posted
I've been pondering this story for a couple of decades. I knew a lot of the characters, their situations, their direction and motivations. I knew the settings and the general plot. I knew the villain and what he wanted.
One thing I could never quite figure out, though, was why it needed to be told at all. Cool story bro, but what's it all about?
Then tonight, like a boot to the head, it hit me.
It's about me. It's about finding a home. 0_0
I feel so blind.
Has this ever happened to you? Did you find yourself working on something, and not knowing why, but knowing it felt right, then sudden realization made it so obvious you wonder how you missed it all this time?
Are there questions or tricks to reduce this lack of insight?
For me, I think just going through and saying what is desired, lost gained, risked and valued helped to shine a light on the solution. I think if I had asked, "What is this saying about me?", I might have come to this realization much sooner.
Thoughts and ideas? I don't like feeling blind.
Posts: 76 | Registered: Apr 2019
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posted
Epiphany! Huzzah! Epiphanies often strike out of the blue, sometimes they're due to Edison's perspiration: ninety-nine percent perspiration, one percent inspiration. Though forced epiphanies are like self-fulfilled prophesies, miss full realization.
Charles Frazier's notorious Thirteen Moons is curiously an apt comparison. The novel's true dramatic movement is about an orphaned boy's and persistent adult journey to find a sense of settled home people and place belonging. Will Cooper's impoverished parents sold him into labor servitude, and he doesn't realize his quest's true nature. Nor did Frazier fully realize the quest on the page.
A bidding war for the novel grossed a high nine-figure advance against royalties, and the novel fell far short of sales and appeal expectations. A button-loop bookend nonlinear timeline and a sequence of portentous dramatic events fail to develop enough given or inferable meaning what the novel is truly about -- except for similarly situated readers.
The novel's performance infamy netted Frazier an unspoken ban from further traditional publication.
The novel "mimes" portentous events, settings, personas, and overall, yet fails to reach most readers. Another label for the type is "And story": And something meaningless begins the story, and something meaningless happens in the middle, and something meaningless happens at the end, and all to no meaningful purpose.
I understood the novel's true import from the outset, yet frustrated that Frazier misses the full-realization mark.
How does a writer fully realize a story's true import? One method is through workshop and advance reader insights. More of a challenge is writer self-realization when first prewrites begin, when in progress, or from rewrites and revisions.
"Smart subconscious. Term used when a critic (or the author) reviews text in light of a new approach or theory and discovers, much to his or her surprise, that within the previous text are a whole series of small items or details which help express this approach or theory; the smart subconscious was planting them in hopes that they would eventually be discovered. Smart subconscious is a possible explanation for subtext. (CSFW: Paul Tumey)"
"Subtext. A secondary level of action or content in a scene. Not stated overtly — that is, not perceived by the characters — and sometimes not even consciously perceived by the author."
Freudian slips, too, for prose, are smart subconscious plants fraught with subtext. Smart subconscious plant challenges are, first, identify what the subconscious attempts; symbol hunts and plants, best avoided, dilute smart subconscious plants; and continuity of apt subtext, supertext, symbols, and action.
Prose is about the emotional influences circumstances place on lives. Yet emotion is an abstract, cannot be touched, uncommonly seen, after all, social codes foster rigidly controlled emotions, "don't make a scene," maybe uncommonly heard, too. An apt emotion symbol might be a tangible and concrete event, a setting thing, or a character, or all. A label for that is "objective correlative."
"Objective correlative: the tangible manifestation of an intangible, created and used by the author to help the reader grasp the intangible concept. Most literature is about emotions or ideals — things that you cannot see or touch. So the objective correlative becomes a focus, a tangible surrogate. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painting becomes the objective correlative of Dorian Gray’s soul — it shows the invisible rot. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s child is the objective correlative of her sinful passions.
"An important characteristic of objective correlatives is that they are usually vested with attributes which tilt the reader toward the emotion the author wants him to feel in relation to the intangible being staged. (T. S. Eliot) ['Hamlet and His Problems'; original coin: Arthur Schopenhauer, 'On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason', 1813: 'Matter is therefore only the objective correlative of the pure understanding'.]" (Ibid)
How to timely develop all the above? Maybe that puts the cart before the horse. How can a writer know beforehand what meaning making about personal experience is attempted? Thus, write ahead full steam and leave for later revisions interpretation and inference.
Or maybe the meaning making journey starts from a known personal experience want and problem yet lacks a vessel for the journey. Thus, maybe some planned writing and some intuitive (smart subconscious plants), and some of both.
Or maybe the meaning destination and the journey and the vessel are known and all that is left is to write and rewrite, and the raw draft writes itself. Mindful the dread writer's block doubts and confusions nonetheless want tamed. Also mindful, all except the essential story craft skills might not meet the challenge's occasions.
For me, in the blind and conscious of subconsciousness influences and a plan produce the more appealing writing. Mental composition and sketches and meditative analyses less often than desired, though more often than not, foster a basis from which to build on a plan. Foremost factors that shape the blind, subconscious, and plan are three essential craft aspects and two social function appeal criteria for all of the literary opus.
Craft: antagonal want-problem motivation forces in contention (complication), polar opposite stakes risked forces in contention (conflict), and tone's emotional-moral attitude about a core subject or topic.
Social functions: recreation and subtext moral message revelations targeted to human vice and folly.
