Food for the Hungry Writer ~ Story
Story
A good story somehow gets inside your
brain. A good story tells you something you already know, but more than
telling you what you already know, a good story also makes you feel. If
you, the writer, don’t feel the story, your reader won’t feel it. To
make the reader feel, we have to use the tricks storytellers have known
for centuries. One of the tricks storytellers use is to build a story on
a myth base.
The language of a good story draws you
past the language into its myth base. A good story that hooks you into a
myth base feels familiar even while it is brand new to you. Even while
you read Cold Mountain, example, you feel that it is a deep
story, that there is more to it than the journey of a solder home from
the American Civil War. It is a story about Getting Home. It is the Odyssey, the Aeneid, it is Everyman who has ever been lost and looking for a place to rest. That is the myth base working in you.
As language draws you into the story’s
myth base, you, as a reader, don’t know until it happens, so there is a
bit of a mystery there, while you, the writer need to know how to put
the myth base under the language so your reader can feel it. To do that,
you have to get inside the story. To get inside a story as a writer,
you want to look at story sources.
Sources:
The way we see it, there have been three horizon events that shape European and American story telling:
- Biblical: The Fall of Rome which led to the infusion of Judeo-Christian Biblical writing as a source for story.
- Classical Antiquity: The Renaissance rediscovery of classical (Greek and Roman) myth brought a second source of writing.
- Psychological and evolutionary insights arising from the work of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung: Survival of the Fittest, The Freudian Slip, The Archetype.
Getting inside the Source
From the fall of Rome in 410 AD until the 15th century (about the same time gunpowder is introduced into western warfare), there was essentially one
source for metaphor. As a common source, the Bible gave us its
characters, its events and situations; it gave us its heroes and
villains.
Because the Bible was a foundation text,
a writer might choose to tell a story about a strong man. To make the
story understandable, he might hook his story to Samson. He might refer
to being shorn as a loss of strength, to lose his hair turns him into a
lamb. Because the writer hooked his story to a common myth base, the
story required no explanation. Everyone knew what it meant and everyone
knew what the writer was talking about.
In the story of David and Goliath, the
sling shot becomes an object whose meaning is understood because all
readers and listeners (the Middle Ages were, at their peak an oral
period in the history of western writing) knew the reference and they
knew the moral significance of it.
As a source for allusion (things and
events the writer referred to) and as a source for story, the Bible was
not just mandatory (no one knew anything else after a manner of
speaking) it was the only possible way to connect to the audience. (We
use connection as short hand for meaning). All listeners to the story
about a boy who slays a giant understood the story, and a skillful
writer could turn that story into a morality play where the lesson was
quite simply—get too big for your britches and the little guy will pull
you down. The allegory of Joseph and his coat of many colors was equally
understood while Dante’s Divine Comedy, the foundation text built on the great Biblical foundation text, can be understood only in the context of biblical allusion.
Allusion, as a literary device, and story depended almost exclusively on the Bible, its Hagiography, and its Apocrypha.
The lives of the Saints, the Hagiographic
texts, became important sources of moral literature. Saint Francis,
Saint Sebastian, Saint Eulalia, Saint Perpetua all taught moral lessons
about the Christian life and devotion to Christ. In such grand pieces as
the mysteries (the mysteries are medieval dramas based on scriptural
events—especially the Incarnation, Passion, Crucifixion, or
Resurrection, of particular importance for redemption) the Christian
passion was re-enacted for all to see. In Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ became not only a source book but a model for living the exemplary life.
Until the 15th Century, the
Bible had a long run and, in its overlays on Celtic and Nordic story
telling, nearly exterminated the pagan myths that lay there, and so, for
example, the Romances which had correlates in Celtic or Germanic myth,
became under the Biblical/Christian influence, models of not just the
perfect knight, but the perfect Christian knight. It is not by chance
that the Cross on the shield supplanted the animal totems that adorned
the shields of Celtic warriors.
In the 15th century, when the
great texts of the classical world came back into vogue in the Western
consciousness, it was through Latin, Arabic, or Hebrew because all the
classical writing had been taken into the Arabic-Muslim libraries in
Spain and from there, in Latin translation (the lingua franca of Western
Europe) spread to the rest of the continent and with them came the
sudden infusion of the second Great Story Source: Classical myth.
