Week 6: Storylab Advice to Writers

 

Writermag.com

Advice to Writers

You've Got to Work It Over March 03, 2021

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I like this advice the best. You have to put in the work and effort to achieve anything. You can't just manifest your book into existence. I think there's a lot of advice regarding writing, and the most basic part is just doing it. Just sitting down and writing something is better than writing nothing at all. 

A Novel Takes Over a Writer's Life February 28, 2021

I just write what I want to write. Quiet is very beautiful to me, the medium of everything that matters. I'm grateful for the patience of my readers, certainly. But the fact is that a novel takes over a writer's life for literal years. What I write, day by day and word by word, is much of my felt life. It would be a terrible capitulation to give up my explorations of quiet because of anxiety about the receptiveness of readers. I have found that readers are very much to be trusted.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

 

 I also quite like this advice. I think it's good to enjoy the "quiet" of your work, and not be consumed with every minuscule detail. Sometimes it's good to just let the writing flow instead of building an entire plan for every sentence. Those kinds of works tend to be tedious (in my opinion).

 

Writers Are Forever Remembering February 16, 2021

They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places...but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering.... All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.

TONI MORRISON

 

 

 

Even her advice is poetic. 

 

I really adore Toni Morrison. This advice is beautifully written (like everything Morrison writes). I think remembering is what really connects an author to their writing, and makes their pieces truly a part of who they are. 

Storylab: Crash Course

 

Mythology and junk

What is Myth?

This video was so informative. I had never really thought about what "myth" was — I just kind of assumed I knew, but I think the videos explanation of "myth" really puts into perspective the differences between story telling types. 

"Myth comes from the Greeks word "mythos" — which means "word" or, more significantly, "story""

This entire video summed up is myths are stories that have staying power. They aren't necessarily true or untrue, they simply have survived for many centuries. They mostly involve stories of Gods and Goddesses — and this includes Hero tales.

Theories of Myth 

The idea that Zeus was once a king who did such fantastic things that he was eventually turned into a God is so cool. I'm not sure that I believe it, but it's fun to think about! 

The theories presented by ancient philosophers are fascinating. I'm not much into philosophy, so I had never looked into their teachings. Their thinking that myths are seems like an early form of atheism. I'm not sure though, don't quote me on that. 

On the flip-side, Christian philosophers thought it was true, but associated the myths as demons creating the worship of pagan gods. 

PROTO-INDO EUROPEAN — this entire bit makes me think of the story of the Tower of Babel. The world only had one language. Collectively, humans decided to build a tower large enough to reach heaven which angered God. He scattered humanity around the world and created different languages.

The Hero's Journey

I love learning about story structure, and this video was a great way to lay out the template of the hero's journey. 

The hero's journey is made up of tiers that represent the adventure. The call to adventure, the challenges faced, transformation, atonement, return. There's more stuff sprinkled in between, but that's the gist. 

I'm not sure this template could be applied to every story ever, but there's many I can think of that fit it. So cool to think about!