With the above developed, especially tone and satire's revelations of human vice and folly, I usually have the framework skeleton of a strategy and writing plan. As yet somewhat underdeveloped story craft skills suited to the many facets and challenges of the subjects stymie my success. More practice writing to come, and so close to the wanted destination that, if it were a snake, I'd be bit.
posted
I've had lots of ideas founder on reefs like that. I'll have a good story with lots of interesting (to me) things in them, but then I can't do anything because I can't think of a good reason why this should be happening.
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posted
Blessed is the writer who knows what their story is about before they set down a single line. I never know until at least the second draft; usually requiring a complete story re-write. And, Robert, finish your story and then worry about why it should exist. It could be there for it’s own reasons; your own intuitive epiphany perhaps.
posted
I have a friend I can talk to. Sometimes it helps to talk/rant, and he's able to toss in useful suggestions too. But nothing as significant as that.
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posted
Okay so I'm not totally sure...are you speaking in like a technical, structural sense of like what is the focus or dramatic center of the story, or in a more conceptual sense of what it means to you/the writer personally, what its meaning/purpose/message is?
Cause the answers to the two are pretty different.
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posted
The latter, I suppose. I hope I would have noticed the former sooner. No one is specifically searching for a home, but in some way or another, they are all without a proper home, or were in some way displaced, or rejected or lost a home. The lead wants to obviously get back to her home, but that wasn't the main focus for the original plot, exactly. She's not Dorothy, per say, but the journey is homeward bound in a more abstract sense. Maybe I'm wrong. It could be a bit of both.
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posted
As an example, the world has two intelligent races, one is native, the other are colonists. The native race is fostering the colonists, but it's not their ideal world. This isn't a plot point, but a setting. I don't plan on having the lead find a perfect world for the colonists, or for the colonists to realize at the end that home is where you hang your hat. Their situation will never be ideal, and that's okay with me. Just like the native race will never have their world to themselves as it once was, and that's okay too. Still that situation is saying something about home, and fostering others. I think. Posts: 76 | Registered: Apr 2019
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I often don't know what the theme of a story is until after I finish it. But then, I'm a discovery writer. Then I can work to bring the theme out more in the revisions--if I want to.
posted
Or message? Or theme and message together. Aesop's Fables amounts to summary told stories with moral messages at their hearts, and each can be reduced to a proverb and theme.
Might "You can't go home again" or the Thomas Wolfe 1940 posthumous novel of the same title be an overall theme-message? Or a stepstone toward one? The proverb means a person who has been away a while or through a life-transformative event has substantially changed or "home" and home people have changed to a degree that nothing is ever the same again.
Life moves at the speed of light. Miss a moment, and the moment is forever gone.
Or "Home is where the heart is." Wherever you are, there you are. Make the most of it. Don't pine for home and spoil where you are. Baba Ram Dass, (Richard Alpert): Be Here Now, reflections of the godparent of psychedelia and Eastern mystic guru. Those proverbs, however, for fiction, occasion a physical, personal, or both and more journey back home with strong anticipations for home's permanence, only to realize, once there, home no longer is what it was. An intangible dramatic movement and tension entrainment sequence subtext that could attend any hometown scion leaves away, is a stranger comes to other towns, returns the prodigal, and home is not what it was story.
Or a colonial settlement's attempts to reshape a place into how they perceived home -- much occasion for drama.
My creative writing mentors advised that a theme is up to later readers and commentators to discover, and a writer best practice ought not strive for one. Too easily a theme bogs down the process, most at a start's inception, and might force inauthentic symbol plants into a narrative. I concur, though subtext is what I settled on for a more productive label and fount for theme's continuity and unity enhancements. By the way, the more emphatic anti-theme mentor's surname is also Weiland!?
At root, though, whatever overall organization and aesthetic unifier principles, labels, and facets a writer self-selects and self-imposes for this conundrum of the ages is what works for the given writer and, ideally, for the target audience.
posted
So yeah, I have experienced what you are describing-you right something then realize it has a deeper meaning that you weren't consciously aware of writing into it.
Not super often though. My stories often begin as expressions of/vehicles for some meaning or message (or sometimes a mood or atmosphere I wish to convey) or they begin with a scene or character or idea and I try, consciously, to find a theme/meaning/message for them-but even then, I sometimes run into one, in that process, that I didn't intend.
Something like this apparently happened with Ray Bradbury and his novel "Something Wicked This Way Comes." Something, I can't remember for sure what, a comment someone made to him I think, cause him to re-read certain parts and he realized he'd written a sort of lament or farewell, a paen to his father.
I don't think this phenomena has anything to do with a blindness that needs to be removed. I think it just has to do with the subconscious and also the fact that, even though our stories come from within us, even we often may not know everything about them until they are complete. I personally find it quite joyful to finish a story, read through it, and realize I've created something much more than I'd imagined.
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posted
Isaac Asimov told of hearing a lecturer talk about the meaning of Asimov's award-winning short story, "Nightfall," and of being amazed at what the lecturer claimed was in the story.
Asimov went up to the lecturer after and introduced himself and said that he had not put any of that into the story.
The lecturer responded by telling him that the author does not have a monopoly on the meaning in the story.
I submit that every time a story is read, a form of collaboration occurs between the writer and the reader so that a slightly different (for more complex stories it could be very different) version of the story is experienced each time. This is because each reader brings something different to each story, and the same reader may bring something different each time the story is reread.
An example of this was experienced by Michael Swanwick, who told of looking forward to his son being old enough to enjoy THE LORD OF THE RINGS as he had when he was young. He found, to his surprise, that while his son experienced the story as the wonderful adventure Swanwick remembered when they read it together for the first time, Swanwick had a very different experience. To him, the story had become, as he put it, "the saddest story in the world" because he saw things in the story that he had missed when he was younger.
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