Monthly Archives: March 2007

The Story Cocoon

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I’ve been within the membrane of a story since the movie ended yesterday evening.

Part of the longevity has to do with the type of movie (Amazing Grace), of course. But more even than that, I attribute the strength of the membrane to a post-story silence that I observed yesterday, maybe for the first time.

When telling stories– especially heavy, significant stories, and especially to an older audience– one recommendation is to take an entire five-minutes for silence after the story, before talking about it or starting a new one.

On our way to the car, and our first two minutes there, I effervesced my first impressions, and how the the woman’s role coalesced cleanly with three other sources (I may essay about later) that were on my mind recently.

This talk had made me turn off the radio (I refuse to compete with talk radio) so when we made a stop for Jay partway home, I waited in a quiet car.

There is a line in The Magician’s Nephew about the place you could almost feel the trees growing, and that was the curious sensation I felt while Jay was gone: a sense of growing and solidifying. Foundation stones, or roots of Story were growing both down and out, connecting something in my core to something in my story cocoon.

~ ~ ~

Do you know what I mean by a story cocoon, or a story membrane?

It’s not just the ability to get lost in a story, but the presence and weight of when you’re there. It’s the extra atmospheric pressure of another world, and the iridescent bubble that hasn’t quite popped, even when the story’s ended.

It’s the slowness you feel as you’re leaving a dark theater, or closing a book, while your mind works to order the myriad of sensations you’ve just received and reconcile them to your understanding of the world as it is. (Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn’t.)

And it’s that feeling of a story sticking with you, affecting you.

~ ~ ~

The idea about this first came when I was reading The Thirteenth Tale, and while it applies to books as much as to movies, I think we experience it with movies more.

I’m beginning to think that this is the strongest argument for Charlotte Mason‘s directive to read slowly. More slowly and in smaller sections than you can based simply on your ability or interest, in order to allow the content to infuse your thinking and, basically, last long enough to truly affect you.

~ ~ ~

The question, of course, remains as to how much you want a story to affect you. Good/effective writing or storytelling will create a stronger cocoon that’s harder to escape from, and this is why I always want to be so careful what I expose myself to. After all, innocence is not just for kids.

The Heaviness of Other Worlds

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Once when Melody was only a few months old, Jay and I reluctantly left off our first watching of Seabiscuit as soon as she fell asleep. In a moment of selfishness (or opportunism) the next morning, I finished it while Jay was at work.

I found the ending very moving, and felt full under the spell and weight of the story, even without having seen the whole thing at once.

I was agitated. Keyed up.

Not feeling the energy to do anything else, I took the second movie I’d begun the day before, and put it back to see if there was more.

Just as Jay had arrived home from work the night before, I was nearing the end of the new Oklahoma! and turned it off. The cast was in the midst of the Title finale. That song was the last in the 50s version of the movie I watched once with my Grandma. It had bored me to pieces then. (This version is *much* better, though kicked up to a stronger PG-13 in my estimation.)

This next morning I was curious to see if that really was the end. The move had never seemed done at that point, loose ends still dangling.

Well, it wasn’t done.

For the next 25 minutes or so I was dragged through a shiveree, a knife-fight and trial (with accompanying emotional angst) before the incongruously tidy finish.

That hour was one of the most intense and disturbing of my life. Seriously. I had buried myself in the most intense parts of two other worlds with out the diluting time between.

The atmospheric pressure was too heavy; the membrane doubled, too thick and confining. And I had no idea how to process.

I continued shaking my head like a dizzy cat most of the remainder of the day (a friend came for lunch, and this was nearly all I could talk about).

Maybe it was the bends— a theoretically preventable malady that takes thought or planning to avoid.

I know I’ve been very careful not to do that to myself again.

It All Depends on Your Definition

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The professor paced through his lecture. “Every woman is a man-hunter,” dropped from his lips as an unquestioned fact.

The year was 1950, and my grandmother was working her way through college, still a spinster at age thirty-one.

In an undertone meant to be heard, Grandma took the authority to correct the teacher’s misrepresentation.

“I’ve never met a man I couldn’t live without.”

Two weeks later, with the same quiet voice, she invited the class to her wedding.

Mocking her, the professor inquired, with polite words, whether she’d met someone new.

