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Overview
In his widely read guides How to Write a Damn Good Novel and How to Write a Damn Good Novel II: Advanced Techniques, popular novelist and fiction-writing coach James N. Frey showed tens of thousands of writers how--starting with rounded, living, breathing, dynamic characters--to structure a novel that sustains its tension and development and ends in a satisfying, dramatic climax.
Now, in The Key, Frey takes his no-nonsense, "Damn Good" approach and applies it to Joseph Campbell's insights into the universal structure of myths. Myths, says Frey, are the basis of all storytelling, and their structures and motifs are just as powerful for contemporary writers as they were for Homer. Frey begins with the qualities found in mythic heros--ancient and modern--such as the hero's special talent, his or her wound, status as an "outlaw," and so on. He then demonstrates how the hero is initiated--sent on a mission, forced to learn the new rules, tested, and suffers a symbolic death and rebirth--before he or she can return home. Using dozens of classical and contemporary novels and films as models, Frey shows how these motifs and forms work their powerful magic on the reader's imagination.
The Key is designed as a practical step-by-step guide for fiction writers and screen writers who want to shape their own ideas into a mythic story.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429932288 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 274 |
| Sales rank: | 919,167 |
| File size: | 416 KB |
About the Author
James N. Frey is the author of two internationally best-selling books on the craft of fiction writing, How to Write a Damn Good Novel and How to Write a Damn Good Novel II: Advanced Techniques, as well as nine novels. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Extension, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Oregon Writers' Colony, and he is a featured speaker at writers' conferences throughout the United States and in Europe. He lives with his--he says, "truly heroic"--wife, Liza, in Berkeley, California.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Awesome Power of Myth
The Storyteller's Magic
As a storyteller, you practice a kind of magic, the most powerful magic on earth. You are a mythopoet, a maker of myth, and it is myth that consciously and subconsciously guides every human being on this planet, for good or ill.
Bunk, you say. Myths are old and dead and have no meaning to modern man.
Better think again.
Think about communism and its mythology. One-fourth of the people on earth still live under communism, despite the recent changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The communists constructed a mythology that they called "scientific." But as Martin Day in The Many Meanings of Myth (1984) points out, "The blissful perfection of its ultimate goal, anarchy, follows the party line of Elysium Islands of the Blest, Valhalla, Utopia, New Atlantis, Erewhon, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain."
Millions of people are being imprisoned and put to death in the name of the communist myth in Cuba, Serbia, China, and Tibet. And many more will die in its name before the myth is dead and buried.
We in the West, too, have our mythologies. The Free Man, as an example. Think you're a "free" American? Tell it to the IRS.
Happiness is a new Buick, the ad men tell us. Smoking will make you good- looking and bristling with health, they told us for years, and look how many millions believed it! Thousands of deaths a year are caused by smoking in the United States, a catastrophe of epic proportions — yet the Marlboro Man ropes in scores of new smokers every hour. Martin Day concludes that modern man, "shorn of his rhetoric and his pretense," is governed by his mythical dreams just as much as are the "Trobriand Islanders and the Kwakiutl Indians."
Be careful when you say something is "just a myth."
The hundreds of Spanish conquistadors who gave their lives looking for the Fountain of Youth are ample testament to the power of myth. So were the Nirvana- seeking Buddhist monks in Saigon during the Vietnam War who poured gasoline on themselves and set themselves on fire while sitting in the lotus position. So are the screaming teenage girls at a rock concert. All have been swallowed up by mythic images.
Aping the mythic figures of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Hopalong Cassidy, young Americans a generation ago headed off to Vietnam to "kick a little ass." The myth of the all-powerful American cowboy hero ran into the brick wall of reality. It's no coincidence that as America came to the realization that the ass-kicking image of itself was false, the popularity of Western films and books collapsed. The myth of the invincible Western hero was dead.
Remember the story of Pandora from Greek mythology? She's the young woman who, out of curiosity, disobeyed a rule from On High and opened a box (some say a jar) she wasn't supposed to open, and in so doing let loose all the evils of the world.
