The Weirding of the Writing Process: Channeling Society's Metanarratives (Part 2)

I ended my post yesterday by stating that, as creative writers, we don’t come up with our own ideas. I suggested that we channel them. Today I’d like to follow that train of thought to some practical conclusions.

I won’t go over the same territory I went over in my previous post. Those who are interested can refer to part 1, posted yesterday.

There have been a slew of narrative theorists and thinkers who have offered a version of this argument: there is no such thing as a new story. A good example of someone who made a version of this argument would be the Russian folklorist, Vladimir Propp (1895-1970).

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970)

I won’t go into his ideas in too much detail. The best way to give you an idea of what he believes is to briefly characterize his most influential work. Having read lots and lots of Russian folktales, organized them, cataloged them, he reduced them all—in a book titled Morphology of the Folktale (1928)—into 31 narrative functions. Here’s his argument in a nutshell: every folktale he studies, in spite of their apparent variety and color, are, on a primal level, re-tellings of the same story; for Propp, they are all variations of the same narrative structure.

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)

Another example: anyone who has read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) will recognize some similarity with Propp. Campbell, who studied world mythologies, suggested that all the world’s mythological stories can be reduced to one story, a story he calls “the hero cycle.” I won’t go into Campbell’s work here because his work are much more widely known.

Why do I cite these authors in talking about that first stage of writing, invention? “Coming up” with ideas?

If you accept the more general idea that these thinkers point to, that stories are there and not created, I think it really alters the way you proceed as a creative writer.

Invention becomes less the acrobatic and awkward task of surveying the field of stories, the canon—if you will--and innovating with novelty in mind. Innovation, in the conceptual framework I’m outlining here, becomes a problem, a crisis we are unfit to master.

The task is to not innovate. The task is to look beyond the ephemeral stories of our modern moment to see the eternal ones that linger in the shadows, beneath the surface, out there.

Couldn't get it all in today. Stay tuned for part three tomorrow.

Exercise: (Step 1) Think of a story that you love. That moved you. That captures your imagination (for me this would be, say, Star Wars). Summarize it in 50 words. No more. No less. Next, look at your 50 word summary and reduce that to one sentence. Make this sentence no more than 20 words. The trick to this is dropping incidental details like characters and circumstances and foregrounding important narrative functions.