In studying the distributions of motifs, one finds that the same object in different cultures may hold vastly different meanings. For example, snakes are found in the mythology and folktales of many cultures. While in Judeo-Christian tradition the snake usually symbolizes evil, in India it is a sacred creature that plays “a major role in folklore and in many Buddhist, Jaina, and Hindu legends. . . . In southern India, especially on the west coast, many houses have a snake shrine or a snake grove in a corner of the garden, where offerings, especially of milk, are made to the snakes” (Dallapiccola 2002, 139–140). In European folklore the dragon is a guardian of remote, dark regions and often a beast to whom humans must be sacrificed, but in many Asian cultures dragons are helpers of human beings and bring good luck.
Archetypes and motifs in folklore and literature : a handbook / edited by Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy
Just as in visual communication. You can’t take colour red meaning the same in Mexico as it does in Vietnam. The meaning will be dictated by the referencial frame of the culture behind, or altered. Either by convention (security manuals stating red is the colour to indicate hot water pipes and water sources for firefighters) or by individual choices. Knowledge alters the way we represent or abstract things. Someone who has read manga instead of comics won’t see heros the same way someone who has grown up only with superman.
Hereby, motifs in folklore will differ in meaning and use depending on the original culture.
Enjoy thinking outside your cultural frame or enhance the cultural motifs in yours. Pasto kalo.
Use a very defined ruling idea: adultery, murder, justice, anecdotic.
Use a very strong point of view.If it is a murder take a stance in favour or against and how you expect the reader to react.
Remember, for the second time, you’re to write very few words
Erase, erase, erase. Or to say it in the craft’s argot: edit. With the big scissor.
For en ending I’ll take a phrase attributed both to Mark Twain and Blaise Pascal:
Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte[1].
I wrote long to you for I had no time to make it short.
Summarizing: to make something as short as a question mark, Victor Hugo must have spent more than a few hours thinking. He also must have filled the waste bin.
What do you prefer writing: long or short stories?
Enjoy both. Pasto kalo.
[1] It is attributed to Pascal in French… I shrug. I don’t know.
We all like survival. We all are survivors of something. The displaced Russians from Tajikistan have fled their home to go and settle in Chernobil. They have gone from surviving war to surviving radiation. We, the rest of us with a lot less dramatic survival feats, survive sickness, nature… stupid bosses.
In short, The old man and the sea is short, subtle and kicks ass.
HOWEVER, THAT IS NOT AN ARGUMENT FOR SHORT
The old man could be shorter. And according to literary analyze, Hemingway wanted to take us into a fight against adversity through dense[1] (in some critic’s opinion) prose. And the ending is equally futile as the useless struggle of K in The castle[2] by Kafka.
TO THIS, <<MORE WORDS>> SEEMS BETTER, RIGHT?
This is the moment I bring up a very short letter. Once upon a day, Mr. Hugo —no one you would know but the author of The miserables, Our lady of Paris[3], The legend of centuries; delivered or had delivered some manuscript and as soon as he was told the manuscript was being sold, he went and took out his suitcase[4]. After jumping on it to be able to close it, he went on holiday.
Yet… he was restless about the book selling[5]. So much he couldn’t sleep and decide to write to his editor. Indeed his editor was a really busy person with lots of appointments in his agenda. Thus, Hugo wrote a really short letter:
?
… In a whole blank page with nothing else in it?
Yes.
And the answer?
!
Not always writing a lot is writing better. It is the how good you’re telling tales.
HOW TO WRITE SHORT STORIES THEN?
TO BE CONTINUED
[1] No wonder I didn’t like it. I’m a simple human being.
[2] Thos one I abandoned because I read the prologue. And its author had the great idea of telling me K never reaches the castle. Thus the dense and heavy prose feels like making line in any health bureaucrat’s department to end up being told there are no appointments available. No need to torture myself any longer.
[3] So far I’ve only read that one and Hernani, the one piece Paganini allegedly plagiarized to write Rigoletto.
[4] Spicing things up, I’m not sure it happened exactly like that.
I’ve come across writing fiction manuals where the author boasts about writing 50,000 words in one go. So effortlessly they end up erasing scenes.
Is it bad to write a lot less than that?! When you think imposition (the way the paper is folded in order to get 4-8-12 pages), maybe. Since there is a fixed numbers of pages to be filled in into a quire. Editors need to think this. At least in case of offset printing. Authors who print digitally have a lot less to worry about imposition.