You could search the wide world over, and you wouldn't find a single individual who thinks that the evils of the world can be blamed on poor, maligned Pandora. The old gal is dead now and is dismissed as "just a myth" by every single human being on the planet.
But you will have no trouble at all finding people who believe it is manifestly true that the evils of the world can be blamed on a young woman named Eve, who disobeyed a rule from On High and ate an apple she shouldn't have, and that brought evil into the world. To hundreds of millions of true believers, the Adam and Eve myth is absolutely, historically true. Millions of faithful believe it is as true as the fact that the sun shines in the daytime. For them, the Adam and Eve myth is a working myth.
In fact, the church to which I belong teaches that the Adam and Eve story happened to real people, just the way it's set down in the Good Book. In my church, if you dared suggest that the Adam and Eve business in the Garden of Eden was "just a myth" made up to explain the mysterious workings of nature to a primitive people, as is the case with Pandora, you would be hooted down, jeered, and branded a blasphemer; you might even be stoned in the parking lot.
When a myth is believed as true, it's a powerful force. People have been killing each other over myths and their interpretation since, well, who knows? Probably since before Pandora opened the box and before Eve tasted that juicy red pippin, which, by the way, many scholars now believe was actually a pomegranate.
Hundreds of millions of people in the world believe Muhammad leaped into Heaven, leaving behind a hole in the ground in the shape of a foot where he launched himself. They also believe that if you die in a jihad, a holy war, you go right to Heaven. In fact, millions of eager young men proved the force of the myth by charging machine guns while screaming, "God is great!" in one of the bloodiest wars in human history, the Iranian-Iraqi war of 1980 to 1988, which had 2.7 million casualties, including over a million deaths. To the soldiers who so gleefully martyred themselves, there was no question about it: the Muhammadan myth is manifestly true; Muhammad leaped into Heaven, and you can go there too if you die in a jihad.
Just a myth, you say?
Because of the power of men to create myth, Percy Shelley, the nineteenth- century poet, called poets and fiction writers "the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
When Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther came out in 1814, it was an instant success. It was the story of a young man so obsessed by an unrequited love that he kills himself — a monomythic story of a hero transformed (albeit in a negative way) by love. Over the next few decades, hundreds of young men were found dead with a pistol in one hand, a love note in the other, and a copy of Young Werther in their back pockets.
Just a myth, you say?
When Secretary of the Interior Seward met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), he said, "So this is the young lady who started it all." He meant the War Between the States, of course. Her story, a monomythic masterpiece, was largely a product of her imagination; it depicted slavery as hell on earth and gave impetus to the abolitionist movement and the already-growing war fever.
So would you say her fantastic creation, which led to one of the bloodiest wars in history, was just a myth?
To say the pen is mightier than the sword is to trivialize the pen. The pen is far mightier than a sword; it's mightier than an atom bomb. Mightier than all the atom bombs ever created.
See Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), and you can see the effect of the Nazi myth on its followers. Myth indeed is a potent force.
You, as a fiction writer, have the pen in your hand. What you create may have an enormous impact on individuals, communities, nations, the world — and world history.
The ancient peoples of the world knew the power of the word. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, God created the heavens and the earth not by waving a magic wand, but by speaking words. The ancients believed that your soul was your breath; that words, created by breath, came from your soul, from the immortal part of your being; hence, they were sacred. And powerful.
The Gospel of John in the New Testament begins: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
And the Word ... was God.
Indeed it was. And still is.
The Evolution of Storytelling
Reflect for a moment on the first storytellers.
Human beings first began to bury objects with their dead — jewelry, weapons, pottery, and so on — around a hundred thousand years ago, the archaeologists tell us. These people must have had some notion of life after death — otherwise, what's the point of throwing perfectly good jewelry, weapons, and cooking pots into a hole in the ground?
