Adventures in Storytelling 3

florianric from Deutschland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Entry 3, Carpe editorem, occide.

As I stated in the last entry, I learned it was okay to trust my instincts. But when it came to editing, I didn’t really know where to start. I read a couple books on editing, some more useful than others, and sort of just decided to start from the beginning. {read Storytelling 2, here}

I wrote Project Paisley’s P1 into three parts. As a finished draft, P1 was massive, as in, this-is-never-getting-published massive. It was a problem I was aware of while writing it. The seed had grown into a wild forest and was in need of serious cultivation if I was going to make anything of it.

While writing P1 I made heavy use of a tactic I call pre-editing (some call it backtracking). Pre-editing is when I go back to former chapters/sections in order to reread them. Sometimes this is done in order to refresh my memory, double check lore, or simply because I can’t do anything else. Often, if I see a mistake or I decided to rewrite something, I fix it. There are people who believe this is terrible for your writing, but I find helpful. Sometimes, I’ve gone back and read something really good and it’s inspired me or reminded me that I’m not utterly useless as a writer.

While working on part three I had some difficulty getting to my end. I took some time at the local library to print out the first part of P1. I learned from one of the aforementioned editing books that seeing your work in print instead of on a screen can help you distance yourself from it. I also learned that changing the font from your standard use font (like Times New Roman) to something less familiar (like Bahnschrift) provides further alienation.

This technique, which I call alienation, works for me and I still use it. Placing distance between yourself and your work is like taking a break in a very torrid relationship. It can be incredibly difficult. You’ve spent hours, days, months, years with a particular project. Cutting yourself off from the creative process that held you in thrall for so long is like clipping off pieces of your own soul.

But you must cool that fire before you can really edit. Pre-editing, for all the use I got out of it, wasn’t helping me edit. It was creating a longer and more unwieldy draft. I spent so much time with part one that I had difficulty pulling away from it in order to finish part three. I ended up adding an entirely new section to part two, while I believe this worked out for the best, when I finally got around to finishing part three, I was dealing with a draft so large I knew that no company would publish it as a first novel.

Still, I persevered. I sent the draft to a printer in order to have the monstrosity printed and mailed to me. Note: don’t ever do this. It is cheaper to buy your own ink and paper, print from home in batches and store in a three-ring binder.

In 2019, I started a new fulltime job. Circumstances required me to shelve P1 for months.

Then, Covid happened, and I dusted P1 off. 2020 was a hard year for most of us, but opportunity lies in even the worst elements of chaos and hardship. Never pass up an opportunity to exercise your passion.

Distance granted me clarity. But not crystal-clear clarity. More like, cold light of day, icy shower clarity.

That’s a little harsh, but you catch my meaning. There were things about my writing that shocked me. The overuse of -ly words, the abundance of had and so, the rambling sentences, the ones that ended randomly unfinished.

And that was just the technical stuff. There were lore errors, inconsistent naming, naming conventions I suddenly found that I hated…

But, as I went further and further into my first draft edit, I came to realize something. For all my mistakes, I enjoyed reading it. Sure, it was messy and unfinished, I had a hundred little things that needed fixing, plot threads that needed tying up (or cutting entirely), but it was good. Or, at least, it was good to me. It hit me as something I would like to read.

Writing is an organic endeavor. Where you start shouldn’t be where you finish. This became abundantly clear when I took P1 off the shelf and began my first few rounds of editing. My ending was better than my beginning.

My skills as a writer improved dramatically from the first sentence to the last sentence. Both still needed work but the last sentence was in a much better state than the first.

I came away from my first draft feeling better than I expected. I wrote an end-of-edit letter to myself and stuck it in my binder to act as a rubric for my next move. In it, I outlined several things I needed to work on:

My voice is passive, I need to own my words.
If you see had or so, delete immediately/rewrite the sentence.
Various lore and worldbuilding mistakes and inconsistencies.
There are somethings here that I simply don’t like.

By itemizing the issues in P1, I felt more confident and put it back on the shelf for another month.

I needed a break, editing is hard work, in many ways harder than writing. Editing engages our creative drive, but it also demands our reason. There were times where I found myself arguing over if I should delete a certain word or rework a sentence. More than once I crossed out a word only to mark it with a simple “ok” only to cross that out. I started the next month, rested and ready. I used my end-of-edit letter to focus my second pass on the nuts and bolts of my writing. My voice was there, but it was buried under mountains of passive verbs and extraneous adverbs. Not to mention that I used the words had and so like crutches.

