Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

Good, Evil, and Beyond in Fiction

When contrary facts collide with opinions, opinions should change, but often resist. I experienced that while reading this post by author Catherine Nichols about the good guy/bad guy myth.

My Former View

Prior to reading that post, I’d thought of ancient stories and folk tales as excessively moral. Peopled with characters wholly good or bad, the old yarns instructed readers in proper moral behavior. (And the moral of the story is…) Good guy wins because he’s good—bad guy loses because he’s bad.

I thought of these stories as immature, unsophisticated. We tell children simple stories of clearly-defined good and evil to help them make sense of a complex world, and to point them in a morally right direction.

In my understanding, Shakespeare changed that. He gave the world more complex characters, neither wholly good nor bad, deeper and more realistic. Sigmund Freud carried the movement further. After Freud, bad guys couldn’t practice evil for its own sake. They needed origin stories, psychological explanations for turning to the dark side, thus making them not wholly bad.

That led to our modern era, where stories tend toward the amoral, outside the moral/immoral spectrum. That’s what I thought, and even blogged about before.

A View Overturned

Ms. Nichols made the opposite case, and her post jarred my neuron signals from their accustomed paths. The ancient tales, she said, didn’t focus on morality or values much. Characters acted in accordance with their personality quirks, not in obedience to some moral code.

Citing examples such as the Iliad, Norse mythology, and familiar fairy tales, she asserted that old stories made no attempt to pit good against evil, or even teach moral lessons.

Modern stories, by contrast (particularly those depicted on screen), emphasize the white hat/black hat distinction and assign moral virtues to the characters, giving them codes of conduct to live by.

Nichols said modern re-telling of old stories insert morality where it hadn’t existed in the original. She cited the examples of Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Thor, where later writers assigned moral codes to characters who hadn’t possessed them in the original versions.

Toward a New Understanding

Which version is true? Did ancient authors write stories laden with morality, intended to instruct, while we modern sophisticates have transcended that? Or did past writers spin yarns without regard for moral teachings while today, we feel the need to issue good or evil badges to our characters? Is one type of story more evolved, more worldly, than the other? Or perhaps both views oversimplify the issue, cherry-picking examples to fit a theory?

Let’s start by assuming storytellers existed in every era of humanity, all the way back to the origins of language. With the advent of writing, storytellers documented their tales.

We may also assume people through the ages have differed in practices, cultures, customs, and values. Perhaps these differences influenced each community’s preferences for story types. Only those tales that resonated with a group got passed down. As storytellers and writers experimented, they discovered what worked for their audiences.

If a writer caught a cultural turning point, a readiness for something fresh and different, that writer met the new need. Other writers rode that wave, too.

I’m suggesting that moral and amoral stories have existed in all times and places. They either catch on or not depending on the prevailing preferences of their current, local marketplace.

Whether stories endure beyond the time and culture of their writing does not depend on the degree of morality in them. Rather, classics live on because they say something important about the universal aspects of human nature.

So What?

Meanwhile, at your own keyboard, you’re wondering how this esoteric discussion affects you. Where’s the actionable advice?

Okay, here it is. You may find it interesting to ponder the history of storytelling and debate the ebb and flow of moral and amoral stories. Or you may not. Just write the story within you, and I’ll write the story within—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 18, 2024Permalink

Taking Vonnegut’s Story Shape Theory Further

Is it possible to depict all story plots in graphical form? If you could, would you find some graph shapes more common than others? The late author Kurt Vonnegut thought so.

In 2004, he gave a lecture describing his system and that talk is so good, you ought to watch the video, at least the part starting at minute 38. He’s entertaining. Someone has animated Vonnegut’s graphs at this delightful website.

His lecture covers several basic story types illustrating a protagonist’s experiences of good or ill fortune as ups and downs on the graph. If the author writes well, the reader will feel uplifted during the ‘good fortune’ periods and sad during the ‘ill fortune’ portions.

The main story types Vonnegut presents in his lecture are ‘Man in a Hole,’ ‘Boy Meets Girl,’ ‘Cinderella,’ and ‘Metamorphosis.’ Watch the video to hear his descriptions of each one.

Vonnegut comments that we humans often struggle to recognize and appreciate times of good fortune in our own lives. Therefore, I think, we often experience, and can relate to, the uncertainty of Hamlet.

