows a new awareness for how children have different needs and approaches to story at different ages.

Life for 12-year-old Miranda used to hold magic, before she started growing up and questioning her cryptozoologist mother’s staunch belief in things like fairies, werewolves, and most of all, Bigfoot. The Bigfoot Files by Lindsay Eagar is a charming, imaginative addition to recent reads on the middle-grade shelves, a book that walks the line between magical realism and fantasy while offering insights on family and relationships that kids can and should learn while growing up (but are still relevant at any age). I love a weird, fanciful, unique read, and this quirky mother-daughter modern fairytale was something totally new.

For anyone looking for comfort TV with heft and heart:

In the chaos that has been 2020, I’ve been hankering to return to life with the Braverman clan, even though I’ve watched their story all the way through twice already. NBC’s Parenthood is one of those great shows that was clearly successful enough to be seen through to the end, yet underrated enough that it never held a strong viewership and kind of disappeared after its 6-season run.

Like real life, Parenthood is a drama-comedy, with laughter and tears both present in just about every episode. It’s a multi-generational story about love, relationships, and family legacy, told through the intersecting lives of an older couple (Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia); their four children; and their grandchildren. I could talk about the richly drawn characters or the funny, heartwarming dialogue or the pitch-perfect cast or the great soundtrack, but what keeps me hooked each time I watch this show is the feeling that you’re spending time with a real family. Not many of us now have our whole family in one town and continually dropping in on each other’s lives, and it’s a nice world to live in for a while.