99% of the time, had and so are unnecessary and they take away from the active action of the characters turning them into passive meat puppets and robbing your voice of it’s confidence. “She had become tired” should be “she was tired.” “So she changed her plans” needs to be “she changed her plans.”

This paragraph: “She ran quickly, speeding down the hall and roughly turning the corner. She threw herself into the next room. Slammed the door and waited silently for the danger to pass.”

Became: “She ran. Her pace picked up speed, slowing as she rounded the corner. There! She spotted the first open door and threw herself into the room. She pressed against the door. Waited. Sweat slipped down her temple. She heard steps—stilled.”

You’ll note that the second paragraph became longer and the sentence length became more varied. By removing the crutch of adverbs, I was forced to think more about the scene. How do you add tension without an -ly guiding the reader?

Variation is the spice of writing. Vary your sentence length. Vary your grammatical structure. Vary your verbs, nouns, etc. There is no reason sentences in fiction can’t be one word. Or twelve. I also vary my punctuation and my diction.

Note: I don’t want to make it seem as if this all happened between my first and second draft. Writing doesn’t work that way. One day I simply began to notice these changes in my writing. That being said, I’ve gone through four drafts of P1 and I’m currently rewriting most of it. I’ll address the last two issues in the next entry.

These are my tools, pre-editing, alienation, end-of-edit letter, and variation. They go by different names, some people don’t like them, some don’t find them useful. And that’s okay. Writing is not carpentry. We craft our own tools and use them as we intend them; if it doesn’t work, we toss it out even if it works for someone else.

Own the tools of your craft. Use them to help you identify your crutches and build the confidence to yank them out.

July 1, 2023 1

A Simple Meal of Bread and Cheese

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Philosophy_Courses%2C_Grandes_Chroniques_de_France%2C_Castres%2C_BM%2C_0003%2C_f._277r%2C_c._1332-1350_%2820679865714%29.jpg

Some time ago, an old friend and I had a discussion set off by a fan fiction she was reading. She sent me a screen shot of something she thought was funny, or horrendous, I can’t remember. What I do remember was seeing the phrase “they stopped near midday and ate a simple meal of bread and cheese.” Immediately, without much context, I knew it was either an alternate history or a fantasy alternative universe (AU) because I’ve seen this deliciously terrible phrase in nearly every fantasy I’ve ever read.

A simple meal of bread and cheese evokes a strange, nostalgic feeling. It has the quality of a really good but utterly normal Christmas dinner. Or better yet, Holiday leftovers. When it’s the middle of the night and you make a cheese sandwich with a dinner roll and some slightly dried cheddar that was left on the appetizer tray.

The phrase itself is unassuming but I can glean some information from it. If your meal is simple, its probably because you come from a high-class background because for a peasant this is just a meal. Simple connotate rustic. Rustic is a polite word for coarse, country, rural, roughing-it. And while its utilitarian enough to evoke these vagaries, the quaint charm leaves me unsatisfied. Like there was a missed opportunity for a slight taste of a wider world.

I find myself asking the writer, what kind of cheese? What kind of bread? Are there nuts in the cheese? What kind of grain is the bread made from? Would it go well with apples?

As Chesterton so elegantly put, the poets have been silent on the subject of cheese and we ought to rectify that.

Personally, I’d rather smear a soft green cheese over a slab of oat-laden bread than place a slice of Kraft on a piece of Wonder Bread. But my tastes aside, a simple meal of bread and cheese is prime real-estate for worldbuilding, whether that world is modern, archaic, or fairytale.

“…hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese: good plain food, as good as the Shire could show…”
The Fellowship of the Ring

While the meal Frodo and his friend have at the Prancing Pony is more than just bread and cheese, the words to describe this simple meal of bread and cheese is marked with Tolkien’s usual narrative color. “Good plain food” he wrote. Because it is. It’s simple fare. Half of a ripe cheese, new loaves. That is, a slightly tangy, older cheese and fresh bread still hot from the oven.

It paints a picture that expands the world a bit. The men of Bree aren’t so different from the hobbits of Hobbiton. It’s this meal that calms Sam who is unused to being around so many tall-folk. For an instant, as readers, we get to enjoy the hobbit’s momentary comfort. We taste a world that is familiar, and yet achingly far away.

Food culture flavors a setting. There is something otherworldly about drinking spice coffee over coffee [Dune]. Something familiar and real about wheels of white cheese and chunks of hardbread [A Song of Ice and Fire]. There are warm comforts in a serving of deeper-than-ever-turnip-and-tater-and beetroot pie next to hotroot soup and nutty soft cheese [Redwall].