Then Vonnegut’s system breaks down. He tries to illustrate Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and ends up drawing a boring, straight line. Since Hamlet doesn’t know if the ghost he’s seeing is real, or significant, he spends much of the play in a state of uncertainty, not knowing if he’s experiencing good fortune or ill fortune.

Still, it is possible to depict uncertainty on a graph. Scientists use error bands, often shown as shaded areas.

My graph is one possible way to depict the uncertainty faced by Hamlet. In general, readers don’t like uncertain characters or vagueness about their state of mind. If a character doesn’t know if her life is good or bad at a given moment, the reader could dismiss her as being stupid.

With a skilled writer, like Shakespeare, however, we understand Hamlet’s confusion and sympathize with him. We don’t think he’s dimwitted or insane, despite his attempts to feign madness.

You can depict uncertainty on a Vonnegut-style story graph. In fact, I think the entire mystery genre involves uncertainty to some extent. For much of these stories, the detective can’t tell if a given clue gets her closer to solving the case or not. The detective strives to diminish uncertainty until the end.

I’ll leave you with one more observation about Vonnegut’s graphs. I don’t believe the ones he covered in his lecture constitute the only possible graphs, and I think he would have agreed. Story graphs may take any shape, but some (the ones he showed) work better with readers than others.

In the end, it’s the writing that matters. It’s how you convey the emotional highs and lows to the reader that counts. If you tell a good story, you can make almost any graph shape work.

This concludes your combined Math and Language Arts classes for the day, thanks to your favorite professor—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 5, 2023Permalink

Metaphor, Your Trained Tiger

Ah, the metaphor. The perfect asset for rendering the abstract concrete, for elevating prose above mere banal description, for igniting the fire of words.

tiger photo by Charles J. Sharp

I’ve written about metaphors before, but only to distinguish them from their showy, weaker fellow creatures, similes. The poor, attention-starved simile. It’s like a male peacock, brandishing ‘like’ or ‘as’ to signal the reader, to flash its tail feathers, saying, “Look at me! I’m making a comparison!”

A metaphor shows no signal, gives no sign. It’s unannounced, sneaky, and subtle. A trained tiger lurking within a jungle of words. Hidden power, and beauty.

I attended a webinar this week titled “The Magic of Metaphor,” by author Marin Sardy, and that inspired this post. She refreshed my knowledge of this trained predator, one I’ve too often left languishing in its cage. Thanks to her, I’ve fed the beast, stroked its fur, let it get some exercise, and vowed to present it more often.

All metaphors hinge on an absurdity. A thing is not a thing, says the metaphor, it is some other thing. It’s not like something else. It is something quite different. X is Y. Shakespeare asserts the whole world is a stage. They’re the same thing, equal.

Absurd. The whole world is not a stage. You know that. Shakespeare knew you’d know that. But your mind, that highly evolved pattern recognition engine, saw the link and made the connection. The world resembles a stage in some respects—got it.

Ms. Sardy discussed the various types of metaphor, the different tricks your trained tiger can perform. Simple, Compound, Extended, Implied, and Conceptual. You can look those up elsewhere. Each takes the basic ‘X is Y’ formulation and twists it a different way.

Metaphors help readers understand and appreciate your story. The ‘X’ is something in your story—hard to describe, difficult to picture, outside the reader’s experience. In the cited metaphor by Shakespeare, “all the world” is fuzzy, nebulous, too big to grasp. Your powerful trained tiger equates that with ‘Y,’ something known to readers, tangible, and easier to imagine. “A stage.”

If your tiger performs well, Ms. Sardy says, the metaphor is clear, apt, original, and authentic. On a bad day, the tiger bites its trainer-author in the form of a cliché, or metaphors that are mixed, stacked, or forced.

Ms. Sardy addressed how to train your tiger—that is, how to choose the right metaphor. Given the ‘X’ of your story, how do you select the perfect ‘Y?’ The four pieces of advice, put in my own words, follow:

  1. Push past the obvious. List a bunch of candidate ‘Ys’ (perhaps by mind-mapping) and don’t pick the first ones that occur to you.
  2. Think for yourself. Don’t copy, or even attempt to imitate, the metaphors of other writers.
  3. Understand the ‘X.’ Put yourself as deeply into your story as you can. Immerse your mind in it. Only by being there can you convey an appropriate and vivid comparison.
  4. Draw from past experience. Think about similar things from your own past. That may help you select the right ‘Y,’ one familiar to readers.

