#Exit Sign Swaparooner

[howtohero]

#245 The Power of Stories

Stories are a powerful thing. A skilled storyteller can take a story, be it real or fiction, and use it to influence great change in the people or the world around them. Stories can be used to teach lessons; to give warnings; to bring joy; to bring sorrow; to bring pain and to alleviate it. In the right hands stories can be used to do damn near anything. As a superhero, your life is essentially a series of wondrous and fantastical stories, (interspersed with hilariously embarrassing ones about getting your cape stuck in revolving doors or getting suck in what’s known as a “revolving door loop” where you just keep going around and around and getting increasingly panicked) and that makes you very fortunate indeed. Having so many incredible stories under your belt gives you yet another opportunity to do good, albeit in a more unconventional way.

Understanding that the strange things that happen to you, or that you happen to, can be used later on to do some good can actually do wonders for a superhero’s morale. If you’re forced to fight a giant mud monster for the fifth day in a row (different, completely unrelated, mud monsters believe it or not) at least you can take solace in the fact that you can later use this terrible time to inspire others to clean up after themselves, or not to lose hope when faced with the same problem over and over again. Every bad day can be turned into a good and valuable story later. And nobody faces more bad days than superheroes. (The idea that supervillains face more bad days than superheroes stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a supervillain tick. Supervillains are often the product of a single bad day that sets them down a path of horrible villainy. Any other defeat or setback they experience after that initial bad day is not viewed as a bad day by these villains, but rather as further excuses, which they desperately crave, to commit outlandish crimes. If a villain were ever to succeed they’d lose any and all motivation to do things and that’s the last thing they want. Which means that you’ll never be happy, and they’ll never be satisfied. Thus the battle between good and evil is the world’s one true never ending story.)

It should come as no shock to you, my superheroic reader, that the stories of your life can be used to inspire and intrigue others. Superheroes, and other larger than life or awesomely powered figures, have loomed large in fiction literally since the beginning. Our oldest recorded story, The Epic of Gilgamesh is about a man with incredible strength, stamina, and endurance fighting monsters and seeking immortality. That’s like a regular Tuesday for you and yet it is humankind’s most enduring tale. If you’re any good at your job, you yourself have been the subject of many comics, movies, sitcoms, internet puppet shows and one fascinating Japanese gameshow/car wash. Now, it’s time to take control of your own stories! Stop selling the rights to every instance of you scuffling with the Exit-Sign Swaparooner or spearfishing the venom-whales of the Kludachrom System. Instead, you can use these stories to inspire people or inspire change or simply to entertain young children so their hardworking parents can get some much needed sleep! When you’re a hero no good deed is too small! (The Exit-Sign Swaparooner is a devilish fiend who takes exit signs and puts them over doors that are not in fact exits. You may think that this makes him more of a prankster than a supervillain but 1. The line between those things is much thinner than you might believe and 2. Let’s see if you’re still laughing when you’re trying to leave your local coffee shop only to find yourself falling right into a pit full of crocodiles!)

If you’re going to start utilizing your vast array of stories though, it is important to know your audience. Not every story is suitable for every listener. If you’re new to this whole story telling thing, you’re going to need to train at matching stories and audiences and so we’ve devised a quick practice exercise for you:

If your audience is a group of excited school children the story you should tell is:     a. The time you thought the Sentient Cloud of Expletives!     b. The time you fought the Blowzo the eternally puking clown who exclusively pukes on children.     c. The time you traveled back in time and invented math accidentally.     d. The time you traveled back in time and invented math on purpose.

Now, if you picked any of those answers you’re obviously incorrect. Unless you truly know your audience and can prove us wrong. In all honesty, all of these stories might be suitable for a group of excited school children, it’s simply up to you to know what kind of school children these are, and what kinds of stories they want or need to hear. The Sentient Cloud of Expletives story is great if you want to teach kids about proper language, as long as you understand that you need to censor much of the Cloud’s dialogue for this particular group. (It’s also a great story to tell if this particular group of kids thinks they’re too cool to listen to a story from a superhero. Using a ton of swear words in a story is the number one way to get too cool for school children to listen to what you have to say.) The story about Blowzo is a great story to use if you want to scare a bunch of children into doing the right thing. (Fear is often the best tactic to use when dealing with children. I’m quite sure of this.) [This is wrong, don’t scare any children!]. Teaching children that a super cool superhero invented math is a great way to encourage children to learn it! And teaching children about going back in time and inventing math a second time teaches them that they shouldn’t be afraid to admit when they’ve made mistakes. (Even if your plan to fix your mistake is to erase an entire timeline, only to just invent math again but on purpose this time!) 

In reality, any story can be adapted for any audience as long as you understand the motivations and attitudes of the people the story is intended for. If you miscalculate, you can end up boring your audience. Or even worse, upsetting them and causing you to give your stories bad reviews. Honestly I don’t think you can handle scathing reviews from story critics. They can be very mean. And I know you’ve actually fought Charles T. Mean, the inventor of mean, but let me tell you, these people are out for blood. I once wrote a story and some critic told me, to my face, that the story made him hate the person who invented words. So. (And it wasn’t even the historical fiction story about Deirdre Word, inventor of the word, being a serial killer who only invented words so she could leave threatening messages to her would be victims during the Revolutionary War!) 

In addition to knowing your audience it is also important to know your stories. You need to look back through your life and understand the various uses of each of your many stories. Stories of great triumph can be used to inspire people to surmount impossible odds, or to intimidate your enemies by showing them that you’ve faced greater threats than they can ever hope to be. (You can honestly win a lot of fights this way.) Love stories can be used to demonstrate the lengths people will go to for love or as the lead up to a “spontaneous” musical confession of love! Scary stories can be used, as we’ve said, to terrify children into doing good deeds or to win the annual superhero halloween ghost story competition which my sources tell me is a thing. If you can understand that every experience you have can serve you in a number of different scenarios some time down the line, limited only by your own creativity, you’ll certainly feel better about having to fight your way through the Mobile Murder Mountain the next time it arrives in your city! 

Stories can be quite versatile. They can be used to calm down or distract scared civilians. They can be used to generate goodwill with our galactic neighbors. They can be used to build people up or tear them down. Your job as a superhero is to wield your stories in a way that will make the world a better place. Good luck, and happy storytelling!