A simple meal of bread and cheese tells us much, but a meal of green white cheese and sesame crackers tells the reader a bit more.

It’s these tiny details that give readers a place to latch on. Never pass up a chance to deepen a reader’s journey. Writers don’t need to fill in every blank, that’s tiresome, but take into account the flavor of the universe you’re trying to convey.

If a story takes place in ancient China, no one is eating cheese or bread (as in, typical wheat bread). If your story takes place in medieval England, everyone eats bread and cheese, but class differences dictate the type and quality. A word a caution, never fall into the trap of cultural stereotypes especially when it comes to food. Anyone calling “British food” boring has never had the experience of a blisteringly hot bite of shepherd’s pie. Calling every Indian dish spicy does a disservice to the creamy, sweet, and even sour dishes of India. Making pasta a completely foreign and exotic meal to your adventuring party ignores the fact that some of the first written references to pasta in the West come from the 1^st century AD.

When it comes to food and the worldbuilding you do around food, research is your friend. Watch any number of historical cooking shows on YouTube; look up recipes for dishes you’re unfamiliar with and then make it. If a local restaurant serves a specific kind of cuisine, go try it. The best teacher is experience. Take note of the similarities between cultures, appreciate how those similarities are expressed differently.

This small concept—a simple meal of bread and cheese—is the vehicle for a richer experience. We become more potent writers when we make an effort to expand a universe through food. Food is a way for us to come together.

As a writer, bring yourself and your readers to the dinner table. Make them hungry, make them want to come to your works just to taste a fine meal, make them want to come back for more.

Above: A Still-life with Bread, Cheese and a cut Pie. Floris van Schooten, (between 1585 and 1588 – buried 14 November 1656), Dutch Painter. Oil on panel. Housed at Koetser Gallery.

June 3, 2023 0

Writer’s Review: Writing Tools, 50 Essential Strategies

Hh1718, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re a writer and you’ve ever looked up “writing advice” you’ve probably come upon a vast google list of various articles offering tidbits of—well, honestly—things you already know because you’re not an idiot. You then decide the best thing to do is search Amazon, surely Jeff Bezos, with all his wealth and power will have a curated list of “how to write” guides for your convenience. You’ll pick one from a writer you know and then it’s off to the races.

To your horror, you’re met with 20 pages of a spectacularly un-curated wild jungle saturated to the brim with no-names and gimmicks. Some of it isn’t even about writing books, it’s about Amazon marketing or prepping or parenting. Some of these books don’t even appear to be written by anyone at all, but by a faceless corporation. Not only that, while they’re cheap as a Kindle book, if you’re more of a “paper and ink” person, you’ll be shelling out twenty to thirty bucks on a new copy.

That’s where I come in. I’ve read dozens of these kinds of book and some of them have really wasted my time, others have helped build my confidence or given me a useful piece of advice I’d never thought of.

I’ll be honest I’m not exactly sure how to review a book that offers writing strategies and guidance. I’m not going to judge it based on its technical flair or it’s plot or it’s narrative structure. The only thing left is the level of use I got out of it.

That’s probably the only way to review a book like this—or any “self-help” book out there. In the end, I won’t be rating the book out of 5 or 10 or what have you. Instead, I’ll offer my observations on how useful I think the book is and who I think is best served by reading it.

Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark

I don’t know anything about Roy Peter Clark. The blurb on the back of his book says he’s the VP of the Poynter Institute, a prestigious journalism school. Now, let’s not hold that against him, because Writing Tools is a pretty useful book.

Clark’s book is broken into 4 parts: Nuts and Bolts; Special Effects; Blueprints; and Useful Habits. Each part has a number of chapter that Clark calls “Tools.”

For example, Part One: Nuts and Bolts, features Tool 3: Activate your verbs. Clark uses an example from Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love in order to show that Fleming took to heart the simple advice given by George Orwell: “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”

This is a great tool for writers of all levels and experience—avoid verb qualifiers. Instead of using “he sort of wanted ice cream,” or “he seemed to want ice cream.” Activate your verbs, “he wanted ice cream” or “he chose chocolate” or “he got ice cream.” Clark then reminds us that you can overstuff a paragraph with activated verbs. When you play with this concept, you can see what he means by the need for temperance.

