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 Twelve Reading Notes Part A - Celtic Tales

Source Story: Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, with illustrations by John D. Batten (1892). Web Source.

• "Connla and the Fairy Maiden"
• A prince, named Connla, sees a fairy maiden who invites him to come and live with her in a land without sin or death. He is the only one who can see her, but his father hears her voice and gets his Druid to cast a spell and get rid of her. Before she disappear, she throws an apple to Connla, who eats only that for a month because it replenishes when he eats it. He falls in love with her during this time, but when she reappears his father again tries to call for his Druid to dispatch her. But before the Druid comes, Connla runs away with her on a glass canoe off to sea.
• "The Field of Boliauns"
• A man named Tom Fitzpatrick meets a leprechaun working on a holiday. He follows the leprechaun for awhile, and then begins to threaten the leprechaun, wanting to know where he's hidden his gold. He grabs the leprechaun, spilling his beer, and makes the leprechaun take him to the hiding place, which is under a boliaun in a field full of boliauns. He doesn't have a shovel with him, so he ties his red garter to the boliaun and makes the leprechaun swear not to move it, then goes home to get his shovel. When he returns, the leprechaun is gone and so is the garter, so he never gets his gold.
• "The Horned Women"
• A rich woman's house is taken over by weaving witches with horns on their heads. They tell her to make them a cake while they weave, so she goes outside to get some water. The Spirit of the Well tells her how to get rid of the witches, and once they leave, how to perform a series of rituals to keep them from coming back. She follows the instructions, and when the witches return, they cannot get back into her house, so they leave.
• "The Shepherd of Myddvai"
• A shepherd sees three beautiful maidens come out of a lake, and through trial and error and a lot of bread, he convinces one of them to marry him. She tells him she will be his wife, but if he strikes her three times without cause she will leave him. Twice he taps her on the shoulder and she counts it, and finally, when she bursts out laughing at a funeral, he grabs her shoulder roughly, so she leaves him and takes all the animals she brought with her back to the lake. She returns one final time later to give her sons gifts when they become men.
• "The Sprightly Tailor"
• A laird named Macdonald tells a sprightly tailor that he'll pay him handsomely if the tailor will sew him some trews at night in a haunted church. The tailor agrees and goes to sew them that night. A monster starts to rise out of the ground, and keeps asking the tailor if he sees the monster's great head/neck/arms/etc. The tailor just responds "I see that, but I'll sew this!" each time, and finishes the trews just as the monster fully emerges. The monster chases him, but the tailor is nimble and escapes, then receives a rich reward from the laird.
• "Munachar and Manachar"
• Munachar and Manachar went to gather raspberries, but Manachar eats all the raspberries that Munachar picks, so Munachar decides to hang him. He goes looking for a rod, who says he must first find an axe, who says he must first find a flag, and so on until he gets to a miller who tells him to bring a sieve filled with water. A crow cries "daub, daub," so Munachar daubs clay in the sieve so the water doesn't run out. After going through all the lengthy process to get the supplies to hang Manachar, he returns to find that Manachar has burst from eating all the raspberries, and is already dead.
• "Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree"
• An evil queen is mad because a fish says her daughter is prettier than her, so she tries to kill her daughter. She makes several attempts to murder the daughter, and is successful one time, but each time she thinks the daughter is dead, she is either mistaken, or the daughter comes back to life. So when she returns to the fish, expecting to be considered the prettiest, the fish always tells her that her daughter is prettier. In the end, the daughter's sister-wife helps trick the queen into killing herself. The daughter and her sister-wife live happily ever after with their shared husband, who is a rich prince.

Image of the fish who kept calling the queen ugly, probably.
(Image of a trout from Flickr)