Note: In this post, I’ve transposed Ms. Sardy’s marvelous webinar into my own words. She didn’t use a trained tiger to describe metaphors—that’s my idea. I take the blame for any misinterpretation of her wonderful talk.

Ready to show off your trained tiger? At the literacy circus, a spotlight shines down on the center ring. A vast, reading audience waits in their seats, anxious to find out if your trained tiger act is better than that of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 18, 2022Permalink

Do You Semicolon?

Among punctuation marks, the semicolon is the nerdy kid who gets picked on and is chosen last for sports teams. The semicolon goes on to college, of course, and finds steady employment, but never moves up or achieves greatness, and yet falls asleep each night dreaming of a life that might have been.

As a refresher, the semicolon links major sentence elements together. It can keep two related independent clauses loosely joined; it also separates items in a list, especially when some listed items contain commas.

Search on your keyboard and you’ll find the semicolon, perhaps sharing a rarely used button with the colon. Yes, it’s that half-comma and half-period thingy—(;). Take a good look, because it may not appear on future keyboards.

That’s right. The semicolon is falling into disuse. With limited keyboard territory available, that’s a kiss of death. Future generations might well ponder about the meaning of that strange mark, unless nearer term translators simply delete it from all texts, substituting commas or periods (or emojis) as they see fit.

Semicolons have hit on hard times, or Times. Ben Macintyre, a columnist in The Times of London wrote, “Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon…Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”

The semicolon’s chief detractor, however, had to be Kurt Vonnegut, who said semicolons are “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

Sheesh. It’s a semicolon, guys. Do you have to drag sex into everything?

Most people don’t hate the semicolon; they either don’t understand it or don’t see the point of it. Scorn from Vonnegut is one thing; at least he paid the semicolon some attention. But to be ignored and forgotten is far worse.

Despite being the shunned wallflower at parties where the comma and period are the hits, the semicolon boasts of a noble history. In The Tempest, Shakespeare has Prospero use one: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” The Bible is smitten with semicolons, starting in the second phrase of Genesis: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Eight semicolons lend their gravitas to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution teems with forty-eight of them.

That’s all fine and good, you’re thinking, but tell me what semicolons have done for us lately. And none of that poetry stuff, either. Cite some recent examples of great prose featuring a semicolon.

Sorry, I can’t. It seems that profound prose demands either the finality of a period or the casual linking of a comma. I’ve had anthology editors (bless their persnickety blue pencils) strike some of my semicolons out of existence with their sweeping editorial delete marks. Even so, I use the mark sparingly, varying between two and thirteen times in my last five published stories, for an average of one semicolon in every 54 sentences.

The semicolon enjoys the support of a few writers out there, including Ben Dolnick and Mary Norris, but such praise is rare and scattered. There is no organized ‘Save the Semicolon’ movement, or even a Kickstarter or GoFundMe page.

So, Caring Readers, it’s up to you. Preserving this punctuation mark will depend on how often we all use it. Do your part; my part will be done by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 14, 2018Permalink

Be Positive about Negative Capability

As part of our shared journey through the realm of fiction writing, let’s explore a few rooms within a stately mansion belonging to the English romantic poet, John Keats. In particular, what did he mean by the term negative capability, and how does it relate to creative writing?

photo By William Hilton – National Portrait Gallery: NPG 194

Nearly two centuries ago, on December 21, 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers where he mentioned negative capability:

“…at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

That may be confusing, but here’s what I think he means—If you want to be a great writer, be willing to:

  • delve into the essence of your characters (or objects, like a Grecian Urn),
  • shed your preconceived world-view,
  • abandon any search for meaning or the urge to fit things into a logical structure, and
  • accept any mysteries and ambiguities you find without trying to resolve them.

Keats praises Shakespeare for the Bard’s ability to show us his characters, through their speech and actions, as they would be, without the author’s heavy hand fitting everything into a coherent whole. Keats criticizes Samuel Coleridge for starting with a philosophical vision and fashioning poetic characters to illustrate that vision.

Why did Keats call this approach ‘negative capability?’ The Wikipedia entry offers an electrical explanation. However, I believe Keats was saying that a true poet should negate her own capability (to make judgements; detect patterns; deduce from, or induce to, general principles) and instead immerse herself in the object of study and absorb all that is there, with all its contradictions and inconsistencies.

