The accepted convention of what makes a good story is what Joseph Campbell outlined and called The Hero’s Journey. Granted, Campbell argued that this story line, having been mined from the history of world myth and theology, is something hard wired into the human psyche. Like how turtles born on the shore know to run toward the sea lest they be eaten. It’s inherent and imprinted and it points to something bigger that can’t be articulated. By employing it, people have created stories that are “transparent to the transcendent.” Many such stories have been canonized, others adopted as whole religions.
Then there are those of us who want to challenge and push the accepted convention of what makes a good story, if only because we live in a world teeming with myriad variations on that theme. I once went to a writing workshop where the instructor asserted that we must adhere to the formula or our stories would never see light. Rather, they would collect dust under our beds forever and we would die miserable. He had dissected the formula to pinpoint exactly what kind of event should happen on exactly what page of the book, what characters must be included, etc. He was passionate and evangelical. He was, like so many, a follower.
People are afraid to attempt the unprecedented.
Yes, it is true that if you apply that formula well, you will have something compelling to the majority of audiences. But there are other important stories to tell and this formula is not the way to tell them. In fact, most stories worth telling are much more complex and difficult to articulate than what such a formula requires.
For example, the story that I am currently attempting to write into a novel has multiple hero’s journeys happening continuously in tiny, subtle, sometimes momentary bursts in every character, every scene, throughout the story. I’m half convinced that it is impossible to tell at all.
I recently read a debut novel that was well critiqued by the literati and terribly reviewed by the general readership on Amazon. The novel, The Orchardist, is in many ways what my friend Peter likes to call “good MFA writing,” in that it is scrubbed and measured and proper and trendy with its use of punctuation. For that reason, I didn’t like it at first. Or maybe, I didn’t want to like it but I did anyway so had to keep reading. With a very slow and meandering plot reminiscent of other, familiar apple orchard settings I’ve read, the well drawn characters sucked me into their world. I also noticed that the story did not seem to be following the formula. Sometimes, it snapped back to the formula like metal to a magnet. But then it pulled off on its own again with force that was not deliberate, but blissfully accidental. Or, deliberate, but not on the part of the writer. It had a life and an intelligence of its own. It knew where it had to go and it was not burdened with a brain imprinted with a formula.
This kind of layered, meta, emotionally complex and fragile skeletal structure will not adhere to the formula. It’s like trying to make a single, clean octagon out of a wall-sized spider web embedded with cocooned prey.
That the unique beauty of a story like this is lost on the masses is a real tragedy.
It reminds me of today’s societal idea of objective or conventional beauty: young, symmetrical, thin, white.
On an individual scale, this is never as impressive as it is made out to be on a magazine cover or a big screen. Rather, it’s trite and characterless. How much more interesting is a person whose face shows worlds, lifetimes of experience? Isn’t that real beauty?
There is yet hope.
There is a small minority of people with the ability to appreciate this beauty, and not just other writers. Not just the women and men who have contributed to evolving the form of the novel beyond the accepted blueprint. Not just the people who are truly egalitarian about appearances (there are very few of these, I’ve only ever met one). But people with open and intelligent minds. Not the kind of intelligence that comes from education, but the kind that comes from thinking for oneself. It’s easy to think what we’re told to think. That is what the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes is about and why it’s so famous. But to rethink what we’re told and see that the man is actually naked? In the story, only a child is able to do that.
Please, let’s rally our small minority and grow it. Please, let’s see more like children see.
Recent Comments