Story Lab Week Twelve

For this week's story lab, I spent some time browsing through Jon Winokur's "Advice to Writers" website, looking for some of the best advice to share here. I decided to select my pieces of advice from the "Daily Quotes" section of the website, which are from a multitude of different people and cover a broad range of topics. So, here is a list of the five best pieces of advice I found, according to me:

1. "There's No Ideal Literary Style" (advice from Iris Murdoch) - This advice is good because it reminds us that even though, as Murdoch says, there is "good and bad writing," there is no perfect style that we must conform to. Writing is an art form and is therefore highly individualized, and the style we choose should be one which complements the content well.
   
2. "We Must Not Be Defeated" (advice from Maya Angelou) - Maya Angelou reminds us that we will certainly face many defeats, and that perhaps we should face many defeats, because they will help us to grow and improve. But, we must not allow ourselves to be defeated. Even when we fail, the most important thing is to get ourselves back up again and keep going.
   
3. "The Characters Arrive First" (advice from William Gibson) - According to Gibson, when he writes, it is the characters who first show up in his imagination and make themselves known, and then he must figure out where they are, what they are doing, etc. This, for me, lines up well with something my Fiction Writing professor really drove home in her class last year: what we strive for as literary authors is to create work that is driven by the characters - the people, who we can relate to and feel through and live through - rather than the plot. For me, interesting, fully formed, and multi-faceted characters are integral to a good read, so I like the idea of starting with them and then just trying to figure out everything else in relation to them.
   
4. "Keep Dialogue in Character" (advice from Paddy Chayefsky) - This is a great piece of advice, in my opinion, because even though it seems so obvious, I feel like I see a lot of people who struggle with this one, and I know dialogue isn't my own strong suit, either. Sometimes when we write, I think there's a tendency to think, "I know I need to include all of this information in their speech," and then forget to make sure we get that information across in a way that reflects the character well. It's important to remember to keep you characters in character, especially when they're speaking!
   
5. "Writing Is Not A Serious Business" (advice from Ray Bradbury) - I'm a big Bradbury fan, so I of course gravitated to his quote. He talks about how writing should be fun, a celebration, enjoyable, rather than serious or life-sucking. This particularly meaningful considering the seriousness of the content he is known for!

Image of a writer from pixabay

Week Six Storybook Lab

For this week's storybook lab, I am doing some research for my storybook project, which, as you probably know from my previous posts, is going to be over the lais of Marie de France! The following are some sources and brief notes on what is known about Marie de France herself, some of which I will likely include in author's notes in the storybook project itself, and some of which may influence my retellings as well.

• Firstly, a definition of a "lai" (or "lay/leich" depending on your language preference): Essentially, a lai is a poetic/musical form that was popular in the Medieval period, especially in France and Germany. It is a rhymed poem; certain rhyme schemes were common but overall the structure was in some ways less rigid (or, at least it seems, less rigidly adhered to) than many other poetic forms we might study today, such as a sonnet or a limerick. Marie de France's lais did not utilize the traditional musical setting, and differed in that they told stories, much like fables. (I gleaned this information here)
• Marie de France, from Britannica: She was the earliest known female French poet, which is pretty cool. Not much is known about her, however, though her title "de France" indicates that she was likely a Frenchwoman residing in England.
• Marie de France, from encyclopedia.com: She is believed to have written between the years 1160 and 1210. Her reasons for coming to England remain a mystery, but could have been for marriage or her career (she was extremely well-connected in England's literary world!). She was quite well-educated, and well-respected in the royal courts of England. She was also extremely well-known for her fables, but it was her lais that earned her the respect of her contemporaries, and which are considered her greatest masterpiece. (A side note from my own personal knowledge from what I've learned in my classes: The lais deal with something called "courtly love" (amour courtois, in French!), which was a popular philosophy in her time. Courtly love had several rules, but perhaps the most important - and, I think, the one which most influenced her lais - was that being married was not considered an acceptable reason to forsake true love if it came along. I believe there has been some contention as to whether Marie upholds this idea, but the subject of infidelity is unquestionably one which she hoped to explore in her writing, as ten of her twelve lais include it.)
• Marie de France, from New World Encyclopedia: This source states that she is believed to have been born in Normandy, France, and to have moved to England after her childhood. Additionally, it mentions that some have proposed that Marie may have been the illegitimate half-sister of King Henry II, which is a rumor I have seen mentioned elsewhere as well, and which would seemingly fit well with some other aspects of my research: her move to England and her astoundingly good connections there, her presence in the royal court, and her interest in infidelity as a subject matter. That said, there is not, to my knowledge, any evidence to support this, and so I will file it under numerous other unsupported rumors I have come across as to her life (I have also heard that others believe she was a nun or abbess! Quite the difference, no?). There are only five known manuscripts existing that include her lais, and only one of them includes all twelve. Her lais range from 118-1184 lines long, and they are told in octosyllabic rhyming couplets. She also wrote 103 fables. This source includes a list of famous Marie's from that time who could have possibly been her, including the king's half-sister and multiple abbesses, but, of course, no one knows for sure. So we simply call her Marie de France, after a line she wrote: "Marie ai nun, si sui de France," which translates from Old French to mean, "My name is Marie, I am from France."
  
  
  

Painting of the main characters in Marie de France's lai, "Chevrefoil"(which translates to "honeysuckle") by Edmund Blair Leighton

Week Four Story Laboratory

For this week's Story Lab, I decided to explore the website "Writers Write." Immediately, the post that jumped out at me was "20 Myths to Use as Writing Prompts" because, obviously, it fits really well with this class!

The article begins by defining what a writing prompt is (a word/phrase/idea/etc. designed to spark a writer's creativity and direct their writing, especially for writing exercises) and what a myth is (a traditional story including superbeings/ancestors/heroes, often to explain some kind of natural phenomenon). It goes on to list twenty myths that could serve as interesting writing prompts.

When I started reading this article, I expected it to list specific, pre-existing myths, such as the stories of the Greeks, or any of the things we've been reading this semester. Instead, it gives specific circumstances and prompts the writer to create a myth around them. For example, "Write a myth to explain why the sky is blue." Although this wasn't what I expected, it was still interesting to me, so I'll include a couple of my favorites here:
"Write a myth to explain why leaves change color."
"Write a myth to explain how bees got their stings."
"Write a myth to explain why birds fly and fish swim."

Despite not being what I thought the article would be, I still feel as though these could be interesting writing prompts for a story, and I may take them into account for a later story for this class!

Another article I explored was "5 Instances When You Need to Tell." This one caught my attention because, in every writing course I've taken -- and I'm an English Writing minor, so I've taken several -- the concept of showing versus telling in storytelling has been a permeating subject. Generally, of course, it is considered better to show and not tell, which means that you should let your reader see what's happening through action/dialogue/scene/etc., rather than just describing everything to them.

The five instances it lists are when you need to gloss over unnecessary conversations/connect scenes, when you need to report events/gloss over unnecessary characters, when you need to show time passing, when you want to focus on emotion but can't actually show it at that time, and when you want to add backstory. Of course, none of these are hard and fast rules, as, for example, sometimes you might want to show backstory by way of flashbacks, or something along those lines. But essentially the idea is that sometimes, if you try to show every tiny conversation and every passing character, the reader will get kind of bogged down with all that detail and it will distract from the actual story, so telling/summarizing can help you move past some of the extraneous stuff without it feeling disjointed or unclear.

Fountain Pen Writing Photo by Pixabay