For those of you still stuck on the word ‘Penetralium’ in Keats’ letter, let me digress a moment. The word refers to a building’s innermost part, like a temple’s sanctuary. By extension, it can mean the secret inner essence of a person—the soul. Keats thought in terms of rooms of the mind, as illustrated by a letter he wrote, which is cited in the Wikipedia article: “I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments…”

For another description of negative capability, see this video with author Julie Burstein, especially from 1:00 to 1:25. Also, check out this post at Keats’ Kingdom, and this one by Dr. Philip Irving Mitchell of Dallas Baptist University.

As for me, I take a nuanced view of negative capability, as it regards creative writing. I agree writers should empathize with their characters, to know them as directly as possible. That keeps all the characters from seeming to be slight variations of the author. I also concur writers should embrace “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” The worldview of any character and even the universe of the story itself don’t have to fit neatly together in every detail. The writer should approach the characters and story with an open mind, allowing things to develop as they would in their world, not necessarily in step with the worldview of the writer.

But where Keats asserts “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration,” I suggest this applies to the story as a whole, not just one character. Characters are not works of art for a writer to portray, however empathetically, in isolation. They are part of a greater whole, the story, and that whole—with its plot, themes, style, setting, and characters—is the thing the writer must strive to optimize for reader enjoyment.

I hope you liked our visit to this mansion of John Keats’ mind. It’s time to continue with the rest of the tour, led by your literary tour guide—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 5, 2017Permalink

Are Your Stories Antifragile?

That’s no typo in this post’s title. Antifragility is a thing, and today I’m discussing the concept as it applies to fictional stories.

In his book Antifragile, Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb asks if there is an antonym of the word “fragile.” If there were such an adjective, he’d say it describes things that become stronger when stressed.

He doesn’t mean words like ‘robust,’ ‘tough,’ or ‘resilient.’ Those words describe things that sustain shocks without damage. He wants to describe things that improve their resistance to stress by being stressed. Lacking a ready word, he coined the term ‘antifragile.’

Can a story be antifragile? To answer that, we should consider the things that impose stresses on stories. These include criticism in negative reviews and mocking satire.

What would it mean for a story to become stronger? If it meant that the story became more widely read, more popular, with increased sales, then an antifragile story would be one that suffers negative reviews or even satire and yet its sales increase.

Are there any such stories? If I recall correctly, Nassim Taleb offered the more popular plays of William Shakespeare as examples. For four centuries, those plays have endured bad reviews and been mocked, but they are performed far more often and in more languages and formats than they were in Shakespeare’s time.

From an author’s point of view, antifragility seems like a wonderful property for a story to have, especially the increasing sales part, right? If you wanted to write an antifragile story, and perhaps lacked the skill of Shakespeare, how would you go about it? Are there tangible attributes of such stories? Is there a checklist to follow?

I hate to disappoint you, but there’s no checklist. Further, the only authors who really understand what it takes to make a story antifragile…well, they’re dead. That’s because stories don’t really demonstrate that property to the greatest extent while the author is alive.

Still, being me, I’ll take a crack at it, because I like a challenge. Here is my proposed checklist for making your stories antifragile:

  1. Create complex and compelling characters. They need to seem real, with strong emotions and motivations, with goals to attain, with difficult inner problems to surmount, and with bedeviling decisions to make.
  2. Appeal to every reader. That may be impossible to achieve in a single story, but in your body of work you should include characters of many types, in diverse settings. Include rich and poor, young and old, introvert and extrovert, city and country, etc.
  3. Explore the eternal truths about the human condition. You know many of these eternal truths—we’re born, we grow up, we have parents, we learn to relate to others and even fall in love, we have disagreements and conflicts with others, we become curious about the nature of our world, we deteriorate with age, and we die. When I say to ‘explore’ these truths, I don’t mean to write a philosophy book. Write a fictional story that entertains, but causes readers to ponder those deeper truths after reading it.
  4. Execute your story with style, flair, and creativity. Yeah, right. Simply do that. This one is hard to implement, but I’ll suggest some thoughts. Look for ways to turn a phrase well. Create a new word that English lacks but needs. Write in a manner that stands out, such that readers could identify your unique voice from a couple of paragraphs chosen randomly from your stories.

Okay, it’s not really a checklist where you mark off each item in turn: done, done, done. It’s more of a guideline with concepts to aim for. Who knows if it’s even accurate? After all, I’m not dead yet (as I write this), so I can’t possibly know.