The Renaissance was a time of syncretism
wherein the Bible as a source of allusion stood toe to toe with
classical myth for a period of time, but yielded, finally, in the 16th
century to the classical. Jerusalem Delivered and Orlando Furioso bring
an end to the great biblical themes and their overt and easily
understood allusions. There is no more Divine Comedy
but now the writing is loaded with allusions to different gods and
heroes – Herakles, Zeus, Demeter, Persephone, Oedipus as the classical
world was reborn in writers who abandoned the biblical in favor of the
classical myth and now any allusion to the Sun has to be cast in terms
of Sol or Phoebus, and any battle is couched in terms of Herakles the
great warrior, and any journey is told as an allusion to the Odyssey and
Homer’s two epic poems became the source of story instead of either
Hagiography or the Bible.
In the 17th century, Milton’s epics Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained work
the biblical vein at its richest, but even there Milton is completely
aware of the Homeric epics. Milton, of course, read both Greek and
Latin, and knew by heart all the great classical works available to him
as a student of that world.
The classical world reached its zenith in the early 19th
century when the Romantic poets began to look beyond myth into nature,
but still used classical myth and theme as a source and so Keats still
writes his Odes on Greek themes and Matthew Arnold still alludes to the
classics and all this because it was a common language, the result of
the classical education. It is the common language and the common source
that allows the writers to compose in shorthand. The Fall no longer
means solely original sin and the Garden of Eden, but can allude to
aspirations that reach too high as Icarus falls. Still understood, the
Biblical allusions have less currency and in the end, are vestigial and
finally come to an end as the driving force shaping western writing.
As Classical myth supplanted biblical
allusion, another, the third great source floods onto the world stage:
In 1859, the middle of the century, Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species. Darwin introduces and plays on a theme
of radical change through time. In one book, he destroys the foundations
of western writing because now, there is nothing immutable, nothing
lasts, the 18th Century materialists were right, the whole
world is in flux. With Darwin, it is a world unseen that gives us the
third shift in allusion and from Darwin’s insight it is a short 50 years
to Freud and the Unconscious.
With the blossoming of the Unconscious
Mind into western ideology, the Third Source has broken out and drives
full blown into the writing world.
Writers no longer find satisfaction or
inspiration in the high flying Icarus or the muscular Herakles or the
Peripatetic Odysseus. Now the allusion is to an inner world of dark
places without names and the journey is not to Hell as it was with
Dante, nor is it to Ithaca as it was with Odysseus, but now the journey
is into the Unconscious where all of our life is coded and so we now
write in the Third level of allusion that is as perfectly understood to
the educated 21st century reader as was the Biblical allusion to the listener in 1200 AD.
But, the problem for the contemporary
writer is one of Metaphor. If there is no common language for the code,
how do you make any connection to your readers? If you can’t write about
the Fall or the Descent into the Purgatory and if your readers do not
understand the coded message of the Argo and the Argonauts (but think
they might be a professional football team) how do you connect?
Because there is no common literary
document and no common body of metaphors that all educated readers
understand, writers have to build with a new set of tools that happens
to be as old as the human mind: Subtext. Lacking a common set of metaphors leaves the writer free to discover structure
in order to create temporalized metaphor (grand language for putting
your characters in modern garb and placing them in a modern context that
your audience can relate to. (See CG Jung and Erich Neumann)
How is it done?
To do this writers discover archetypal
patterns stripped of metaphoric allusions – in short, your have to build
the thing you refer to. The writer cannot allude to that common
language, so must build the metaphors of his or her writing from the
ground up. The construction site, as always in the time of the Third
Source, is subtext. Cold Mountain,
for example, is the story of a long and arduous return home from a
bloody war. It is an Odyssey that doesn’t allude to Odysseus. E.T.,
Spielberg’s film, is the story of a voyager who wants to get home. He
is a modern Odysseus, lost in time and space. In these works, the
writers build the archetypal pattern and then cloak the archetypal
characters in metaphor that connects to their audiences.
Clint Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars is a retelling of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, while Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres is a retelling of King Lear.
