The Story Mountain: 7th July 2021

Students of creative writing the world over learn that every story is mountain-shaped.

They will tell you that exposition lies in the gentle slope up and out of the car park, that the quiet shifts through the gears of plot are the forests where the incline starts to glisten on walkers' foreheads. The vistas at the summit are the climax, the final sweeping swathes of descent the resolution.

All stories, they say, take this basic shape. A stirring love story, a lurching crime thriller, a queer reworking of a fairy tale. Some stories are a mountain range, with Munros and Corbetts and Grahams packed into a novel the shape of a horizon snipped away by the Cuillins.

And to that I say: perhaps this model is not always quite right.

Perhaps, sometimes, a mountain is instead shaped by its stories.

Picture a sad story, a real tear-jerker. When somebody, anybody, your father, falls at the bottom of a mountain. When he falls and dies, and his story ends. The hero is killed off in his prime; the audience gasps. When your story is being annotated and re-written with red lines through the sentences even as you are led by mountain rescue back to the car park, that – that – THAT is not resolution.

Perhaps the mountain is not a story after all, but a means of telling it. The omniscient narrator. Mountains are cliffs and vistas and skies. They are trees, gorges with rocks as cushions at the bottom. The way things are. They are not tears. Screams. Loss. Beauty. Human.

And yet still they fill you with joy. They will drop you. They will squeeze your hand and let go. Like an anti-hero from a turbulent American novel, they will wine you, dine you, fix a proposal at the summit in the summer sun. They will break your heart. A mountain narrates tragicomedies, bildungsroman, encyclopaedia, every kind of story there has ever been. And the resolution is not necessarily where you expect it to be. Perhaps, sometimes, there isn’t one.

Picture a wild orchid grounding a Torridon mountainside, your father's favourite flower. Pink and modest like the tie he used to wear to work. It protrudes like a microphone from the mountain. You stop to hear its story.

We do not begin, we do not resolve. We are nobody’s story. We are only here.

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