Last week, I read most of (skimmed parts) Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey McDonald. Books can be far more memorable for how they make you think than for their subject matter. Morris made me obsess with the idea of how we construct our personal narratives, and how they are constructed for us.

Errol Morris is a documentary film-maker. I watched Morris’s The Thin Blue Line sometime in the 1980s. It is accompanied by a Phillip Glass score. It was my introduction to documentaries. I may have watched a few before that, perhaps in a high school class or mindlessly on the television at home. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was also my introduction to how narratives are constructed, or perhaps more frequently or accurately, how they emerge and take on a life of their own, for better or worse.

The documentary essentially is about a guy wrongly convicted of a murder in Texas and the guy who did it. Incidentally, Morris is credited with winning the wrongly convicted guy his freedom and his life. Ironically, he was sued by that very same guy years later.

There are two scenes I remember. The first is when the guy who wasn’t convicted of the murder essentially confesses. The second is when one of the guys (or maybe both) are sitting in a cheap motel watching The Swinging Cheerleaders, a soft-core porn movie. Well, as the definitions were then. I remember watching that movie at a drive-in with a car full of buddies in 1972 or thereabouts. I thought cheap movies to drive adolescent fantasies disappeared as fast as they were released. I won’t lie. Seeing that snippet of that movie in a documentary about person wrongly convicted of murder overwhelmed me with feeling I’m not sure I could describe even to this day. For whatever reason, that tiny common data point in my own personal adolescent narrative haunts me all over again when I see the movie.

The Thin Blue Line reconstructs the narrative of how that guy was convicted and how the other guy got away. It is hard to separate the chill from how terribly wrong the reality of our social institutions can be from the mind-numbing impact of Glass’ minimalist score of repetitive tonal fragments.

A Wilderness of Error does the same thing, reconstructs the narrative of this guy who has been sitting in prison for several decades for the murder of his family. The details are beyond sickening, the errors in evidence, judgment, etc. I’ll just offer the most peculiar. The guy who was convicted, the father, was also stabbed 27 times with an ice pick during the altercation. The trial apparently demonstrated, convincingly, that he did this to cover up his crime.

The processional through life causes all of us to construct, refine, tweak, embellish, interpret and (many other verbs you could insert here) articulate our own personal narratives. Others, those close to us, those we work with, attend service with, neighbors, have their own narratives about us. Imagine reading one paragraph of a description about yourself from family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

In certain situations, usually under duress, narratives change and emerge. When something unacceptable is revealed, when gossip is passed around, when something is said that is out of character with our narrative, a new narrative can emerge. Often, it is out of your control. When the crap hits the fan – in the worst case in the examples above, but consider suddenly losing a job and not being able to pay the bills, or if a family member is accused of a crime – the narrative begins to be reconstructed by institutions. Churches, banks, companies, clubs, and on and on.

Every documentary, movie, every article, every research paper, thesis, book, biography, autobiography, account of history, is a narrative, a connecting of dots, whether fact or fiction, proof or speculation, and every combination imaginable of all of these. In research and analysis, we might plot points on a graph and try to “capture” a broader story by drawing a line to represent what we observed. That line becomes an equation that explains a theory which emerged from the data points. We do this every minute of every day without thinking. Often for our livelihoods, we capture the narrative, freeze it in time, and “publish” it.

We construct our narratives in real time too, of course. My 25-year old daughter, a history major in college and a strong writer, has spent the past year, collaborating with her sister and mom in writing and publishing a dystopian genre novel. She also blogs about writing. She has followers from around the world. The novel is selling better than probably 95% of all self-published works. She is using every tool being thrown out there as a result of the breakdown of the traditional publishing world to construct a professional narrative.

I worked for 35 years as a writer of technology, science, and business, and in the last fifteen years fiction. Initially I quietly resented how she essentially entered the world of fiction writing in a year. Then I realized she was doing what I had done when I graduated from college. I got my degree in engineering, but with an eye toward writing about engineering. I remembered telling my advisor/professor I was an excellent writer. He probably had never heard this from the mouth of an engineering student. He asked me to help him with an article he was preparing for Scientific American. In my first engineering jobs, I told everyone I was an engineer who knew how to write. And loved to write to boot. Soon, everyone brought their proposals, their papers, their reports, their memos for me to review. I had no real idea how well I could write. I just convinced everyone I could writer better than they could (not that difficult with engineers, I accept). My professional narrative became reality. A virtuous feedback loop ensued. The more people brought me their work, the more skilled I became. Just like my daughter is doing.

In many ways, the very meaning of life is constructing and reconstructing narratives, comparing narratives, challenging narratives (e.g., peer reviewed research), originating narratives, that involve other persons and phenomena, and your self. It’s done with facts, assumptions, speculation, words, with numbers, consciously, unconsciously, loudly, quietly, with ambition, with confidence. But we all know we construct that narrative within an envelope bounded by ethics, morals, and the ability to perform as we say. When the narrative emerges from others, especially institutions, we have to be more cautious by several orders of magnitude.

You either define your own narrative, or have it defined for you. Within reason. Within boundaries.

Sometimes, especially when the shit hits the fan, you don’t have a choice. You are a victim.

Errol Morris’s work convinces me there are precious few facts in this world. Arriving at some version of the truth, however well accepted or not, to fill in the yawning gaps (and in some cases, canyons) between the “facts” or data, requires a great deal of influence, superiority, rank, institutional behavior, guessing, assumptions, ambition, speculation, preconceived notions, agreement among specialists, and ideology.

I have a favorite saying: Nothing is so satisfying as creating your own mythology, nor as dangerous as believing it. I often wonder if megalomaniacs think about this once their heads hit the pillow.

As for what the future might hold for narrative construction, imagine every thing you write, everything you’ve written, every video you appear in recorded by a surveillance camera, captured in a computer server somewhere, regardless of whether you’ve deleted it from public view. It is still captured digitally somewhere. Every feeling, every mood you decided to record for posterity, most of your movements. Imagine an Errol Morris, good intentions or malicious, in ten years gaining access to all of those records and constructing or reconstructing your narrative. Worse, and probably more appropriate, imagine an algorithm, a bot, putting the pieces together, and detecting patterns, and making conclusions from them.

A narrative can be a thing of splendor, or a thing of terror. Sometimes they are constructed and sometimes they emerge. Perhaps always they are a combination. When each piece of data, each piece of evidence is examined, under a microscope in Morris’s cases, it can be horrifying to understand how the story can change, and change the victims.