No one knows when humans began to speak. Language perhaps started out with nothing more than grunts. It must have developed slowly over untold millennia. But certainly by the beginning of the Stone Age — when people were cooperating in hunting large beasts, making villages, and trading with other tribes or clans — language was probably developed enough for hunters to return from the hunt to tell of the excitement of almost killing the huge, woolly mammoth that got away.
Storytelling perhaps began as tales of hunters and gatherers. It is likely that, as with the hunting and fishing and golfing tales today, things had a tendency to get exaggerated. The imagination begins to take over, and the woolly mammoth starts to breathe fire, and, before you know it, you have dragons, giants, and flying horses. The imagination is indeed a curious and powerful thing.
Try putting a dish towel over your hand, pulling it tight, and tucking it in under you thumb. Tell a three-year-old that this is "Igor," who's looking for magic apples, and the kid will quickly join in the search. For the child there's not much difference between Igor and the magic of the TV, which brings Bugs Bunny into the living room at the push of a button.
The depth of feeling a child may have toward a character in a story is truly astounding. I've seen my own children cover their ears when I — as the wolf in the story — said, "Little pig, little pig, let me come in, or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll bloooooooooooow your house in!"
Mythologist Leo Frobenius once related the story of a professor friend of his who, being bugged by his four-year-old daughter, gave her three burned matches to play with, calling them Hansel, Gretel, and the witch, and went back to his scholarly pursuits. A while later, the little girl ran to him, terrified, screaming, "Daddy! Daddy! Take the witch away!"
The primitive storyteller sitting at the campfire at night was creating many scary images for his or her audience. Primitive storytellers, looking into the eyes of their audience, could see them grow large, could see their listeners fall into a trance state as the story was being told. They had a distinct advantage over modern storytellers, who can only see the words on the computer screen and must imagine their effect on the reader.
The power of the storyteller to put a reader into a trance state is the source of the storyteller's magic.
If you were to put electrodes on the head of your reader, you would find that as the reader becomes more and more absorbed into the story world — the fictive dream — the brain waves would actually change, resulting, in effect, in a trance state.
Science has discovered that readers of romance novels produce endorphins in their brains. Endorphins are chemically identical to morphine, an extremely addictive drug. Astonishing as it sounds, the romance reader, in fact, becomes physically addicted to romances.
A dope pusher may get hundreds of people addicted. A fiction writer can get them addicted by the millions. The storyteller's magic power is truly immense.
Once upon a time a young lad of my acquaintance was madly in love with a comely lass who had moved from the San Francisco Bay area to Seattle to study the art of dentistry. He stayed behind to pursue his career as a magazine editor. At Christmastime, the lad booked a flight to Seattle to visit the lass. Eager was he to be reunited with his true love. On the way to the plane he stopped to buy a book to read on his journey. He chose Stephen King's The Different Seasons. He arrived at the departure gate a little early (being anxious to get his journey under way) and took a seat near the counter to await being called to board. He began reading the novel.
Although but a few feet from the counter, and wide awake, he did not hear his flight announced, did not notice the throngs of people tramping past him to get onto the plane, did not hear his name being called repeatedly. He missed all this, because Stephen King had cast a spell on him. The lad had become so absorbed into the story world that the real world went away.
Such is the power of storytelling.
Clearly, the early storytellers used the phenomena of the natural world as material for their stories. Why is it, the early Greeks must have wondered, that the laurel tree didn't lose its leaves in winter? The storytellers explained it with a story: Daphne was a fair maid, first love of Apollo, but alas, Cupid had shot her with a negative love arrow, and therefore she could love no man — or god. Apollo pursued her with all his will (a sexual harassment case if ever there was one), and, in her desperation, Daphne prayed to Peneus, the river god, to help her. Peneus changed her into a laurel tree. Since she couldn't be Apollo's wife, he made his crown of her leaves, and decreed her leaves would always be green.
You see, the story explains the phenomenon.
Where do frogs come from? According to Greek myth, Latona was cursed by the goddess Juno and went on the run. Thirsty, she asked some people for water, but she was refused. Latona asked Heaven for help, and the people who denied her water were changed into frogs.
