Reading: The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison
Drinking: Tap water with lemon in it
Thinking about: Making a haunted castle dungeon for my Maze Rats campaign
Not writing: Any fiction. 🙁
Month: June 2020
The “Magna Carta” is an idea I discovered in No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty.
Basically, it’s a list of all the things — plot elements, character types, settings, themes, language, etc. — that you enjoy in a story. Then, with said list as inspiration, you can begin crafting your own story, filling it with as many things from your magna carta as possible, thus ensuring that your novel will be something you enjoy writing. We are all readers first, after all, so if we write what we enjoy reading we will create books that excite us.
I taught a Creative Writing class a couple of years ago, and I used the Magna Carta idea with my students (we also did the Anti-Magna Carta, which is from Baty’s book as well). I modeled it for them by creating my own Magna Carta for fantasy literature. I am not sure it’s an exhaustive list of the things I like, but it includes many elements that I enjoy. Some of them are easily found in today’s fantasy genre, but some (“Stories where violence doesn’t always save the day” or “Mothers and non-traditional protagonists”) are harder to come by (at least to my knowledge).
My Magna Carta for fantasy stories:
- Magical treasures
- Lots of magic (but it’s not commonplace)
- Magic that is numinous, mysterious, and unpredictable
- Magic that involves transformations
- Lost/forgotten empires
- Places/people/things being lost to the mists of time
- Dragons
- Female characters being skillful/having professions
- Characters who aren’t fighters still having an impact on the story
- Stories where violence doesn’t always save the day
- Desert settings
- Cosmopolitan cities
- Mysterious towers
- Sinister magicians
- People who can do a special craft
- Musicians
- Music
- Dungeon crawls
- Writing that is poetic and mythic
- Mothers and non-traditional protagonists
- Characters with lofty dreams
- Highly flawed characters who have to persevere
- Characters who need to atone
- Stories about forgiveness
- Stories where characters go on an inner journey as well as an outward journey
- Journeys to strange, new lands
I’m especially interested in women who have professions that aren’t the trope-y, “masculine” professions like assassin or soldier. I want to read (and write) stories about women who are craftspeople, midwives, brewers, scholars, cartographers, apothecaries, and more. I’m interested in women who are mothers who also GET TO HAVE ADVENTURES. Or perhaps a fantasy novel with an elderly person as the protagonist. I’m curious to see how such non-traditional protagonists would thrive in a fantastical world filled with danger and magic. I feel as if far too often, the “ordinary” folk who are tasked with a quest are either A.) young people or B.) “ordinary” men who used to be soldiers/warriors/wizards/ etc. George R.R. Martin explored some of these non-traditional protagonists in his A Song of Ice and Fire series (characters like Sansa and Catelyn), but he still stayed mostly in the realm of high-born people. Not many POVs from regular folk.
However, even though I’m interested in “regular folk” (especially mothers and elderly people), this doesn’t mean I want a low-magic story. What I really love seeing is how ordinary people deal with the numinous, the extraordinary, the strange, the magical. And preferably, they deal with these things in a non-violent way. Not that I don’t enjoy sword-play and action scenes (I do), but it would be nice to have more fantasy that didn’t lead to climactic battles and bloodshed. I’m guilty of this tendency myself; Merlin’s Last Magic, thus far, has lots of violence and killing. But in future stories and novels, I’m interested in exploring how to tell a rousing tale that doesn’t end with a big battle or a violent death.
Overall, the Magna Carta is a useful tool for writers. It’s not meant to limit or restrict writers from pursuing an idea that might not fit their “preferred list,” but instead, it gives them a clearer idea of what they love and what they’re interested in exploring. The things on my magna carta get me excited to start writing; they stir my imagination and feed my muse.
I am self-critical of my work. I am a perfectionist, so if my stories or essays or blog posts aren’t amazing/wonderful/mind-blowing/totally awesome, then I get down. Sometimes very down. I consider not writing anymore (or at least not sharing my writing anymore). Many days, I feel like a failure because I don’t have a big audience or lots of five-star reviews.
