Much Of What Happens To Us In Life Is Nameless Because Our Vocabulary Is Too Poor. Most Stories Get Told

When the people you are closest to, who may even know you more than you know yourself, call you fearless and strong when you start doubting yourself, it makes you realise that there is a whole part of yourself that only others see and believe in. And maybe you could start believing in that too.

We trace our lives in running circles

always waiting for a new path to show

'...from the nineteenth century onward, Cinderella conveyed the explicit message that personal goodness and virtue merit reward, and that goodness and virtue are, and will be rewarded. As a generality, it is fair to say that most people believe themselves both good and deserving; thus the message that goodness will be rewarded is well suited to the hopes and needs of the large part of every country’s population that does not live in comfort. Furthermore, stories like Cinderella, in which magical assistance plays a prominent role, foster an existential belief in eventual assistance, whatever the presenting problem may be, and support hope for a happier and better future. For poor girls in the nineteenth century, for whom so few opportunities for social rise from the depths of misfortune to the highest imaginable joys existed, Cinderella could stand for a way out and a way up.'

Ruth B. Bottigheimer, 'Cinderella: The People's Princess' in Cinderella across Cultures, ed. M. H. D. Rochere (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).

Passing Thoughts

I’m sat here at the kitchen countertop

my laptop on a chopping board

watching my mother's jam pot

simmer away the plums and sugar - 

I’m here to stop it boiling over.

It has already done it once 

the sticky pink liquid has become

stained glass on the hob cooker

it hasn’t reduced much

so I might be here just a little while longer

“I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.”

— Iris Murdoch, Under the Net  

A lady in the sky, she follows

dawn’s peaceful light

in wait of tomorrow's guilt,

burning beneath a mountain of clouds

each one darker than the last,

and yet she shines

brighter than any sun in any sky,

she wanders near those setting scales

backed by lions in a crow like roar

waiting to feed the passing day

a lady in the sky, she waits

D.L. Smith

Writing Notes: The Story Circle

The Story Circle by Dan Harmon is a basic narrative structure that writers can use to structure and test their story ideas.

Telling stories is an inherently human thing, but how we structure the narrative separates a good story from a truly great one.

The Dan Harmon Story Circle describes the structure of a story in 3 acts and with 8 plot points, which are called steps.

When you have a protagonist who will progress through these, you have a basic character arc and the bare minimum of a story.

As a narrative structure, it is descriptive, not prescriptive, meaning it doesn’t tell you what to write, but how to tell the story.

The steps outline when the plot points occur and the order in which your hero completes their character development.

These 8 steps are:

You - A character is in their zone of comfort

Need - But they want something

Go! - So they enter an unfamiliar situation

Struggle - To which they have to adapt

Find - In order to get what they want

Suffer - Yet they have to make a sacrifice

Return - Before they return to their familiar situation

Change - Having changed fundamentally

The hero completes these steps in a circle in a clockwise direction, going from noon to midnight.

The top half of the circle and its two-quarters of the whole make up act one and act three, while the bottom half comprises the longer second act.

In their consecutive order, the Story Circle describes the 3 acts:

Act I: The order you know

Act II: Chaos (the upside-down)

Act III: The new order

Working with the Story Circle enables you to think about your main character and to plot from their emotional state.

The steps will automatically make your hero proactive as you focus on their motivation, their actions and the respective consequences.

Sources: 1 2 3 More On: Character Development, Plot Development

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis // @i-wrotethisforme // Jorge Louis Berges // @smokeinsilence //@viridianmasquerade //Jorge Louis Berges // @honeytuesday // Kaveh Akbar // F. Scott Fitzgerald // AKR //Olivie Blake, from “Alone With You in the Ether” // Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrimage