The Quilted Story

As you grow older, you start to look back at your past with a critical eye. Why am I the way I am? What was going on then that I'd notice now? Did I actually join a clandestine organization committed to tracking Godzilla, or was that a fever dream brought on by a sugar high coupled with a dangerous monster movie obsession?

The problem is you only have your past self's observational and memory skills, and as a kid, I was pretty dumb and oblivious. I'm not saying I'm Sherlock these days, but I'm markedly better at picking up on things.

One thing I do remember that will bring us around to the point (eventually) is the fact that my mom was a quilting hobbyist. She was also into needlepoint and paintball, but the quilting is interesting to me now. She'd go off to quilting weekends and retreats and come back with a full quilt. My brother and I would look over it and ask if she'd done the whole thing herself, mesmerized not with the product but with the idea that someone would be able to complete something like that all on their own.

She'd tell us no, she only did one part. The rest had been done by the other quilters.

So it is with story.

Fictional: The Great Yog

Sorry for the tardiness, but I'm on the other side of the country right now. I'm trying to get myself back on track. In the meantime, enjoy this revised version of a story I submitted for an assignment in college.

Theoretical: Finding Your Voice

Sorry for missing last week. Let's get right to it.

So we've talked about structure and theory, as well as taking those two things together to get form. Even if it was a little confusing at times, it boils down to a simple question: how do you tell a story? Not just a general idea of how a story is told (structure) or the reasons you might want to tell a story (theory), but how do you, as an individual, tell a story?

Form is just the term to talk about structure and theory as one unit, like how a molecule is a way to talk about the behavior of atoms in a group. (That may be a gross oversimplification, but it works for our purposes.) Voice, on the other hand, is an integral part of that, and indeed you might consider voice to be the third component of form. It may also be considered the most valuable and important part of your form, but not without argument.

What, exactly, is voice? Read on.

Fictional: The Train to the Land of Sunder

Back to the Land of Sunder this week.

Theoretical: Synthesizing Form

The good news is this post shouldn't be very long, and not just because I have a busy day today and not a lot of time to spending writing this. The bad news is that, for it to make any sense, you probably should read my post on story structure (straightforward with little deviation) and my other post on story theory (rambling, incoherent, tackles a difficult aspect to discuss). If you do that, though, you're as ready as I can make you to tackle what it's about: form.