Other Notable Blogs

Cafe Unknown
Travel, History and Portland Oregon by Dan Haneckow

Jack Bog's Blog
By Jack Bogdanski of Portland, Oregon. (Like he needs any other introduction by now? -- A.B.C.)

For Portlanders Only
"Why buy a mattress anywhere else?"

Good Stuff NW
Featuring stuff that is good in the NW

LOST Magazine
LOST Magazine is an online monthly magazine that combines elements of many other literary, online, and national magazines with a singular mission--to reclaim in writing lost people, places, and things.

Mapes on Politics
Way West of the Beltway

Outside Is America
A journal about photography, roadtrips, trains and life, with occasional detours into movies, baseball, music, family and more.

The Photographers' Railroad Page
Good photos usually have good stories to go with them.... The goal of The Photographers' Railroad Page is to provide an outlet for top quality photographs and their story.

Portland Food & Drink
Throwing Ourselves on the Grenade of Bad Food to Save You

Portland Transport Blog
A Conversation About Access & Mobility in the Portland/Vancouver Region

PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media -- and booksellers

Rambling West
The musings of a farmer with a typewriter and camera

Stumptown Confidential
Documenting Portland, Oregon architecture, history, and culture through photos, postcards, and words.

The Unauthorized Observer
Observations on faith, photography, trains, baseball, the city where I live (Fullerton, Calif.), anything that I find funny (a lot of things) or irritating (some things) and various incidents involving friends and family.

Under the Weather
...the open road, fatherhood, family life, music, railroads, photography, popular and unpopular culture, sex, violence, religion, the oppression of consumerism and capitalism and the general bullshit that makes up modern life.

Urban Planning Overlord
A blog to counter the myths, lies, and demagoguery others use against sound city planning to further their own ends, fair and foul - but also to urge the profession itself to pull back from the occasional wretched PC exces.

VanPortlander
Living in Vancouver; working in Portland. I have some thoughts.

Whiskey, Texas
...life and experiences in Texas and the Southwest. Recurring themes: Photography, railroads, fading ads / ghost signs, fallen-flag railroad logos, boxcars, bicycling, Texas music, pop culture, sports, road trips, literature, kids and family.

World Scott
The Travel Writing and Photography of Scott Lothes

Blegs & Bargains

 Amazon Book Wishlist

 B&H Wishlist

 My eBay Listings

 Powell's Books Wishlist

Monday, January 23, 2006

My earliest writing was always fiction. It became an outlet for my creativity, an outlet I could turn my skill in fantasies and daydreams into something more useful, or at least more accepted. And through it, I learned a great deal of freedom in writing, the form known as prose, a sort of blank-verse poetic narrative. In so many ways, my fiction allowed me not only creative outlet, but the ability to participate in a world that circumstances and finances would not allow me to join just yet. Others went on vacations, flew the world, saw the sights. I imagined them. I made myself important through my characters, gave myself adventures and excitement of the kind that was rare in the real world. Much as someone reads a romance of old to be the hero, the pirate, the bandit, the soldier, I wrote myself these worlds. It was escape from the boredom of a dull teenagers' life.

Before I knew it, my twenties crept up upon me, and and before I knew it, I was immersed into a "real world" of my own. It was nothing so glamorous as the worlds I created, and in many cases pointless, but as I learned more and lived more in that world, I grew more and more to appreciate nonfiction. Why make up stories when we had such great and tragic ones to see every day? I could see greater suffering, greater betrayal, greater love, all on the streets I walked. And there was more market for those stories too. I felt I was truly involved in something of importance, Fiction suddenly became a great lie, for those who could not stick it out to learn the truth, for the lazy writer. The easy way out, and being a lie, also a pointless one. Who needed fiction, really?

Unfortunately, the more commercial my writing became, the less flexible and pleasant to my ear it became too. Nonfiction has a very binding, dry attachment to proper grammar. As I groaned under the chains of strict, rather Germanic rules -- many of which violated the very truth of language that was spoken on the streets I walked -- I began to feel empty. Something was missing, and I didn't know quite what.

Even as I had lost a taste for fiction, I was missing it. And movies like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as a series of very well written anime titles sent to me by a close friend, were enthralling me. Why? They're made up, they're stories, they're lies. No matter how enticing the worlds they paint are, what can one really learn from them? You'll never be a Hobbit or a King. No-one wields a sword and fixes the world these days. You can't fight the Nobles and bring Paradise to reality. You can't fly through space catching bad-guys and trying to find the woman you love, and defeating a man who was once your comrade and now was your hated enemy. What value was there to stories which made heros of people that you or I could never be? or even be similar to?