The writers don’t write the way Kurosawa did and they don’t write the
way Shakespeare did by alluding to classical (or Celtic themes) but
prefer instead to discover the unconscious story pattern and then write
in the language of our day.
One way the writer in the 21st
century can tap into the subtext of the unconscious mind is to
rediscover the great cycle of Life-Death-Resurrection. In this
structure, Jesus Christ, Attis, Adonis, Osiris and The Terminator are
all metaphors for the great pattern—The Return. The Return of the
Repressed. Resurrection is a metaphor for things emerging from the
Unconscious.
To write in the 21st Century
is to connect to the unconscious pattern and then to build on it. You
take the pattern, and you put new clothes on it. You take the archetypal
pattern and bring it into a time that your readers can connect to.
Rediscovering the Vegetation Cycle
We urge you to dig into the essential
elements of storytelling to find the archetypal patterns that underpin
all good stories. You start with the basics: death and resurrection as
your primal structure. To help you get a handle on this important
structure, take a look at the mythic dynamo. (figure 1.)
Commentary: You can
save yourself and you can save the culture. When language is debased,
when the writer doesn’t take responsibility for the language, then
meaning skips away and confusion is the result.
Sample Text: Beginner’s Mind and the Blank Page
Natalie Goldberg wrote Writing Down the Bones
using writing practice: “One of the aims of writing practice,” writes
Goldberg, “is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient
and non-aggressive….Writing practice embraces your whole life….”
Writing Under the Clock to Free up the Creative Mind
We encourage the writers to adopt timed
writing as a discipline. Timed writing is a sure-fire way to discipline
because when writing under the timer (the discipline is in three parts:
a) selecting a fiction problem, 2) setting the timer for five, ten,
fifteen or more minutes; 3) finishing what you start. Natalie Goldberg
says it very simply: “Keep your hand moving until the time is up.” This
essential discipline—finishing what you start is the foundation of
craft. Timed writing frees up your creative mind by putting your
internal editor to work watching the clock while you roam the fields of
fiction unfettered to finish what you start without the internal editor
bothering you about the small things.
For the writer who has never experienced
timed writing, we strongly suggest buying and reading Natalie
Goldberg’s foundation book, Writing Down The Bones. Writing
under the clock (what Natalie Goldberg calls “writing practice”) opens
you up to all kinds of writing—poetry, fiction, sketch, dramatic
writing, and essay. In this book we use writing practice to assist the
writer in creating progressive segments of timed writing which build
stamina, strength, insight, flexibility, and writerly self-awareness.
Writing practice strengthens the
writer’s craft by extending writing times on topic that take writers
deep into their creative unconscious to break through the emotional
barriers that block creativity.
Every new work starts with a blank page. In the lore of world writing it’s said of Thomas Mann— author of Dr. Faustus, The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, and The Confessions of Felix Krull—that
when he finished a work, he immediately rolled a blank sheet of paper
into his typewriter and wrote the title of the new work.
Beginner’s Mind is the
writer’s way past the blank page because it allows you to start small.
Starting small means just that. Write about character, create the
settings. Let characters and setting develop into scenes. Let the
characters in their scenes tell the story.
- In Beginner’s Mind, you don’t cross out when you write because then you mix up the editor and the creator. The internal editor is guardian of the jewels. The closer you get to the jewels the louder editor mind shouts at you that you’re not worthy of the jewels.
- In Beginner’s Mind, you write specific detail – it’s not a “car”, but a “Cadillac.” Not just a Cadillac, but “a Cadillac El Dorado”; not just a Cadillac El Dorado, but a “gun-metal gray Cadillac El Dorado with a New Mexico license plate.
- In Beginner’s Mind, the writer first writes say, about a piece of fruit, but that piece of fruit becomes an apple and going deeper the apple becomes a Braeburn the color of a Chinese robe….
- In Beginner’s Mind, you don’t think, but you lose control. If the writing gets scary, that’s where you go. You follow your mind.
- In Beginner’s Mind you let go of what you know so that you are free to take what comes.
- In Beginner’s Mind, you want the crossing of emotion and detail. You want to be in the writing without being present in the writing.
- And finally, in Beginner’s Mind, you already know the book. It is in you. You just have to let it out.
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