This tool has become extremely useful to me, especially when editing. Often, when writing, I’m desperate to get everything out onto the page with the idea that I will prune later. This leaves my writing with a lot of ugly verb qualifiers. I find myself scraping these barnacles away, especially in my action-oriented scenes, where I need swift, clean sentences to keep up forward momentum.

Tool 5 is another excellent gem of advice. Clark charges writers to “watch those adverbs.” He states: “at their best, adverbs spice up a verb or adjective. At their worst, they express a meaning already contained in it.”

To make his point, Clark uses the example “she smiled happily” and “she smiled sadly.” “She smiled happily” is immediately cringe inducing. It’s a bad use of adverbs. “She smiled” already intonates happiness. You don’t need to qualify it. But, “she smiled sadly” is a good use of the adverb “sadly” because it changes the meaning of the smile.

Of course, he does conclude with a disclaimer, stating that J.K. Rowling uses loads of adverbs.

Another tool I found extremely helpful is in Part Two: Special Effects. Tool 16 tells us to Seek original images.

Clark begins with an Orwell quote, “never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Orwell had no love for clichés and thought of them as a substitute for thinking. Tool 16 taught me this lesson very well.

During a recent rewrite in a novel I’ve been working on, I came upon a cliché that jarred me right out my own narrative. It was a not-so-common Shakespearean euphemism for marital infidelity, but I knew it well enough to know that I didn’t want it there.

I spent a couple hours looking for alternatives online. In the end I was forced to think about the specific culture I had created, the kind of place the characters lived in, and I created my own. The scene was immediately better, it made the setting feel more lifelike.

This tool is useful for all, but I find it particularly necessary for speculative fiction writers. Your high-tech space aliens aren’t going to say “you’re putting the cart before the horse.” And in your medieval fantasy adventure where reading is a luxury, your peasants aren’t “reading between the lines.” Even if it takes hours, sit down and think because Orwell is right, most clichés are a substitute for thinking.

For my last example, I’m pulling from Part 4: Useful Habits. Tool 41 tells us to Turn procrastination into rehearsal.

I work a full-time job, the only real time I have to write is on the weekends and two days can be cruelly short if I’m having difficultly finding my groove. Clark writes: “writers experience procrastination as a vice, not a virtue. During the process of not writing, we doubt ourselves and sacrifice the creative time we could use to build a draft. What would happen if we experiences this period of delay not as something destructive, but as something constructive, or even necessary?…what if we call it rehearsal?…we all rehearse, and that includes writers. Our problem is that we call it procrastination or writer’s block.”

This is was something that I desperately needed to read. As my work day dragged on and I found I had difficulty writing on the weekends, I began to punish myself with the typical mental abuse we writers hurl at ourselves—you’ll never write anything worthy, you’ll never be published, you’re creatively bankrupt, you’re lazy, etc.

But the drive to write is innate in me. Even as I abused myself, I found myself writing up scenes and ideas in my head. Usually just before bed, during downtime at work, or while in the shower. And when I was unable to get them out onto a page, I continued with my self-abusing. It created a vicious cycle than began to put a real strain on my mental health.

Clark’s advice, that I allow those periods of none-production to become a time when I rehearse what I’m going to write on the weekend.

When the weekend comes, I have no standards. I write. I throw everything at the page, I get everything out and prune it later. I no longer allow myself to suffer “writer’s block.” I rehearse. If I’m really struggling, I look back at some earlier work and do a little basic editing. I keep a daybook where I write little musings and interesting ideas, snatches of poetry, insight or epiphanies.

Its difficult to reframe the “typical ideal” of the “struggling” author. But once you liberate yourself from that concept, you’ll be free to actually do some writing.

Final Thoughts

Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer is one of the most useful “how to write” guides I’ve ever read. It has become the standard by which I rate all “how to write” guides.

There is something in here for every type of writer. It has useful tips to ease beginners and concise reminders for the experts.

Absolutely recommended. Buy it, buy some highlighters, take notes.

May 1, 2023 0

Adventures in Storytelling 2

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Korean_water_dropper_in_shape_of_a_turtle%2C_12th-13th_century%2C_porcelain_with_design_under_celadon_glaze%2C_Dayton_Art_Institute.JPG

Entry 2, it’s turtles all the way down.

