Mortality

This is a painting called "The Three Ages of Man and Death."  It shows a child, a woman, an old woman, and death, who comes visiting with the hourglass.  I have a copy of this picture on the wall of my writing studio.  It keeps me close to the idea of our mortality, a theme I have been writing about a great deal lately.  Do you think about your own mortality?  What feelings do you associate with it?

Confession

At a writing conference I once attended, three authors, women, talked about the label sometimes applied to writers:  "Confessional."  They said that sometimes women writers are labeled "Confessional" as a way of depreciating what they do.  One of the women, though, called the term "Confessional" a plus.  It is what we do, she said, when we come to the page, we confess some hidden truth and hope the reader will respond with generosity and understanding.  This is what I try to do when I approach the writing process:  get down on my knees and bare my heart.

Fragility of Healing

The Sun:  A Magazine of Ideas (August 2004)

My issue #344 of The Sun arrived today.  My short story, "Blue Velvis" is published in this issue.

What do you think of when you think of Elvis?

My story is about the fragility of hope and healing.

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/august2004.html 

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/ 

Conversation With Another Writer

This is part of a conversation I just had with another writer about plot and mythology:  

S-- Well, it [Star Trek] was a western in space, which is how he [Roddenberry] used to refer to it, as I recall. :) As for being based on myths, lots of TV and books are, but I don't see the myths behind them. I rarely see themes. My brain doesn't seem to be wired that way. I see stories. And since I never really cared one way or the other re: Star Trek, I don't know if Roddenberry consciously used myths as underpinnings for the series.

ME: A course I have taught at the university for a long time is "The Myth of the Frontier."  The western is America's great myth and our heroes echo the heros of old.  Poems written after Custer's death, for instance, compare him to Achilles.  Westerns were popular when Star Trek came out, and I once read that R. had said he used the "western in space" as a marketing tool.  But it is also true that space adventures are little different than western adventures, in the final analysis.  I do prefer R.'s vision, though.  I think his series was more about the inner quest, slaying external "dragons" as manifestations of our inner dragons (hatred, greed, prejudice, etc.)  I'm not sure the extent to which any of us consciously use myths--I believe in the collective unconscious that Jung wrote about.  All that stuff is imbedded in us.

S-- I mostly think in terms of basic plots, and myths just used most if not all of them. There are supposedly only 3 to 10 or so basic plots, depending on who you ask. These are the ones I differentiate:   Romance (boy meets girl and all the variations) Quest Whodunit?/Mystery Coming of Age Good vs Evil "Man" vs the Environment and in Science Fiction, we can add in such plots as Alien Encounters (what makes humans human).

ME: Yes, this is true.  A book we use at my university calls these "Shapes."  (Jerome Stern--"Making Shapely Fiction")  And thinking which shape best fits the story you want to tell is very useful, although I rarely start out that way.  I like to start with the messy stuff, emotions, symbols, metaphors ESPECIALLY METAPHORS.  Mythology is metaphorical.  The metaphorical aspects of language and being are what excite me the most.  When I read a good story, I find myself searching for symbols and metaphors as a child searches for Easter eggs; some wonderful truth becomes unveiled for me as I do this.

S-- Pretty much anything else is usually a variation on one or more of the above.  

ME:  That is the structure; I have always been more interested in the decoration!

S-- So it stands to reason that modern stories will overlap myths and fairy tales, sometimes consciously (purposefully paralleling them) or by coincidence.

ME: For me it is all connected.  It helps me to think of my characters as modern-day incarnations of, say, Inanna, delving into the underworld to retrieve the object of her yearning.  The plots are just convenient moorings to hang my decorations on.  

See more of S's views @ Presto Speaks!

She says it best: If you read my Presto Speaks! journal, you'll see I talk about the reasons for writing and my experiences with other writers online and off. The variety of motives and methods is amazingand I learn something from each one.    

http://prestoimp.blogspot.com/      

Possibility of Your Perfection

In The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell writes:  "Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world.  Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things.  Myths grab you somewhere down inside. ... Myths are infinite in their revelation. ...[In saving yourself] you save the world.  The influence of a vital person vitalizes,... The world without spirit is a wasteland.  ...The thing to do is bring life to [the world], and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself."  (pp. 183-184)* This is how I feel about my relationship to writing.  I have come to recognize it is my creative life that makes me feel alive.  It creates a spark that hopefully will spread to others, vitalizing their world.  This is what I want to do; this is what I really want to do.

*Campbell, Joseph.  The Power of Myth.  Eds. Bill Moyers and Betty Sue Flowers.  New York:  Anchor, 1991.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/campb.htm 

http://www.online.pacifica.edu/cgl/Campbell 

Yearning

It is passion that drives us, as well as each and every character in our fictions--the tension between what the characters want and what keeps the characters from having what they want.  Yearning.  Writing is about capturing that.  What did Hamlet yearn for?  The strength to avenge his father's murder.  What did MacBeth yearn for?  Power.  Sovereignty over his own life.  The respect of the woman he loves.  What does Pearl yearn for?  Dignity, respect, a voice.  What do you  yearn for?  

Passions

Writing means discovering your passions.  The Kennedys have always been one of my passions, their strength in the face of tragedy.  How to use this in my writing and still honor it?  Pearl, the narrator of Hurricanes would look to the Kennedys as not only a source of strength but also a template to place over her own struggles to give them shape.  The Kennedys rise to the level of myth in the American consciousness.  Pearl would begin her story by referring to her local newspaper, saying, "Recently, another one died in his prime, John-John in an airplane.  Not long before that, Bobby's boy.  While playing football at high speeds on snow skis."  The Kennedy story speaks to me, has always spoken to me, just as the story of Camelot has spoken to generations before.  I believe in the power of myth to inform and transform us.  The power to transcend pain, even death itself.

Give sustenance to the truth

I often exchange letters with friend of mine from the MFA program at BGSU back in 1989, and we  discuss what it means to be "a writer."  In my last letter to her, I sent along a copy of the Granta Confessional and suggested she read the essay "Envy." My friend said that after reading it she felt, "This is where I belong."  She tells me her own truths scare her.  She feels a dichotomy between "the person who confesses" (her inner, true self) and the outward life she is leading.  She is afraid no one will like the inner self.  I believe this is the threshold we all must cross and we must learn to value the inner, real self.  That is where our art comes from.  That is the part of ourselves we must sustain.

good and evil

There's a dark side to each and every soul.  We wish we were Obi-Wan Kenobi, and for the most part we are, but there's a little Darth Vader in all of us.  Thing is, this ain't no either-or proposition.  We're talking about dialectics, the good and the bad merging into us.  You can run but you can't hide.  My experience?  Face the darkness.  Stare it down.  Own it.  It's brother Nietzsche said, being human is a complicated gig.  So give that ol' dark night of the soul a hug.  Howl the eternal yes!  --Chris in the Morning Northern Exposure  

The tension between these two identities is the tension of becoming, narcissus coming into bloom.  This is the tension I want to use to create.