Always a Subtext

"The audience knows that people rarely, if ever, understand themselves, and if they do, they’re incapable of complete and honest self-explanation.  There’s always a subtext."

- Robert McKee. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 377

A Story Can't Be Verbatim

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"A storyteller is a life poet, an artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words—a two hour metaphor that says: Life is like this Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived.  A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what’s obvious to everyone on the street."

- Robert McKee. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 25

One Text - Multiple Pictures

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"The reader can apply what is for him an accurate picture to a word."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 68

I find it amazing that our minds can paint completely different pictures based upon the same text. We have so many different interpretations. If you doubt that, you've probably never enjoyed a book only to be let down by a movie adaptation.

Writers & Readers - Give and Take

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"Writers provide language that can evoke feeling; we readers supply the experience."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 107

This give and take between writer and reader is fascinating. We use our experience when reading to identify with the character. The writer hopes that we will be able to do so and thus evoke an emotion in us. This is the greatest form of entertainment. Living and experiencing through each other's stories.

It's All Connected

"In memory, the images are connected like events and characters in a story."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 81

This quote reminds me of the book The Modular Brain, in which examples are shown to illustrate how the brain is connected in ways that allow it to function differently according to the patient; perhaps like how stories function through characters.

Fiction is the Best Medium

"Fiction is the best medium for providing contexts for feelings by using language the reader may not be able to supply for herself."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 111

I agree. Fiction allows us to experience things we cannot even vocalize. We can identify with a character or situation and this can free us somehow. It is an amazing power that fiction has.

I can understand why Gold uses fiction to help his patients. This book is inspiring in so many ways. I always knew that there was a lot of truth in fiction. Gold shows us how this is indeed the case. It's a great book.

What is Archplot?

"Classical design is not a Western view of life.  For thousands of years, from the Levant to Java to Japan, the storytellers of Asia have framed their works within the Archplot. . . . The Archplot is neither ancient nor modern, Western nor Eastern; it is human."

- Robert McKee Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 62

Musicians Tell Stories

"I really haven't had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I'd rather tell a story about somebody else."

- Kurt Cobain

The Entire Human Community

"Thomas Berry writes . . .

Any human activity must be seen primarily as an activity of the universe and only secondarily as an activity of the individual. . . .

For the first time the entire human community has, in this story, a single creation or origin myth."

- David Leeming. Myth: A Biography of Belief. Oxford University Press, 2002 pg 161

- Original quote taken from Lonergan, Annie and Caroline Richards. Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1988. pg 37

Even The Big Man is Still Writing The Story

"God built the world, and on the seventh day He rested. And on the eighth? Perhaps things started to evolve, to change - perhaps God started an endless revision in search of a final story."

- Bryan Russell from the Alchemy of Writing

The Truth is Hidden Within Us

"Maybe there is a universal truth embedded in everyone's soul.

Maybe we all have the same story hiding inside
like a shared constant in our DNA.

Maybe this collective truth is responsible for the similarity in all our stories.

Truth has a power
and if we all gravitate towards similar ideas,
maybe we do so because those ideas are true,
written deep within is
and when we hear the truth,
even if we don't understand it,
we fell that truth resonate within us,
vibrating with our unconscious wisdom.

Perhaps the truth is not learned by us,
but rather

REcalled

REmembered

REcognized

as that which is already inside us."

- transcribed from the audio book presentation of "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown

Stories Are Useful Tools

"Stories are the most helpful tools a child has for sorting this all out. Stories have authority. Stories normalize. Stories model behaviour and feeling. Stories model the power to make stories – a power that children must develop in order to manage their own particular individual worlds, the ones seen through their own unique eyes."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 153

Good Repartee

"Here is what Star Helmer, vice president of Harlequin, said about her books:

Good repartee is something that people generally talk about why they like romances, if they’re getting into specifics.  Most people when they’re angry and they’re getting in an argument do not have the witty, precise comebacks.  You usually think about it two days later and say, oh, you know, why didn’t I think of it?"

Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 298

Moral Instruction in Story Form

"Jesus knew this value of stories as related to experience very well, and put his moral instruction into story form."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 163

Science Can't - Religion Can't - Story Can

"Science, once the great explicator, garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Who can listen without cynicism to economists, sociologists, politicians? Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our faith in traditional ideologies diminishes, we turn to the source we still believe in: the art of story."

- Robert McKee. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 12

The Magic is in the Book

"It’s better to transmit these nursery rhymes . . . with the aid of a book, so that the value and authority of the book are present from the start, and so that the magic remains in the book."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 156

Parents, please make sure to read to your kids when they are young so that they can appreciate the magic that is in a book.

What a great message!

Santa Prepares Us for Disillusionment

Doctor Weekes: "Most children in America are subjected to a particular from of indoctrination from their earliest years, in which they are repeated reinforced in their belief of a powerful figure who does not actually exist. However, evidence is given to them to support that belief by stories to make the child believe that the whole world believes in this particular mythic figure."

Step: "You're saying Stevie's problems are because we taught him to believe in Santa Claus?"

Doctor Weekes: "On the contrary, I think Santa Claus is, by and large, quite beneficial. When the child is finally allowed or forced to recognize the non-existence of Santa Claus, then the child is able to go through the vital intellectual process of reconstructing reality in light of new evidence, complete with back-forming new stories to account for past events. This prepares the child for many other disillusionments and gives her vital and well-supported experience is maintaining her grip on reality independent of the stories told to he at any given time."

Step: "So Santa Claus is good."

Doctor Weekes: "Santa Claus is not usually maladaptive and can be turned to a good end. I doubt many parents have that in mind when they tell them the ludicrous chimney story."

Step: "No I imagine not."

- transcribed from Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys audio book

Stories Can Be Expressed Different Ways

"Stories do not need to be written to be told. Stories can be expressed any way human beings can communicate."

- Robert McKee. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 27

Image-Based Communication vs Traditional Storytelling

"I’m saying that when Gutenberg invented moveable type in 1454 people feared the oral tradition of storytelling would be replaced, lost, or regarded as a lower form of communication.  They were upset that information previously communicated by word-of-mouth was now being written, coded in text, and that access to this information would be restricted to only those persons who could read – which in many cases, is exactly what happened.  Now book people. the literati, are upset because the world is adopting a more image-based communication system, because we’re telling stories and sharing information via pictures."

- Gordon J.H. Leenders. May Not Appear Exactly As Shown. pg 91

What Stories Do

"Stories can give us ways to arrange what we see and experience, can give us the material for conversation, can help us to make contact with our grandchildren by reading to them."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 330

I really like this book. It really explains what stories do and how we use them to organize our thoughts and make sense of our world.