Things

Some things I’ve been thinking about but haven’t had time to write about:

1) Three=many, something that came up in the introduction of Number, a book I’ve been dabbling in. This is a very practical thing for a writer to know, it seems, as exemplifying ideas is key. How many times have I heard “Three makes a trend.”

2) Gerard Genette’s concept of a narrative - even one that’s extensive and complex - as the “expansion of a verb.” He describes the Homer’s Odyssey and Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu, for instance, as the amplification of statements such as “Ulysses comes home to Ithaca” or “Marcel becomes a writer.” This is very similar to the core meaning of stories that Jon Franklin discusses in Writing for Story. In developing a conceptual framework for understanding and writing stories, this concept strikes me as fundamental.

The next question then: How does one settle on such a core meaning to serve as the bones upon which to hang the flesh of a narrative? Why, for instance, is a Tom Clancy novel considered less weighty (less “important”) than, say, Michael Chabon or Norman Mailer? Franklin has a chapter in his book that addresses this issue and offers advice on hunting for stories.