“No,” she said. “But I used to think I could live without him.”

Lyric

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Though your life may seem to sound a dark and minor key,
It will someday shift itself to major.
And the lyric of your life will rhyme with nothing less than joy…

From a Michael Card song

I love musical metaphors. I don’t often see them.

This is from Poiema, a CD with several *good* songs, that I’ve had since High School. Just was thinking of that last line today.

Lines about Joy always catch my mind.

Didn’t I Already Say That?

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The problem I’ve found with saying exactly what I mean, is that once I’ve said it, there’s nothing else to say. If it’s not understood or taken seriously, I am left with two unattractive options: remain not-understood, or say something less exact than I’ve already framed.

The Stolen Child– a Tuesday Tale

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The sídhe (pronounced, “shee”) are a powerful and nearly human-looking fairy folk (often distinguished from the flying, cute and/or friendly varieties by spelling it faerie). They are primarily distinguished by their unusually long, slender fingers and their sharply pointed ears.

~ ~ ~

Two women of the sídhe were walking a road that ran along the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, when they came upon a human baby, crying in the middle of the path.

Looking all about them and seeing no one, the fairies quickly wrapped it up in the shawl of one, and, taking the child with them, they hurried along faster than they had come.

At the same time, a pair of fishermen were heading home for the day, and one spotted something white on the side of the nearly sheer cliff.

His companion tried to pretend he thought it was a bird, but the first man insisted on navigating the rocks and climbing up. He rightly suspected it was some traveler who had become lost in the mist and tumbled over the edge.

It was a young woman, hurt but alive, and they brought her home, handing her off to the fisherwives to be tended.

When the girl came to her senses she immediately began to cry for her baby, and the men were sent back out to look for him. But neither up nor down the road, nor in any of the nearest villages could they hear any news of a found bairn.

When the young woman regained her strength she said goodbye to the kind fisherfolk, promising to return when she had found her child.

After much fruitless wandering, the young mother happened upon a gypsy camp where an old grandmother divined in the fire that the baby was taken by the sídhe, and advised the girl to give up her quest.

When she refused, the gypsy mother gave her some advice.

“The sídhe, for all their magical arts, have no power to create anything for themselves.

“Whatever they want they must either buy or steal. If you can offer something rich, rare, and beyond compare, that may buy your child back from the sídhe.”

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Novel to-do list and update

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I find that putting things on paper helps me focus my efforts. Chrisd, whom I met during NaNo has been nudging me to think more about my novel, and we’ve been exchanging plot points and revealing spoilers in an effort to create a pair of coherent narratives.

My initial plan for working with my NaNo novel, and, come to that, my original idea for the novel have all evolved to my current place which actually involves my first edit, even before the story is completely written down.

Three months ago I would have called this unwise, but today, as I told Chris, it seems merely practical. I’ve never worked with a 95-page (single-spaced!) manuscript before, and since I’ve already cut seven pages (written early in the month before my vision had evolved very far), I decided to learn now what is worth keeping.

The image I presented to Chris was that of wanting to unpack before I started buying things for my new house.

In this way I won’t waste time writing transitions or making elements fit that are no longer important.

Did I mention here my husband read the manuscript last weekend?

He gave me some good things to think about, like the need to add some description to slow things down a little.

I was hauling all through November and it reads that way, so now I need to marble my stake a little.

Though, to pull that meat analogy just a bit further, I’m not sure how much I will add. I’ve always preferred moose to beef– there seems to be less waste. Moose is much more accessible too. You just go to the freezer and pull as much as you want– zero mulling over whether one can afford good cuts of meat.

Okay, enough with the Alaskan metaphors.

My other organizing project is to re-frame an outline with my new vision of conflict etc. I think this will help with the editing project and staying focussed on where I want to go.

*This concludes my self-serving announcement. I now retun you to the regularly scheduled program of whatever else I feel like writing.*

Practice as Service

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Writing to this blog does take time that could be spent on other, theoretically, productive things, and I have occasionally returned to the question of whether maintaining this site, basically for my own entertainment, it worth that time.

With all my commitments and desires and interests, everything I do continually comes back under scrutiny.

I look at things over and over again, determining why they’re in my life, and whether they are performing their intended function (it’s really easy to throw away magazines in this mood).