It doesn’t work for copyrighters who need 40,000 words just to justify their choice of a proposal/topic… Are there really people reading that much marketing proposal when nowadays we try to reduce the time we spend reading for we read a lot?
For me, it is almost impossible to write more. As soon as I try to fulfill the count frustration comes about. I doubt. It feels like something is wrong.
QUANTITY IS NOT THE SAME AS GOOD
And for that a title: The old man and the sea[1]. I don’t know in English but in Spanish, that’s a language a little less populated, this novel is small and thin. No more than 127 pages. Very little for those authors who write that many words only for a chapter.
In this one, superfluous has been eradicated.
Now, War and Peace. The concrete blog that could seriously hurt someone were we to smack someone with it. It is scuffle compared to the 6 tomes (so far since when I wrote this entry there were only 5) of a Song of ice and fire series. Not to say Mr. Martin writes at length.
So why is Hemingway’s novel regarded as important?
SIMPLE
«the trembling sound as flying fish left the water»
The descriptions are kept simple. Do you need more to feel the boat under your behind, the waves, the jumping fish[2]?
TOPIC
The second thing that made it go into immortal hall was the topic. Nonetheless, that’s something for the next entry.
TO BE CONTINUED
[1] Novel I don’t like but since it was mentioned as one of the ones with the best 100 incipits and it really is short compared to the concrete blocks of some writers I took as a model to write about.
The presumption that sheep are unintelligent can be found as far back as Aristotle, who asserted in about 350 bce that the sheep is said to be naturally dull and stupid. Of all quadrupeds it is the most foolish: it will saunter away to lonely places with no object in view; oftentimes in stormy weather it will stray from shelter.
Yet just a couple of paragraphs later, he remarks that ‘shep-herds train sheep to close in together at a clap of their hands’, so that ‘when a thunderstorm comes on’, they can summon their flocks back to the sheepfold. The contradictions here resound throughout history: sheep are stupid because they follow obediently, but also because they stray disobediently; they are too dull to know what they are doing, but they can learn to come on command (like dogs, in whom we consider this to be evidence of human-like cleverness).
Sheep. Philip Armstrong. Reaction books
I find the story familiar. It’s like saying women are horrid but praising men for getting two or three. Saying women are stupid but counting on them to manage the house ( sometimes one big enough to count as a company). Fiction is used to convenience when the ones below the story allow it.
Are you to use this feature in your stories? Do it wisely. Pasto kalo.
There were many men working at Hazard’s who remained anti-Negro, and violently so. Freed blacks would threaten such men by competing for their jobs. George wished that kind of hatred didn’t exist at the ironworks, but he also knew no government could legislate it out of existence because it was rooted in fear; illogical.
North and South; Book two, Friends and enemies. John Jakes.
Like Mark Mason says, it is all about us and them. Are you able to have the reader side with your character? Can you make readers to feel like «one of us»? Have a great time making the reader afraid of them.
In Exophony 1 and 2, I blabbed about what exophony is and reviewed a short list of writers who found themselves in a different language. Which means I’m not all lost writing in this terrible language.
Today I’ll only quote a bit of Chantal Wright’s essay «Exophony and literary translation. What it means for the translator when a writer adopts a new language[1]«. Where she rationalizes about OWNING A LANGUAGE.
«When deliberating on the title of this essay, I initially considered calling it ‘On writing in a language which is not one’s own and what this means for the translator’. But to do so would be to uphold two stubborn myths: one, that a language belongs to a certain territory and body of people, which in fact no language does…»
German is spoken in Austria and Switzerland (besides Germany), English… that’s spoken even in my municipality. Yes, native speakers. Morocco, Switzerland and Quebec in Canada do parle le français. Portuguese is carioca too!
It might not be the everyday thing we speak or think; OURS BY CHOICE OR FORCE. Of the 62 native languages in Mexico, I speak none. I’m a child of the conquest[2]…
EXOPHONIC WRITERS THAT MIGHT NOT BE ON THE LIST
The Wikipedia listing is longer than what I initially thought. Don’t stop there. It is an old phenomenon. Authors like Flavius Josephus[3]. He didn’t make the list in spite of starting life as Yosef to end up being Titus when he was taken as an interpreter slave.
Maybe there are authors who were exophonous without anyone realizing! Or because no one knew much about them. Think a Mr. “No one really knows his real name” who wrote <<Una canasta de cuentos mexicanos>>. It is said he came from the States[4] as German or Polish or who knows where from. Spanish wasn’t his native tongue, for sure.
Hereby we are left with an undetermined number of exophonic writers. Interesting eh?