Still, it’s intriguing to think that one day, readers may consider your stories to be antifragile, and when scholars trace it back, they’ll discover you learned how to do it from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 7, 2017Permalink

Upcoming Anthology – Hides the Dark Tower

My short story, “Ancient Spin,” will appear in the anthology Hides the Dark Tower, scheduled to appear in October. It’s a new publisher, Pole-to-Pole Publishing, and I think this is their first anthology.

Hides the Dark Tower-Purchased_Artwork_72pxThe anthology’s editors, Kelly A. Harmon and Vonnie Winslow Crist, have been great to work with. They’ve selected a stunning piece of artwork for the cover, don’t you think?

The anthology features stories involving towers. There’s just something about towers. They represent man’s attempt to reach the heavens. Viewed from the ground, they’re mysterious and imposing. From the top, they provide a view that makes you feel commanding and godlike.

By now, you’re wondering where that title, Hides the Dark Tower, comes from. Glad you asked. It’s from the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” by Robert Browning. Here are two of the 34 verses (italics are mine):

What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guess’d what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch ’gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,

If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.

Browning, in turn, spun off his poem from Shakespeare’s King Lear, so maybe all literature just builds on other works, like bricks upon bricks. Like a tower.

As I mentioned, the anthology comes out this fall, and I’ll provide more details and reminders as the date nears. Looking down upon you all from the newly constructed, sky-scraping, world-record-holding tower here at Poseidon’s Scribe Enterprises, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 14, 2015Permalink

The Story behind “Time’s Deformèd Hand”

You were wondering about this new story of mine, “Time’s Deformèd Hand,” so I’ve written this blog post to answer all your questions. It’s the least I can do to satisfy your curiosity. Luckily for both of us, the post contains no spoilers.

Q: What’s the book about?

A: Here’s a short book blurb: “Time for zany mix-ups in a clock-obsessed village. Long-separated twins, giant automatons, and Shakespeare add to the madcap comedy. Read it before it’s too late!”

Q: What’s with the weird title, and why is there a grave accent mark in the word ‘deformed?’
A: The title is stolen from Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors.” In fact, I pretty much ripped off the Bard’s whole play. The story has many, many references to time, clocks, and calendars, and all the sorts of errors associated with time measurement, so the title is appropriate. The grave accent mark (`) means to pronounce that usually-silent ‘e’ as you would in ‘scented,’ to make the poetic rhythm come out right.

Q: What made you think of writing it?

A: I got the idea, somehow, to combine Shakespeare and clockpunk. I wanted the tale to be lighthearted, so I picked one of Shakespeare’s comedies. Having raised a set of identical twins myself, I was drawn to “The Comedy of Errors” due to all its mistaken-identity gags. Rather than two sets of identical twins separated at birth, I thought I’d have just one set, but each young man has a clockman, and all clockmen are identical.

Q: What are clockmen?

A: In my story, clockmen are clockwork automatons, invented by Leonardo da Vinci a century before my story. They’re eight feet tall, with an outer shell of wood covering the metal gears, ratchets, and cogs. They display a clock on their chest, and have a large, wind-up key protruding from their back. Due to a special property of a certain kind of wood, clockmen are sentient, though they seem dull-witted.

Q: What are the story’s strangest characters?

A: First, I’d have to say the town’s Wachmeister, or constable. Wachmeister Baumann is pompous, and also overconfident, considering he can’t seem to correctly pronounce any policing terms. Then there’s the proprietor of the city’s clockman repair shop, a certain William Shakespeare. Herr Shakespeare had moved from England to this Swiss village. For a repairman, he has the rather odd habit of speaking in iambic pentameter, and a deep understanding of human nature.

Q: What do you mean by ‘many references to time?’

A: The setting of the story is a Swiss village called Spätbourg (“late-town”). It is shaped like a clock, with twelve streets radiating out from the center. It contains the Tempus Fugit Restaurant, the Oaken Cuckoo Tavern, and the Sundial Inn. In addition, the story includes several clock jokes, clock mix-ups, as well as clock and calendar paradoxes.

Q: When and where can I buy it?

A: Thought you’d never ask. The book is launching today! You can buy it here, here, and here, and soon it will be available at Gypsy Shadow Publishing and other places.

What? You have more questions about “Time’s Deformèd Hand?” Better leave a comment for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 16, 2014Permalink

Time for a Story to Launch

I just learned my next story, “Time’s Deformèd Hand,” is scheduled to be launched by Gypsy Shadow Publishing in just three days, on November 15th. It’s the 12th book in that What Man Hath Wrought series everyone’s talking about.

