My student, Cameron, is writing for 20 minutes, so I’m going to use this time to write my blog for today. Cameron is sitting over in one of our recliners with her feet up, her computer in her lap, and a cup of Tetley’s tea on the table beside her. She is 15-years-old, already a serious fiction writer, and she has been my writing student since she was ten. She just won a Bronze medal for a short story with the Scholastic Artists and Writers contest – her third bronze in the same number of years – and she is hell-bent on winning at least a Silver or a Gold in next year’s contest. Right now she’s beginning a new short story, one based on the modern version of a Greek myth. We’ll see how she fares by the end of this 20 minute period, a good method to get the juices flowing without too much commitment.
As for me, I’m sitting at the round table in my living room with Aristotle’s Poetics on one side of my computer and Christopher Vogler’s The Writers Journey on the other. I also have a handout that I just read to Cameron that I printed up from the Internet entitled “Aristole’s Ideas About Tragedy,” which is a summary of some of the key points in Poetics. The most interesting of Aristotle’s ideas – at least for me – is the one on the plot of the tragedy. It reads:
The plot of a tragedy also involves some horrible or evil deed. The tragic hero either does it consciously, does it out of ignorance, or mediates it (makes it easy for the deed to happen). For the audience to be horrified by the evil deed, the evil has to be done to someone important to the tragic hero. If the hero kills his enemy, the deed won’t seem so bad. On the other hand, if the hero kills someone he doesn’t care about, the audience won’t care much either. To make it really horrible for the audience, Aristotle suggested that the evil deed should be done to a family member.
This illustrates why the story of Oedipus is such a compelling tragedy. After all, what evil deed could be worse than killing your father and “marrying” your mother? Murder and incest. I’d say that’s right up there at the top of societal taboos.
Cameron loves dark subjects despite the fact that she is a brown-eyed blonde wisp of a girl. Underneath that ponytail lurks the mind of a serious scribe of tragedies, with stories that rival poor Oedipus’s. I am eager to see what evil she will describe in the pages of her latest story.
Commenti