As you know, I have been doing a tremendous amount of reading these past six months, which is one reason I have not published as many book reviews as usual on my blog. But throughout this intensive crash course in reading, I have noticed that there is truly nothing new under the sun in the world of writing. What I mean is this; in all of your own literary journies, have you ever noticed how all writing, whether it is non-fiction, fiction, poetry, articles and essays, or even blog writing, basically tells the same story, although usually from a different angle?
Okay, I am speculating, so you'll have to let me know if I am simply blowing smoke here. Basically, I think that all writing is a retelling of one universal story that is common to all of us, an all-encompassing story that we all share at a collective, almost genetic, level, regardless of when we lived, our ethnicity, race, religious background, sexual orientation or gender. What is this story? I think it is a quest, it is the story of seeking .. something, whether that something is knowledge, either scientific knowledge or self-knowledge; or an experience, or even the desire to preserve one's status quo -- but writing is all about the journey that is undertaken in the search for something, and in the process, the main character (when there is one), and the reader, are forever changed or transformed in some way.
So what do you think? Do you think there is a universal human story? If so, what do you think it is? Do you think that writing a quest to recapture that universal human story, or is writing instead a quest to add one more data point to the accumulation of writing as humanity seeks to finally finish writing our all-encompassing story? Or perhaps, you think that writing is about something else entirely?
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Is this in any way related to the concept of the 'Hero's Journey'? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth ) Or are you thinking of something more general?
(To answer the question directly, I think there are other stories. But the Monomyth is pretty darn common.)
-Mecha
Am I correct in assuming that you are ignoring those books written to propogate deliberate untruth or create false impressions of people.
How many biographies are actually hagiographies, a fair few I'ld say & some books are written to advance political or personal agendas. These I don't classs as good.
I'll have to think about the other books I've read, but my first thought is that the good ones address/explore the human condition and/or the way the universe works. So they seek answers to the why & how questions.
This is a very interesting post for a naturalist. I do think that there are universals in great literature. However, I also think that great discoveries and observations of nature are made by people who are not particularly good writers and are not immediately able to explain their findings and relate them to our human predicament. There is an important role to be filled right now for those of us who can write reasonably well and also understand what scientists are up to in specialized fields of study.
Some people believe that, in fiction, there are just seven basic plots although some would say eight.
That doesn't mean there aren't thousands of stories worth telling. Same argument applies to people who decry new music for repeating the same old selection of chords - it's too reductionist. With works of art, it's the detail that counts.
Just rattling off the top of my head, I'd say that the function of writing (the noun, a product) is to preserve information while the goal of writing (the verb, an activity) is to communicate with others not present. Combine those two and the purpose of writing is to communicate across time. Put more existentially, the eternal narrative behind all writing is a quest for immortality. In putting our words down we hope to preserve something of our thought so that it might outlive the moment and perhaps outlive us.
That's the short version; the long version is here http://johnmckay.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-we-write.html
...have you ever noticed how all writing, whether it is non-fiction, fiction, poetry, articles and essays, or even blog writing, basically tells the same story?
Yeah, and that's why people should stop writing. There's already more excellent writing extant than anyone could read in a lifetime, so what's the point of adding more to the pile? Especially when it's really just the same thing over and over again. Let's just read what we already have, and give the trees a break.
I think you should read Joseph Campbell's books. I think you would really enjoy them.
Clapping
Chardyspal
Willa Cather said (my paraphrasing, but pretty close if not spot-on), "There are only two or three basic human stories, and they go on repeating themselves with such ferocity as if they had never happened before."
i was raised to believe that all novels conformed to three plot types;
man against man
mana against nature
man against himself
but that of course, did not explain ALL writing, which i see as a quest after .. something.
i was raised to believe that all novels conformed to three plot types
Well, I was raised to belive that there are only two plots:
1. Someone goes on a journey.
2. A stranger comes to town.
What was wrong with your parents?
I think we tell stories to ward off our horror of randomness. We propagate the myth that things make sense. We write to filter and distort and create patterns in the static.
By the way, I linked your blog on mine which is still nascent. I hope you don't mind.
Ah, the plots of cowboy stories.
In SF writing, it's a proverb that "there are no new ideas, it's all what you do with them". The editor John Campbell (afaik, no relation to the mythologist) claimed that in his entire career he'd only received one genuinely new idea (that being "slow glass").
It's easy to construct short lists that initially seem to partition "the whole of literature", but every example I've seen works by focusing on the "skeleton", and simply ignoring any differences that don't fit into the scheme du jour. By doing so, they limit themselves to a single perspective, which intrinsically blinds them to anything hidden by the fixed point of view.
Now I wouldn't normally stain my fingers with the Guardian but I happened upon an article (linked in another blog) that makes some interesting points about some modern novels and novellists http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,563868,…
"....novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very "brilliant" books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being."