As a result of this self-criticism, I’ve been on the lookout lately for new metaphors to help me approach the writing process and the work I’m doing. Bradbury had this metaphor in Zen and the Art of Writing where he wrote about “stepping on landmines” first thing in the morning and then spending the rest of the day picking up the pieces. In other words, explode yourself — your memories, your ideas, all the things you’ve ever experienced — and see what pieces you can find to write about. Elsewhere in his interviews with Sam Weller, he mentioned jumping off a cliff and “building your wings on the way down.” I do like both of these metaphors (especially the wings one) because they advocate for courage, for jumping into the unknown, for not being afraid to do something shocking and see what happens. But both of them are inadequate for me because I don’t quite have that much courage, and also because they imply a goal or end-game at the heart of creative work. Jumping off the cliff means, “Build those wings or you’ll go SPLAT.” Stepping on the landmine and picking up the pieces means, “You had better pick up a good piece or you’re screwed.” They seem to be saying, “If you fail, then you’ll be toast.”
For a self-critical perfectionist like me, that’s not a great message. Not only do I have a fear of failing, but I think most of my work is a failure. I jump off the cliff but don’t build very good wings. I step on the landmine and can’t pick up the right pieces.
This is why I’m in need of new metaphors. Metaphors that encourage me and help get me past the fear of failure. Austin Kleon uses a garden metaphor for creative work in his book Keep Going. I like the garden metaphor, but there’s still a goal inherent in that one: what happens if I’m a terrible gardener and all my plants die?
I need a metaphor that has imperfection built-in.
This is why I’m attracted to the idea of writing as a form of “getting lost” or “wandering.” The wanderer, or rambler, has no fixed goal, no endpoint. She isn’t trying to get anywhere. For her, the whole point is to GET LOST. Wandering into the wilderness, adventuring with only a vague idea of where she’s going, traveling with a torn and faded map (ancient and indecipherable in parts). She’s willing to lose her way, to stumble through the forest.
What would writing look like that embraced this kind of ethos: that wandering is good, that getting lost is a happy accident?
I know the conventional wisdom would be that “wandering” and “getting lost” will result in a muddled, messy, incoherent story. Some might say, “That’s okay,” and suggest writers then do a lot of revision. But I’m getting less and less keen on doing major revisions in my writing. It takes me a long time to write stories and novels (due to lack of time); the thought of spending years and years writing and revising the same book sounds unpleasant. My goal is to write clean first drafts (minus the occasional typos and wonky sentences). By “cycling” through my draft as I write, I can avoid the need for major revisions.
And even more so, I think that “fix it in revision” is actually antithetical to the “getting lost” ethos. It suggests that the wandering is a mistake, something that needs to be fixed. If I have a destination in mind, then yes, getting lost is probably bad and I would need to course-correct. But what if I have no destination? What if the whole point is just to wander? To ramble and see where I end up? In that case, the “fix it in revision” model doesn’t work. If I’m not trying to get anywhere in particular, then what is there to fix?
This is what I like about the “wandering and getting lost” metaphor. When I go out for a walk, I often just walk around; I don’t have a fixed destination. I just ramble. But in my rambling, I discover beautiful things, I feel a wonderful sense of freedom, I get to enjoy myself without thinking about a “destination.” What if my own writing process could be like this? What if I could ramble, discover new things, feel that freedom, and enjoy myself? Would all my stories turn out like garbage? Would all my books end up incoherent and sloppy?
Maybe they would. Maybe this metaphor is not a good one, in the end.
But I kinda want to try. If nothing else, it’s a useful image for me to keep in my mind. When I sit down to write, I’m like the adventurer who wants to experience something new. I’m the wanderer with no fixed destination, only a desire for discovery. I’m the rambler who just wants to ramble, not get anywhere in particular. And by rambling, by getting lost along the way, I might discover something I never could’ve imagined otherwise.
As a Catholic, it angers me to no end when I see certain (white) Catholics in America dismissing the Black Lives Matter movement, as if the issue of racial justice isn’t something we as Catholics need to worry about. “What about abortion?” many of these folks often retort. I do believe that abortion is an evil, and that we need to work to help women not choose abortion, but being against abortion doesn’t mean we can’t also be against racism. I mean, this isn’t hard, people! Racism = evil. Systematic racism = evil. This is Catholic social teaching 101.
And yet, there are some Catholics in the U.S. who always want to put a stop to any discussion about injustice or oppression by saying, “What about abortion?” As if that’s all we need to worry about. No other problems here, folks! No siree!
The Church’s teachings about the dignity of the human person, it’s teachings about the sanctity of life, it’s teachings about justice: all of these things compel us, as Catholics, to do something about racism, to do something about inequality, to do something about violence perpetrated against marginalized people. If the person in the womb matters, then so do black lives.
Pope’s Francis’s words should be ringing in the ears of every American Catholic today:
“My friends, we cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life,” [the pope] said on Wednesday.