DOES ONE CHANGE LANGUAGE ONLY WITH MIGRATION?
No. It can be a retail strategy. More readers, although more competition.
IT IS POSSIBLE TO FEEL FREER IN A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE.
For Aga Lesiewicz, English was a more honest way to express herself, giving her the confidence and changing her on the way.
I prefer it because I can attain a certain musicality I wouldn’t in Spanish.Besides, it forces me to think as the character. Not what I think or want out of the situation. Why do you think the blog was born in Spanish. Just a bloody journal about what I discover about writing fiction and the noise it buzzes in my head.
To others, it is just a way to disguise themselves. To experiment with their own identity or learn to survive in their new environment. Nabokov went out riding buses to write Lolita in the right colloquial English.
We write in a different language because it makes us happy too. Prejudices or not.
DO WE WRITE WELL?
I’ve only read Gibran and Kundera[5]…in Spanish. Never in the original language. Both are great.
Me? I gotta think I do. Otherwise, I should just give up the blog and life altogether (no job, not published, just doing this cause I care for it more than I care about other stuff[6]).
Would you try? Against any prediction or prejudice?
Have fun writing in your own or whatever language you have chosen/are forced to write in. Pasto kalo.
[1] Wright, Chantal (2010) Exophony and literary translation: what it means for the translator when a writer adopts a new language. Target, 22 (1). pp. 22-39. Quotation found in https://benjamins.com/online/target/articles/target.22.1.03wri ; the original can be read through a 300 euro subscription so, no thanks.
[2] If you are thinking it is thanks to you. No. It is because of you. Not the same. Be conscientious. Just that. Thank you.
[3] Josephus, Flavius /dʒəʊˈsiːfəs/ ( c. 37– c. 100), Jewish historian, general, and Pharisee; born Joseph ben Matthias . His Jewish War gives an eyewitness account of the events leading up to the Jewish revolt against the Romans in 66, in which he was a leader.
[4] I remember some museum exhibition that featured the guy as a part of the display (don’t ask what was the title or the artist on display since I don’t remember that, nor the museum) in which it was implied he came to Mexico after passing through the States where he changed his name to Bruno Traven —maybe I’m just adding more gossip to it for my memory is not photographic— from Red Marut and even before Red Marut; there seemed to have been other changes, The point is, NO ONE KNOWS WHERE HE IS FROM, THUS NO ONE KNOWS WHAT HE ORIGINALLY SPOKE.
[5] Read The unbearable lightness of being, originally written in Czech (his mother tongue), a language I wouldn’t even dare to mess with.
[6] Hence, I’m a nobody. I’m useless to you if you send me your baby manuscript for me to read and promote. It’s me who needs you. Sorry.
Thompson’s Motif-Index is one of the most important works in folklore studies produced in the twentieth century. Some may view it merely as a taxonomic endeavor, but as Thompson stated, “Before it can become an object of serious and well-considered study, every branch of knowledge needs to be classified. There was a time when geology and botany consisted of random collections of facts and hastily constructed theories. It was only when this anecdotal stage gave way to systematic classification that real progress was made toward a thorough method of study” (1977, 413).
Archetypes and motifs in folklore and literature : a handbook / edited by Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy
Are we any closer to have made of Narratology something useful to write fiction? Is fiction even something studied that seriously nowadays to produce real differentiated fiction and not mass produced serial stuff? Just questions. Not a Sunday sermon. Pasto kalo.
Although she had long looked forward to it, as the story unfolded, she realized she didn’t find it funny at all. The lyrics were racist, the actors were white, and it was blatantly obvious that the female lead was going to be blamed for everyone else’s misdeeds. The whole thing reminded her of work.
Lessons in chemistry. Bonnie Garmus
… Whenever women can be blamed of something, they are. Even when half the deed rests upon the male counterpart’s decisions. Which is why women are fired and men keep their jobs.
Any chance you’re writing fiction where men are fired the same way women are? Pasto kalo.
Although metaphor and analogy are unconventional in scientific circles, I am firmly convinced that a more nonlinear kind of thought will eventually supplant much of the logical reasoning we use today. Chris Langton, one of the primary researchers in the field of complexity theory, has speculated that in the future science will become more poetic. Our troubled world, too, is becoming too complex for logical argumentation, and may have to change its thinking: real trust, when emotions are running high, is based on analogy, not calculation. Meanwhile, we must concentrate our attention on learning all we can about the brain, as a way to get the jump on where the field, and our world, are headed.
Introduction. A user’s guide to the brain. John J. Ratey, M.D.
