Writing: An Oroborous Tradition

After reading Stephanie Vanderslice's post on boy's literacy, I thought I'd add my thoughts. One of the themes I found the examples she gave was adventure stories. This is probably how most people come up in the literary tradition: pulps, comics, magazines, ten-cent westerns. When we're young our parents grab the cheapest, safest books that are close at hand. My progression was as follows: Laura Ingalls, Louis L'Amour, J.R.R. Tolkien, William Golding, Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy. Slowly, I climbed toward more complex storytelling, character development and themes.

We all have horror stories of early English teachers who took away our story notebooks because it wasn't the assignment or who commented on the lack of substance in our reading preferences. Every form of art or creative endeavor makes this cycle, though, from genre to genre. Everything moves through cycles of epic, pastoral, romantic and so on. I use the word cycle because I don't believe that people evolve in a linear fashion. We're like Oroborous in that we come back to the beginning, time after time. We find what is useful in our literary tradition and create our own voice.

In my own work, I developed my own voice by studying the deeply personal characters from Laura Ingalls, plot from Tolkien, setting from Conrad, moral themes from Golding and beautiful language from McCarthy. The Epic is no more valuable to us culturally than the Romance. Each has a place and each offers us a tradition for our own writing.

Holding the Line.
Bri