Where last I left off, I explained how Project Paisley had a faulty start. The idea behind the project was burning brightly, but I lacked the fuel to keep the fire going. The solution I came to was easier said than done: don’t surrender an idea just because it’s become difficult to navigate. Pull back, regroup, assess the situation, and start preparing for the second try. {read Storytelling 1, here}

I set the original start of Project Paisley aside and let it rest while I prepared for my college graduation. I had a lot on my plate back then, but I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a friend. I told her that with distance from Paisley, I felt as if the world I wanted to explore was too large, too empty, too colorless. I specifically recall using the phrase “it’s too big, I think I need to think smaller.”

That was my problem. And it was a big problem. Like Matryoshka dolls, further issues nested within the larger problem.

The world felt monochrome with no distinct cultures, flavors, or religions. Without a world to shape them, my characters were the generic adventuring party seen the world over. And because my characters were generic and boring, I wasn’t interested in them. Interest for the author is paramount. If you’re bored, so is every one else. [Note, this isn’t strictly true. Not everyone is as interested in 15^th century Florentine politics like me.]

With this revelation finally admitted I was able to address it.

My first order of business was to figure out what kind of world I wanted to build. From there I could mold my characters around the cultures they came from.

I spent my last semester in college reading dozens upon dozens of medieval history books. When I had exhausted my public library, I delved into the poetry and narratives of the same period. I made a laborious study of the Divine Comedy which has endowed me with a deep reverence and appreciation for Dante and his works. As I learned more about the man himself, things started pulling themselves together.

Stupidly, I never dated my notes, but as I graduated and settled in to life outside of school, I wrote my first set of notes that would become the background and backbone of P1.

P1 was never my intention. Or, I should say, P1 was meant to be a short foray into a small, condensed version of the world I originally intended for my failed prototype. For this short story, I had two things in mind; the quasi-erotic, spiritually rich relationship between Dante Alighieri and Beatrice; and the doomed, overtly sexual relationship of Tristan and Isolde.

What I ended up producing was a courtly romance with the symbology of Tristan and the philosophy of Dante.

But that was a future realization because the first thing I worked on was written on a piece of plain white printer paper. On it, I wrote two cities, London and Paris. From those two cities, I made notes about the things I liked about them. I liked the idea of an ancient city with multiple former masters out to make it on its own, I recycled a name from an unfinished D&D campaign. That in and of itself was a lesson in keeping notes. Even failed ideas are great fertilizer. I keep what I’ve previously written, even if its terrible.

The way I tell this story makes it seem as if these thoughts happened independently of each other or in sequence, but all of these thoughts and ideas were cooking at the same time. As I thought about the city, I thought about what kind of people would live in it.

I began the first part of P1 in the summer of 2017, nothing serious, just some scenarios. I didn’t yet have an actual plot. Mostly, I wanted to get a feel for the world. I still had blanks to fill in, the major deity didn’t have name, none of the counties really had names, I wasn’t certain what shape religious worship took, or how it would affect the daily life of people living in the world.

To this day, when I begin a project, I draft certain scenes or events I want to occur. It’s usually a climatic or tense moment. I find that the scenes are typically dialogue heavy or action oriented, either way, it’s a pressure scene. By placing the characters under immediate pressure, I find that I get a feel for their basic stress reactions. I’m able to determine personalities from there.

I conceived two characters for P1, E and R. The more I learned about E the more I understood about R. I’m not going to sugar coat anything and play the will-they-won’t-they card here. E and R were made for each other. I lampshade this almost immediately.

As I said in my last entry, when I conceived this idea, I was a virulent anti-plotter. I never worked out a true timeline or plotted the events as I would inevitably do in the future. But I did try some new things.

I drew something like a flow chart. I wrote E at the top of the page and drew lines connecting thoughts, wishes, and ideas to various traits or backstory events. Not everything I wrote on the chart made it into the story, per se, but it helped me set certain personality expectations. I was able to use this chart and come to basic conclusions about how E would respond to different scenarios.

Writing is an organic process. Inevitably, what you start with is not what you finish with.

Again, what was meant to be a short story turned into a multipart fantasy with a wide variety of characters and stakes that seemed to rise with each passing chapter. I worked on P1 from mid-2017 through 2018 and finished the first draft in August of 2019.

At P1’s completion I came upon a new set of issues. It was enormously long and it had a narrative thread that, while it was cohesive, meandered in some places. But I had done it. I had written a full-length novel. It wasn’t my first (I completed one in high school for National Novel Writing Month), but it was—to date—my best.

However, finishing a novel brings a lot of things to light. Now I had to shift focus, I needed to swap my writing hat for my editor’s cap. That was a tall order for someone who, up to that point, hadn’t done any serious editing outside of term papers.