And yet. And yet my missing that writing. And yet the seductiveness of those worlds. Was it just me running away, or was there more?

***

Summer came, and I registered for school. I had not done schoolwork for six years, and had not been in a school environment for double that. I would be an older student, a "Non-Trad" as they are now known. But I wasn't nearly so worried about fitting in as making sure I could afford it, making sure my financial aid would stretch, because like all artists and wannabe artists, I was not well off. To secure the maximum amount of aid I could qualify for, I needed one more class, so as to become full time. There were only two classes that fit my schedule, one was English Composition, something that I really needed for my work as a journalist, and the other was English Literature. As fate had it, the first was full, the second was not.

I had had to go to Dallas for a convention during the first week of school, and since I was therefore missing my first two classes, the teacher had sent me the syllabus outlining the basics of the class, as well as the lesson plan. I had expected the usual sort of lit class, the kind you get in high school where you read something, then you write enough to prove you read it. Instead, I got a class that delved into the fundamentals of fiction, the why. Being proposed to me was the precept that fiction was merely another form, another medium to tell a story, another communication method. All very obvious, but what wasn't obvious was the defense of it's value; fiction was not a mock-reality, as I had so long felt. The lies, as I had put it, were not to deceive, not to give us worlds we would long for but never be able to inhabit, but shorthand. In the same way that fiction was free to abandon the restraints of proper grammar to achieve an effect that was more efficient at delivering it's message than a non-fiction sentence would, so, too, it abandons the logic and necessity of the factual world, to deliver it's message. Contrary to my escapist thoughts, fiction was meant to educate, teach, inspire, and communicate, just as any other method of writing, or just as any art form for that matter. Fiction is a giant metaphor. Through it can be said things that cannot be said in any other way, through it can be learned things that cannot be learned any other way. The parable, though fiction, was good enough for the Lord, so its lies are not falsehoods, only the efficiency of wit.

The value of fiction, then is the flexibility it has to tell stories too large and too complex to grasp in any other way.

Labels: Writing

Back to Top | Back to Contents

While the happy ending is much sought after by the average reader of a story, there is a very pertinent reason it should not be strived for by an author.

Most stories deal with adversity, often times with facing against an evil force. Usually the goal is to defeat this force, or at least to survive it.

But to go further and reward the hero for his defeat by giving him a "happy ending" cheapens the struggle. The logic becomes "struggle against an evil adversary so that you may be rewarded with earthly happiness." This means that, if you take away the earthly happiness, there is no reward, and therefore no longer a motive for standing up against the challenge placed before the protagonist. Additionally, it further distances the story from the reader, in the way that any strange invention of a fantasy never could. How many people actually have that "happy ending" in their lives? It is in many ways an entirely unrealistic pill for the reader to swallow.

Many Japanese legends and even anime deal differently, often ending in the death(s) of their main character(s). While this may at first seem cruel -- and there are many downsides to the Japanese model, including the heroic elevation of suicide and the lack of a sense of individual rights and needs -- there are upsides to this approach that are more consistent with the logic of a good story.

Two things stand out about the Japanese model. One, the need is less for the character to survive and/or be rewarded, and more to be true to themselves and their moral code. The second is the separation of the idea of defeating your enemy from reward or even survival.

The need to not be false, the need to defend your principles, even if they cost you your life, is a very noble precept and is a liberating, and ironically highly individualistic approach to a story. The second item that stands out, to die in your cause is not to become martyred or to commit suicide, but to undertake the role you must undertake, no matter the cost. It is in some ways the difference between the secular view of assisted suicide, and the Catholic model, wherein it is wrong to kill even for mercy, but it is acceptable to give mercy if the side effect may result in a hastened death.

From a narrative standpoint, ending a story arc with the death of the protagonist can often allow more closure than any other form, a sort of natural ending, rather than the constant question of "what happened then?"

One word of caution. Every story shouldn't end in death or an "unhappy ending". To create a world where evil always triumphs is the ultimate in disheartening literature. If the story must end with the evil undefeated, then there must be "survivors", there must be those who continue onwards. And in all cases, if the protagonist survives the end of the work, it must be done in a way that does not imply a happy ending, but at the same time must imply a sense of hope, which is all any of us can realistically expect in our own lives. It is also a pattern that the reader can identify with from their own lives, and therefore bring the story to a more meaningful position. One of the great reasons that tragedies have held human attention, after all, is their believability, from a human nature standpoint.

Labels: Writing

Back to Top | Back to Contents