Several times this week I’ve used the analogy of a musician practicing scales, when I try to explain my writing, or why I write.

In themselves scales are not particularly beautiful music, and doing them isn’t even for anyone but the musician. But it is those daily exercises that provide the necessary familiarity with the instrument that enables him/her to be an accomplished musician.

My writing may, as I say, be solely for my own entertainment, but everything I do is honing my craft, and preparing me for my next piece.

I no longer question if this writing has value, because I am convinced it does.

Doubtless it was hours and days of David’s “diddly-dorking around” with a sling and stones that prepared him first for the lion and the bear, and ultimately for Goliath.

Practice is a form of faithful service.

It assumes that there is something worth preparing for (a word in season, for example), and rises to that call.

I’ve been writing stories for a long time…

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Here are a few tags I thought might sound interesting. I’ve been cruising through old files tonight (yes, avoiding my current novel– telling myself I’m too distracted/tired to work on it just now…)

Oh, help! Marika thought desperately. Will no one rescue me?

She huddled absurdly under her bed in the darkness, she, nearly 13, and almost too big to fit. She’d played at this game before. The memory seemed obscene now.

She’d played at losing her parents and being alone in the house when robbers came– just for the safely contained thrill of fear.

And now it was coming true. She stuffed the fabric of her skirt into her mouth to muffle the choking sobs. She was not a coward, but this was too much for her.

The snuffling sounds of dogs came into the large bedchamber, and Marika wished she could faint, certain she’d be quieter if unconscious.

~ ~ ~

Then this, like my current work, is from a fairytale:

Two young men, born on the same day into very different families and circumstances, both expect to marry the same young woman.

It just so happens the girl they both want is under a curse from a slighted fairy (aren’t all the good ones?), and because of that something bad will happen if she ever is touched by the light of day. She just doesn’t know what.

Only because she doesn’t have the advantage of having read the title of the story, of course. It’s from The Orange Fairy Book, if I remember correctly, and is called The White Doe.

~ ~ ~ Continue reading »

A Plea to Leave the Stories Alone

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Someone gave my kids a 3-pack of cheap paperback picture books for Christmas last year.

I have nothing against paperback books in general, and I’m not trying to say this person was cheap. I mean the quality of the books and the content itself was cheap.

Maybe the best way to say it is that these are the types of children’s books that are easy to write (ouch.) or, maybe worse, the type of book that’s only worth reading (or listening to) when very young.

I like what C.S. Lewis says in a number of different ways, and that, essentially, is that a children’s book only worth reading as a child is not really worth reading at all.

One of these books was a softened version of Hansel and Gretel. There were a number of changes made to make it more child-friendly, and what good I felt the original story could communicate was removed altogether.

The wicked step-mother and the hunger were entirely removed. The children were not abandoned by an endlessly (emotionally) battered father, but were simply lost. Hansel was not resourceful and protective of himself and his sister, merely curious or careless, letting the crumbs fall– and foolish too, imagining they would be there in the morning. (The original, you remember, had him using stones at first.)

When we got to the the witch was where my husband began to object. He has different ideas than me (our kids get a double wammy) of what wrecks a children’s story– traditional or otherwise.

Gretel knew the old woman was a witch because she made the children work ever so hard, carrying water and firewood. Whenever Jay was compelled to read the story (because we kept forgetting to make it disappear) he changed the wording to say the children were very good to help such an old woman with her heavy chores.

In the end, again, it isn’t the children’s cleverness or resourcefulness that “saves” them, but luck and the witch’s own clumsiness. And they find treasure somewhere as the house burns down around them and they bring it out with them. (Jay’s retelling always had the father scolding the children for not leaving the burning building at once).

I don’t even remember the original story having treasure at the end.

~ ~ ~

I like retellings, Just not when they change the essence of the story.

I like “age appropriate” versions of traditional tales. My 4-year-old doesn’t need to know yet that Snow White’s stepmother, the queen, wanted to eat her liver and lungs. It is enough that she wanted her dead.

My 2-year-old doesn’t need to know that a woman is being accused of eating her own children. That will not add anything to the story for her.

The stories were originally entertainment for adults, and it is only natural that some things should be softened or omitted when they are used as entertainment for children. But that doesn’t mean they should be changed to be “safe” by “modern” standards.

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