At this time in my life I started a new job, I met a boy, and I was dabbling in philosophy that would soon point me to Holy Mother Church. It was a time for change. I was older, more mature. I wasn’t afraid to ask for help. So, for the first time in my life I picked up a book that was supposed to help me become a better writer by teaching me to edit.

I took its advice and shelved P1 for a while to gain some distance. I turned my attention to actual short stories, which is a different topic entirely.

Now that I’m able to properly look back on that part of my life, I see more clearly the lesson learned. P1 was a massive detour and it was going to take some time to fit it into my original intentions for Project Paisley. But it was worth it. I returned from that trip as a better writer. I still lacked discipline, I still needed to pick up a new set of skills, but I had climbed the first mountain in this range of madness.

From this experience I learned:

Trust your instincts. Just because the solution presented is contrary to the writer’s intentions, doesn’t mean that it should be ignored. Following that string might lead to something greater.

Above: Korean water dropper in shape of a turtle, Koryo dynasty, 12th-13th century, porcelain with molded and incised design under celadon glaze, Dayton Art Institute.

May 1, 2023 1

The Archetypes of Scripture: Jonah, Reluctant Hero

Goodness Shamrock, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A General Introduction to the Series.

It’s cliché to say that the Bible is not so much a book as it is a library in a single volume. It contains works of history, law, poetry, prophecy, and even (if you have a Catholic Bible), works like Book of Tobit (Tobias) that has a structure similar to that of a novel. Genre, of course, is a modern invention; the Ancient Hebrews and the original Christians would not have “split” works into neat little categories. And truth be told, the books don’t always fit, like the aforementioned Tobit.

But genre is neither here nor there. My concerns here is the story. And, paradoxically, I lied above. The Bible is a single book in the same way it’s a library. Okay, so perhaps “I lied” isn’t entirely correct either. A better way, I think, to categorize the Bible is with the word Epic. It’s an epic in the same way the Lord of the Rings is epic. Threads from the books before are woven through the entire story, leading up to the epic conclusion of Christ Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection.

In other words, it’s a Grand Narrative. The stories within the Story are themselves part of the Story. The Story ceases to make sense without these smaller stories. The Grand Narrative is the Word and the Word is the Grand Narrative.

There are many who would disagree with me. Some because I’m thinking to much about it instead of living it. Others because they don’t believe in the Grand Narrative at all. Some will take issue with my choice of Bible, others will discount me entirely because I’m Catholic. Others, because I’m a woman.

All of that is irrelevant. When I peel apart an archetype in Scripture, it isn’t my intention to convert or to undermine or blaspheme. It’s my intention to understand the Story. I want to explore the Library that makes up the bedrock of the Western literary tradition. I want to find the archetypes that prototyped our modern archetypes.

Knowing these archetypes will help us become better writers. Understanding the foundation of Western literature will make us better readers, which in turn, makes us better writers. For those of us who believe, I hope it makes us better believers. For those who don’t believe, I hope it helps you understand why some of us do. Ultimately, this line of thought states that believing in the power of story improves our abilities to read and write.

For my Archetypes of Scripture Series, I will be using multiple Bible translations, mainly the Revised Standard Version: Second Catholic Edition (RSV-2ce); the Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition (RSV-c); and the Douay-Rheims Version (DRV). I will use them interchangeably, depending on how I feel about the specific translation. Some are prettier than others or use more accurate language or better express what I’m getting at. I will always try to cite my translation.

Jonah, Reluctant Hero

As stated above, the Bible is an epic, meaning that the books make reference to each other, or characters may appear in more than one book. Jonah is first referenced in 2 Kings 14:25. But let’s leave that aside for the moment and focus on the text of the Book of Jonah.

Jonah begins with the Call to Adventure.

1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amit′tai, saying, ²“Arise, go to Nin′eveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”
[RSV-c Jonah 1:1-2]

Hearing this, Jonah immediately flees.

³But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare, and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
[RSV-c Jonah 1:3]

There’s an economy of language common to Scripture and other ancient texts. The action is immediate, there is no time to breath between the Call to Adventure and the Refusal of the Call. The story begins it’s climb and it only has a few stops before it comes to the climax. Likewise, the denouement is as equally swift and in the case of the Book of Jonah, painfully brief.

Let’s take a quick detour to explain what I mean when I use these terms.

