For our first bridge project, accurately entitled My So Called Life, our task was to create two stories by which one was true and one was false. We had to present our stories with evidence that supported our tales, thus causing the audience to have to pass judgment on which tale the believe to be true, and which they believed was false.
Deciding which stories to tell was a difficult task, since there weren’t many that were outrageous or interesting enough to publicly recount that would both hold interest and seem true. After taking into consideration which tales would permit me to both provide convincing evidence, and tell them in a way that would engage my audience I settled on the time my apartment got robbed (true) and the tale of how my dog died (false).
Obtaining the evidence was surprisingly simple. I had a photo of me and my old dog from the Dominican Republic, Scooby, which both was “indisputable evidence” as well as easy to manipulate through story telling. I decided to exaggerate minor details, and change others completely. In example, I stated that I had my dog from ages 5 to 14, which was true, but exaggerated the fact that I actively lived with him which I had never actually done. I only saw my dog once a year when I went to vacation to the Dominican, and he was practically my grandmothers dog at that point. To also aide y story, I stated that my dog had gone to live with my grandmother in Long Island as a result of the apartment robbery, when really my grandmother doesn’t even know what Long Island is.
Due to the fact that the apartment robbery was the true story, I did not face the difficulty of having to make up any detailing for it. The real issue lied in making the evidence believably fake. Because an apartment robbery is already an outrageous enough tale, I edited the police report to purposely have flaws and plot holes in it to make it seem as if it was rushed or lacked carefulness.
Details such as the nature of the crime was missing, or even what the crime itself was in case someone was inspecting it for small details which would flaw the report.
When it came to telling the story, I decided to not read off of my paper. I felt as if I engaged my audiences and showed that I had memorized seemingly normal details of my occurrences that would make it more believable. I felt that when you’re reading something, it’s easy to trip up over your words when you see something you know isn’t necessarily supposed to be there. Therefore, I told both the tales off of the top of my head, adding extra emotional emphasis for the tale of my dog, to show I was “deeply troubled” by his passing.
When it came time to present, the audience was nearly split in half when deciding which story was real or not, though they leaned more for the story of my dog. As a result, I was satisfied by these results, and felt as if I did a good job making my falsified story convincing.
