April 1, 2003

• Having Trouble Posting?

  
  

  I have been, I write the blog and click submit (after copying to clipboard OF COURSE) and then everything crashes.  But I've learned that if I click SUBMIT AND EMAIL instead of plain old SUBMIT then it posts.  I don't know why it works, but it seems to be doing the trick for me so I thought I'd pass it on. 

  
  

  Got Death?

  
  

  I've been thinking about fiction writing.  I play around with fiction every now and then, as you know from reading my blogs, but mainly I am an essay/non-fiction kind of gal.  When I write fiction I want it to be GOOD fiction.  Now it's possible to cross every 't', dot every 'i' and still have a boring story.  The obvious thing about fiction is that you have to be telling a good story, or you might as well go back to writing essays.  So lately I've been pondering the question, "what makes a good story?"

  
  

  Happily for me, greater minds than my own have pondered this question.  Moreover, some really compassionate people who waded through the works of Joseph Campbell, J R R Tolkien's scholarly Oxford stuff, and Mircea Eliade's research into world myth and folklore have taken pity on people like me who want to know - bottom line - what makes a good story.

  
  

  Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood script doctor, has translated Campbell's work on the hero's journey into a set of principles for fiction writing.  His book is called "The Writer's Journey" and I heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to write good stories.  You won't learn how to construct clever sentences or avoid the passive verb with his book.  But you will learn how to integrate the archetypal elements that we unconsciously look for when we sit down to hear, read, or watch a story unfold.  A Xanga blog is no place to go into a lengthy discussion of mythic structures.  No matter how I'm tempted.

  
  

  My meditation for the past few days has been on the symbolic death.  In the hero's journey the central theme underlying every step of the way is "approach of death."  In a romance we know the story, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back permanently.  The point at which boy loses girl, he undergoes a symbolic death - and in many cases the very real psychological death of hopes, dreams, desires.  In and adventure story, the hero comes to that point at which he is trapped with no way out and to get through to the other side, he must in someway die to at least a part of himself.  Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings that the entire story was about death - from the poem that includes the line "mortal men doomed to die" - three references to death in one line - all the way through the appendix when Aragorn (don't get excited yet, he lives to be something like 210 years old) reveals that the final gift of God to the King is that Aragorn gets to choose when and where he will give up his life in a voluntary death. 

  
  

  I've written here before about the struggle of man with mortality.  Rereading all this Tolkien/Campbell material has sent me down that path again which may explain my increased excitement about fiction.  (People tend to frown on killing off your neighbors just to satisfy your curiosity about mortality, but they don't object nearly as strongly when you kill off a character in a story.)  Now I'm thinking through the various possibilities for symbolic death... maybe the judge won't be too hard on me if its just a practical joke...  

  
  

  I recently submitted a short story to Dreadpirate's Contest, (you can read mine and other entries here.)  In my story the character is confronted by what may or may not be a life-threatening situation, but the real death comes in the last line.  If you read it, let me know whether or not you think it works. 

  • 1:31 pm
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