The Call to Adventure was coined by Joseph Campbell, likewise was the Refusal to the Call. These phrases are the first and second parts of the Hero’s Journey as outlined in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The Chosen One is the hero, the protagonist, the one called to the adventure, the one who will complete the quest. The Hero’s Journey can take on multiple forms, usually called Masculine and Feminine. Masculine/Feminine in this context has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the type of journey; the Masculine is outer, usually marked by self-sacrifice, while the feminine is inner, marked by self-discovery. All good stories incorporate elements of both archetypal journeys.

In the Book of Jonah, Jonah is the Chosen One, he hears the call and he refuses it, choosing to flee to Tarshish instead of going to Nineveh. But why—the reader may ask—does Jonah choose the flee?

The Book of Jonah doesn’t really provide any detail. Like all ancient texts, we must do a little assuming. Often, ancient writers left out details because they assumed their audiences already knew why something was the way it was. Without reading the rest of the Bible, we may be a little confused.

Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city now located in Mosul of modern-day Iraq. The Book of Jonah takes place in the Eighth Century BC but it was probably written after the Babylonian Captivity (or Exilic Period). This tells us that it probably isn’t meant to be taken historically, although Jonah is a historic figure. The point of this story is to tell a story. It tells the truth in the way all good stories tell the truth.

All this is to say that the Assyrians were more than just Gentiles to the ancient Hebrews, they were their captors and oppressors. Jonah, an Israelite, rightly sees them as the enemies of the Lord. Why would he go to Nineveh to preach repentance? They might actually repent and then Jonah’s enemies will be spared destruction.

So, returning to the narrative, Jonah is on a ship for Tarshish.

⁴But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.
[RSV-c Jonah 1:4]

The sailors begin to panic and pray to their various gods. But Jonah, who knows why the storm is happening, doesn’t panic at all. In fact, he’s asleep in the hold, utterly unbothered by the danger. Jonah is exhibiting the main theme of the Book of Jonah, trust in the Lord. The Captain, angrily, says to Jonah: “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call upon your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we do not perish.” [RSV-2ce Jonah 1:6]

Lots are cast in order to figure out who’s to blame for the storm. Cleromancy, or the casting of lots has the Greek origin of klêros meaning “lot,” “inheritance,” or even “that which is assigned.” Cleromancy is used 47 times in the Bible, especially as a way to discern the Will of God.

The lot falls upon Jonah and the sailors interrogate him, demanding to know where he’s from and what god he worships. Jonah tells them that he is a Hebrew and that the Lord is his god. He then gives them some advice: “Take me up and throw me into the sea.” [RSV-2ce Jonah 1:12] The sailors hesitate. They don’t want Jonah’s blood on their hands. They try to bring the ship back to land but the storm just gets stronger, ultimately indicating that the Lord wants Jonah as a sacrifice.

¹⁴Therefore they cried to the Lord, “We beseech thee, O Lord, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood; for thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased thee.” ¹⁵So they took up Jonah and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. ¹⁶Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
[RSV-c Jonah 1:14-16]

Thus is the inheritance of the Chosen One. For the hero, destiny can be ridiculed, it can be ignored, even fled for a time. But in the end, it will swallow you whole.

In Jonah’s case, he is literally swallowed up by his destiny.

The Lord appoints a fish to swallow Jonah. Famously, Jonah remains in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, foreshadowing the perfected hero archetype of Jesus Christ.

While in the belly of the fish, Jonah prays to the Lord in a beautiful piece of poetry sometimes called the Psalm of Thanksgiving or Jonah’s Prayer of Deliverance. “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” [RSV-2ce Jonah 2:9]

Jonah, now having vowed to do as he’s been called to do, is unceremoniously vomited up onto dry land.

This is the lynchpin of the Reluctant Hero’s arc. After fleeing the adventure, the hero is always caught up by it. The way the snare is set is how great stories differentiate and become varied. Perhaps a loved one is killed? or an unrefusable offer is made? or the character simply makes the choice to stop ignoring the call? Regardless of method, the Reluctant Hero is made to finally embrace their destiny and, most importantly, they embrace the consequences of that destiny.

This archetype, I believe, is most easily seen in the Lord of the Rings. Hobbits are not the adventurous type, but when fate comes asking questions in the Shire, Frodo is forced to flee where he is quickly caught up in events much larger than himself. He eventually accepts his fate, and to contrast with Jonah, he makes the choice to take the Ring, not to please anyone, but because it is the right thing to do. He knows the journey will be fraught with difficultly and that he may lose a part of himself, or even loose his life. But Frodo is the Ringbearer. In a series about reluctant Chosen Ones, Frodo is preeminent.