I hope that this moment can be a turning point for my fellow Catholics, especially those who don’t see the need to fight for racial justice. I know that I too need to do more. We are called upon to do this work. And if we don’t, we will be judged for it.
My parents always loved making a big deal out of birthdays, but my tenth birthday was by far the biggest deal they ever made. They decided we were going to drive to Chicago for a family trip (we lived in Michigan, for geographical frame of reference). Why Chicago? Why my tenth birthday? I have no idea, but I made no objections. Who wouldn’t want to go to Chicago for her birthday? We were going to stay at the Water Tower Place hotel, eat at Ed Debevic’s, visit the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium, AND — this is the thing my ten-year-old brain was inexplicably most excited about — we were going to bring a portable TV/VCR in the minivan so my brother and I could watch movies during the long drive (this anecdote tells you how old I am that DVD players and screens didn’t come pre-installed in vehicles).
We rented a slew of movies, but the one I remember most was The Hobbit — not Peter Jackson’s Hobbit franchise (which hadn’t been made yet) — the Rankin-Bass animated movie from the 1970s.
This movie… let’s just say, this movie will make a future appearance in The Things That Shaped Me series.
We watched it on the way to Chicago and then on the way home to Michigan, so it served as a bookend to the birthday trip, an opening act and a closing act. I was obsessed with The Hobbit — book and movie — and by extension, Middle-Earth. But only The Hobbit-version of Middle-Earth. I hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings yet. At ten-years-old, I wasn’t a good enough reader to handle the lengthier, weightier Rings books.
But I loved Tolkien’s world: the forests; the mountains; the dragons, goblins, elves, and dwarves. Mirkwood was as real to me as the little patch of woods that surrounded my grandmother’s house. The Misty Mountains were unspeakably enchanted, a world within a world filled with treasure, ancient lore, and shadowy creatures; I longed to travel there. And the map of the “Wilderlands” and Thorin’s map were like sacred manuscripts.
Although the trip to Chicago was exciting, what I wanted more than anything for my tenth birthday was something much simpler, and at the same time much stranger: I wanted the boxed set for MERP: Middle-Earth Role-Playing.
Back in those days, I had never played a role-playing game before. Frankly, I didn’t have anyone to play a role-playing game with. But I wanted MERP. The cover illustration alone was worth it. Also, there was something dangerously appealing about role-playing games. These games came with a dark reputation back in the 80s and early 90s. I was forbidden to play D&D; I had to work hard convincing my parents that other RPGs were okay and not gateways to Satanism. Somehow, I convinced them that MERP was alright. Maybe they figured a Tolkien-influenced game couldn’t be too bad. But the mystique, the forbidden quality of RPGs was still there, even if the cover said “Middle-Earth Role-Playing” and not “Dungeons and Dragons.”
The old MERP game came in a box, with the core book and several other supplements, including cardboard playing pieces and two ten-sided dice. Whenever I see pictures of the old MERP books — the core book, the different supplement books for the peoples and creatures of Middle-Earth — an overwhelming wave of nostalgia washes over me. I can’t quite explain it; like all old memories, it’s both intense and inexplicable. I can see and smell and sense all the moments from those old days, but I cannot make you see and smell and sense them in the same way. Memories are like dreams; once we start to tell about them, they inevitably lose their magic, they become pedestrian and plain, they don’t capture the electricity and potency of what we see in our heads. Opening that box-set on my birthday and seeing those Angus McBride illustrations, holding the cardboard cut-outs and the ten-sided dice — it’s a feeling I find hard to describe. When the opening pages of the core book promised that “this game lets you step out of this world and stride boldly into Middle-earth,” I believed it: I was going to stride into Middle-Earth. I was going to experience adventures I’d never experienced before.
This memory is so strong, so central to my childhood, that I know I cannot convey to you what it really felt like. Flipping through the old MERP books brings me back to the past, to being ten-years-old, to being in the backseat of our minivan, watching the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, to being a kid who loved fantasy and who felt like she had to hide that love from the outside world. And there was the forbidden danger of role-playing games: the thrill of reading something that was maybe a bit too adult, a bit too beyond my ken.
Whenever I look at those MERP books now, after all these years, I feel the excitement of ten-year-old me, the sense that I’m about to embark on a strange, unknown, wondrous adventure — like Bilbo stepping outside his door to find the Lonely Mountain. But how can I make you feel these same feelings, or catch a glimpse of what they mean to me? I can’t. I can only hope that perhaps you loved MERP as a kid too, or that you know what it feels like to watch The Hobbit while the moon is rising between the clouds on a summer’s night.