Where does lightning come from? Zeus throwing thunderbolts. Storms at sea? Neptune's wrath. The wind? The enormous snores of a god sleeping in a cave.
To the ancients, stories explained all natural phenomena, from the sun's course in the sky to the genesis of disease. Storytellers had become theologians, priests, and priestesses. In the process, they created not only myths but culture.
And the process has continued to this very day.
The Constancy of Myth from Place to Place, Age to Age
Here's a story you might have heard:
A poor widow sends her young son, Jack, to town to sell their cow. Jack is bamboozled by a stranger into selling the cow for five bean seeds. When he gets home, his mother calls him a fool and tosses the seeds out the window. The next morning there's a gigantic stalk grown into the sky. The lad climbs the stalk and finds a mystical land in the sky. Here Jack meets a fairy who tells him yon castle is really his inheritance from his long-lost father, but is now inhabited by a child-eating giant and his one-eyed wife. Jack goes to the castle and encounters the wife, who shields him from the giant. Jack steals a bag of gold and returns home.
After he and his mother spend the gold (in riotous living in some versions, doing good works in others), Jack, dead broke, returns to the magic land in the clouds and steals a hen that lays golden eggs from the giant and escapes back down the bean stalk. Jack and his mother return to prosperity, but when the hen stops laying, Jack goes back again to snatch a magic harp that plays all by itself. Chased by the giant, Jack scoots down the bean stalk and, to cut off pursuit, chops it down. The giant falls to his death. The music of the magic harp soothes the hen, and it begins laying once again, and everyone lives happily every after.
"The Greeks have this tale," Andrew Lang tells us in Custom and Myth (1941), "the people of Madagascar have it, the Lowland Scotch, the Celts, the Russians, the Italians, the Algonquins, the Finns, the Samoans have it, the Zulus, the Bushmen, Japanese, Eskimos. ... It is not merely the main features that are the same in most remote parts of the world, but even the details."
Some mythologists claim that a recognizable version of "Jack and the Bean Stalk" appears in every culture on earth.
One of the most interesting aspects of the storyteller's art is that it became the rule that the story be told the same each time. Hence, eons passed with very little change in the stories. If you tell the same story over and over again to children, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," for instance, you might tire of the same ending. Try changing it. Your young listeners will turn on you. The same, no doubt, was true for the ancients. Stories untold millennia old are repeated today exactly as they've been passed down.
Other myths, legends, and folktales (all of which are the products of storytellers) bear remarkable similarities despite the fact that they appear in different cultures, places, and times.
In fact, they sound like copies of each other. Psychologist Otto Rank noted that "even though widely separated by space and entirely independent of each other," myths "present a baffling similarity or, in part, a literal correspondence." Mythologist Martin Day has found some rather striking similarities in the mythologies of various religions from around the world: "The Meru of Kenya state that their culture hero Mugive led the Meru people out of bondage across a sea that parted for them and eventually brought them to a promised land. Mugive possessed a magic staff and transmitted to the Meru seven commandments vouchsafed to him by God. ..."
This account almost perfectly matches the account in the Bible where Moses leads his people, the ancient Israelites, out of bondage in Egypt across the Red Sea, which parts for them and brings them to the promised land. He gives them ten commandments vouchsafed to him by God.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Key"
by .
Copyright © 2000 James N. Frey.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Introduction: Why Every Fiction Writer in America Should Read This Book,
1: The Awesome Power of Myth,
2: What It's All About Is Who,
3: The Twin Pillars of the Myth-Based Story: The Hero and the Evil One,
4: The Home of the Brave: The Hero in the World of the Common Day,
5: The Woods Are Full of Fascinating Characters,
6: Fasten Your Seat Belt, the Journey Begins,
7: Death, Rebirth, and the Confrontation with the Evil One,
8: Welcome Home, Sailor, or, The Hero Returns to the Community,
9: Of Tragic Heroes and Comic Heroes and Other Stuff,
ALSO BY JAMES N. FREY,
Bibliography,
Copyright Page,