Now back on dry land, the Lord tells Jonah a second time, “go to Nineveh.” This time, Jonah goes. Nineveh is a great city, according to the Book of Jonah, it’s “three day’s journey in breadth.” Jonah walks one day’s journey into the city and cries, saying, in forty days’ time, Nineveh will be overthrown.

Miraculously, the people of Nineveh believe him. They proclaim a fast and put on sackcloth. The message makes its way to the king of the city, who rises from his throne, puts on sackcloth and sits in ashes. He decrees that all men and their animals will fast, taking neither food or water. He orders them to wear sackcloth and to cry out to God and turn from their evil ways.

Take a moment to imagine how funny sheep, cows, chickens, and other animal would look in sackcloth. This image, I believe, is purposefully amusing and marks a deliberate choice of the author to plant his tongue in is cheek.

The Lord sees that people of Nineveh (and their animals) repent, and “God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them; and he did not do it.” [RSV-2ce Jonah 3:10]

The fourth and final chapter of Jonah speeds towards the end just as swiftly as the first sped to the action. Jonah, angry because the Ninevites repented and were spared destruction, prays to the Lord: “I pray thee, Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil. Therefore now, O Lord, take my life from me, I beseech thee, for it is better for me to die than to live.” [RVS-c Jonah 4:2-3]

Jonah is quite the stubborn fool and, in a sense, like a teenager. Angry that his enemies have been spared, he declares that he’d rather be dead. “I’d rather be dead than have a father like you!” the Lord answers in trademark laconicism; “Do you do well to be angry?” [RSV-2ce 4:4]

Still mad, Jonah leaves Nineveh and pitches a tent east of the city in order to watch Nineveh. There is nothing that betrays Jonah’s thoughts, but perhaps he hopes that the Ninevites were just putting it on for his benefit and they’ll be destroyed not just for being idolatrous oppressors, but because they’re liars too.

Instead, the Lord makes a plant grow over Jonah so that he has some shade from the heat of the sun. This makes Jonah happy, despite his attitude, despite his unwillingness to attend properly to the call, the Lord still cares for Jonah. But, like any good parent, this is a teaching moment. The next day, the Lord sends a worm to wither the plant. The Lord then makes a hot wind and makes the sun beat upon Jonah.

Disappointed, and now, hot and tired, Jonah again declares that it would better to be dead.

But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?”^[^d^] And he said, “I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” ¹⁰And the Lord said, “You pity the plant,^[^e^] for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. ¹¹And should not I pity Nin′eveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”
[RSV-c Jonah 4:9-11]

And that’s how the Book of Jonah ends. Of course, there’s still plenty to break down here. For one, the journey almost doesn’t seem complete. Is Jonah a better person? Does he understand what the Lord was trying to do?

I think the best way to examine this ending is to see it as an imperfect blend of both the masculine and feminine journey. We aren’t told that a profound inner change came upon Jonah, its barely even implied. But, assuming that he was changed, Jonah has undergone the feminine journey which is characterized by a deep, inner expansion of the self. Jonah has learned something about his god. A facete of the Lord is revealed to Jonah, a piece, that frankly, isn’t always easy to find in the Old Testament.

“Should I not pity Nineveh?” God asks and for the Christian this is clearly the voice of God the Son.

Knowing this, we can see how Jonah is also participating in the masculine journey. He has learned something new that will aide his people in the future. More so, he has confirmed a piece of ancient knowledge already known but forgotten in the turmoil of the Exilic Period.

As I said above, the Book of Jonah was probably written after the Babylonian Captivity. The Hebrews needed to relearn the mercy of the Lord. Yes, that’s right. I’m arguing that the text itself is the secret knowledge found at the center of the masculine journey. That means that every reader (at every time, anywhere, etc) is participating in the Hero’s Journey.

Writing and reading are participatory. You should read like you’ve heard the call to adventure and you should write like you’re calling the reader to adventure.

Never underestimate the power of these tropes. That word has been getting a lot of bad press lately, but there’s a reason why these foundational stories are so powerful. Breaking them down or imploding them can be useful for a time, but ultimately, when embraced, these tropes underline the journey of the human soul, from life to death and maybe even beyond.

Above: Jonah and the Whale, a fraction of the Verdun Altar at the Klosterneuburg Monastery in Austria. Nicholas of Verdun (1130 – 1205). Enamel on metalwork (Champlevé). Housed in the Chapel of St. Leopold, Klosterneuburg Monastery, Austria.

April 1, 2023 0