Here’s the blurb: It’s 1600 in an alternate Switzerland, a world where Da Vinci’s mechanical automatons and human-powered flight almost work, thanks to magic trees. Long-separated twins, Georg the reluctant groom and Georg the clock thief, roam the clocklike village of Spätbourg, beset by more time and date errors than you can shake an hour hand at. Will Georg get married after all, and repair the town’s central tower clock? Will Georg—the other one—purloin more timepieces, or give up his pilfering ways? Will William Shakespeare lend a hand, and some iambic pentameter poetry, to reset the cogs and gears of this zany comedy? Only time will tell…or maybe not, in this ultimate clockpunk tale of mistaken identity and temporal mix-ups.

I’ll be sure to let you know when “Time’s Deformèd Hand” is launched and where you can buy it. You know if there’s one person who’d never leave you uninformed, it’s—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 13, 2014Permalink

Don’t Refuse Your Muse

Is your brain in a rut? If so, you’re not alone. Today I’ll examine this tendency and suggest what you can do about it.

For all its desirable features, the human brain suffers from a love of the familiar and a fear of the unknown. This served as a good survival trait for our ancestors in their world, but it’s no advantage for a writer today.

Dont refuse museThis hard-wired preference probably prevents many people from becoming writers in the first place, since that can be a scary unknown. Even for those of you who’ve chosen to writers, this unfortunate brain feature keeps you using the same vocabulary words, writing about the same topics in the same genres, writing stories with the same themes and using very similar characters. It thwarts your creative urge, putting you at war with your muse.

As I’ve said before, your muse gets bored with the familiar and seeks the new and fresh. She grabs your arm and pulls you away from the safe and the known, beckoning you to explore the untrodden path. Her brain is wired in a different way.

Perhaps you disagree, thinking you don’t suffer from the malady I’ve described. You deny being a creature of habit who rushes to the familiar and avoids the unknown. Fine. Here’s your test. Tonight, before going to bed, hide your toothbrush. Let’s see how Mr. or Ms. Creativity handles things the next morning. Good luck!

For a great illustration of the problem, I encourage you to read “The Calf Path” by Sam Walter Foss. This poem paints an amusing metaphor of how our brains work.

Advertising Director Gina Sclafani wrote about dealing with the phenomenon. I find it interesting how she thought at first the task would be easy, since she prided herself on being open-minded. Then she well describes the difficulty, the inner resistance, to any steps outside the mind’s comfort zone. In the end, she’s glad she did, because the rewards are great, but she warns it is a journey pitting one part of your mind against a powerful counteracting part.

Here’s a three-step method you could try as a writer to push yourself out of your comfort zone. I’ll illustrate it with story genres, but it could also work with characters, themes, settings, style, or any aspect of story-writing in which you’re stuck.

1. Make a list of story genres you’d never consider writing about. Include the ones you find stupid, abhorrent, unseemly, etc. It’s no big deal, right? After all, you’re never going to write in any of these genres.

2. Spend five to ten minutes thinking through each genre on your list. Think about each one as follows: “I’ll never write in this genre, of course, but if I were to do so, here’s the story I’d write…”   You needn’t write down any of these ideas, just think through them.

3. Now let some time pass. A few days, weeks, or even months. This allows your muse to do her thing. You might well find she’s yanking on your arm and leading you down an unfamiliar path toward writing in one of those unwanted genres.

A similar thing happened to me. I knew I’d never write in the horror genre. Then I noticed a publisher seeking stories for an anthology to be called Dead Bait. I dismissed it, but my muse didn’t. She worked on the idea for a story she made me write called “Blood in the River.” I’m still not a horror story writer, but it felt good to get out of the comfort zone.

One final thought. At one point in their lives, each of history’s greatest contributors (think of da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Edison, Einstein, etc.) had to leave a comfort zone in order to develop his or her eventual talents. Imagine the loss to mankind if one of them hadn’t taken that step? What if you could become a popular, successful, or timeless writer if only you stretch your mind in a direction it doesn’t want to go?

You’ll have to excuse me. This calf-path I’m walking along is nice, but some woman wearing a chiton is tugging at my sleeve. “What’s that? Where? But that’s off the path and looks terrifying to—

                                                                   Poseidon’s Scribe”

April 21, 2014Permalink