Story Culling
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Compile objects that relate to your story/holds some meaning. Bring one in next week!
Create a first pass of an outline for your story (however you’d like to approach this)
Keep updating your list of stories (and don’t forget to bring this to class!)
Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments
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It all started when…
Before my story took place, I can recall this random thing about life at the time…
If I hadn’t done this, it all might have gone differently…
My story’s ripple effects have impacted this in my life…
What I really learned about myself was…
What I really learned about the world was…
If I were really true to myself about this story, I would…
A question I have about my story is…
I can remember this incredibly specific detail…
If I reinterpreted my story in a different art medium, it could easily be…
If I got absurd with this project, I would…
I could dedicate this story to..
What I love about my story is…
When I’m finished really exploring this story, I will feel…
One more thing about my story is…
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Achievement • Acceptance • Adaptability • Advancement • Adventure • Accomplishment • Affection • Affluence • Ambition • Amusement • Approachability • Art • Assertiveness • Attentiveness • Authenticity • Autonomy • Awareness • Balance • Beauty • Belonging • Benevolence • Boldness • Bravery • Calmness • Camaraderie • Candor • Capability • Challenge • Charity • Clarity • Change • Closeness • Comfort • Commitment • Compassion • Competence • Community • Completion • Competition • Concentration • Confidence • Connection • Consciousness • Consistency • Contentment • Contribution • Control • Conviction • Cooperation • Courage • Creativity • Credibility • Curiosity • Decisiveness • Dependability • Depth • Desire • Determination • Devotion • Devoutness • Dexterity • Dignity • Diligence • Diplomacy • Direction • Discipline • Discovery • Diversity • Dreaming • Drive • Duty • Education • Effectiveness • Efficiency • Empathy • Encouragement • Endurance • Enchantment • Energy • Enlightenment • Entertainment • Enthusiasm • Ethics • Excellence • Expressiveness • Expertise • Extroversion • Evolution • Fairness • Faith • Fame • Family • Fitness • Flexibility • Flow • Focus • Fortitude • Freedom • Friendliness • Friendships • Frugality • Fun • Generosity • Genuineness • Giving • Grace • Gratefulness • Gratitude • Growth • Guidance • Happiness • Harmony • Health • Helpfulness • Heroism • Honesty • Honor • Hopefulness • Hospitality • Humility • Humor • Imagination • Impact • Impartiality • Independence • Industry • Influence • Innovation • Inquisitiveness • Insightfulness • Inspiration • Integrity • Intimacy • Introversion • Intuition • Inventiveness • Involvement • Joy • Justice • Kindness • Knowledge • Leadership • Learning • Liberation • Liberty • Liveliness • Logic • Love • Loyalty • Magic • Mastery • Maturity • Meaning • Meticulousness • Mindfulness • Moderation • Modesty • Motivation • Mystery • Nature • Obedience • Open-mindedness • Optimism • Order • Organization • Originality • Passion • Peacefulness • Perceptiveness • Perfection • Perseverance • Persistence • Persuasiveness • Philanthropy • Piety • Playfulness • Pleasure • Poise • Popularity • Positivity • Power • Practicality • Pragmatism • Preparedness • Presence • Privacy • Proactivity • Proficiency • Professionalism • Prosperity • Punctuality • Purity • Purpose • Qualification • Realism • Reason • Recognition • Recreation • Refinement • Reflection • Relaxation • Reliability • Religion • Reputation • Resilience • Resolution • Resolve • Resourcefulness • Respect • Responsibility • Restraint • Reverence • Richness • Rigor • Sacrifice • Satisfaction • Security • Self-control • Selflessness • Self-reliance • Self-Study • Sensitivity • Sensuality • Serenity • Service • Sexuality • Significance • Simplicity • Sincerity • Smartness • Sophistication • Solitude • Spirituality • Stability • Status • Strength • Storytelling • Structure • Success • Sufficiency • Support • Surprise • Tactfulness • Teamwork • Teaching • Temperance • Thoroughness • Thoughtfulness • Timeliness • Trust • Trustworthiness • Truth • Understanding • Uniqueness • Unity • Usefulness • Valor • Variety • Victory • Virtue • Vision • Vitality • Vulnerability • Warmth • Wealth • Wholesomeness • Wisdom • Wonder • Worthiness
Recommend Readings
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Excerpt from Your Mythic Journey
By Sam Keen and Anne Valley-FoxWe are storytelling animals. As our primitive ancestors sat around the fire carving spearheads and eating blackberries they told stories which in time were woven into a tapestry of myth and legend. These tales were the first encyclopedia of human knowledge. They explained where the world came from, why there were people, why snakes have no legs, why corn smut stops birth hemorrhages, why conch shells are sacred, why coyotes howl at night, and why the gods put fire and death on earth. In the dramatic telling the triumphs of heroes and the antics of fools came alive again. Stories told the people of a tribe who they were, where they had been, where they were going, and how to stay friendly with the spirits.
Our modern myths are often unfocused; we don’t celebrate our myths enough, they frequently hide like outlaws in the backwoods of the unconscious. For a variety of historical reasons (the emergence of machines, cities, anonymity, money, mass media, standardization, automation) we’ve lost awareness of storytelling as a way to dramatize and order human existence. But whether we acknowledge them or not our myths and stories live in our imaginations.
To be a person is to have a story to tell. We become grounded in the present when we color in the outlines of the past and the future. Mythology can add perspective and encouragement to your life. Within each of us there is a tribe with a complete cycle of legends and dances, songs to be sung. We were all born into rich mythical lives: we need only claim the stories that are our birthright.
With a little imagination each person can find within himself a replacement for the myths and stories list when we ceased living in tribes. A person is a complex being made up of a million individual smells, tastes, memories, and hopes. Listen for a few minutes to the voices that run through your mind. Every psyche is a private theater filled with scenes and characters. Listen and you will hear your father, mother, brothers, sisters, children, lovers, friends, enemies, teachers, and heroes acting out their dramas on your stage. Hearing the multiple voices within yourself will remind you that you belong to a special clan. Your people still inhabit you. They will help you to celebrate your myths, sing your songs, and tell your legends.
The techniques of storytelling and the psychology which underlies them rest on a discovery of the obvious: that what all persons have in common is their uniqueness. Every person has a story to tell. That’s what makes a person and defines the journey that person makes through life. There are no autonomous, anonymous, pragmatic individuals—we were all raised by an intimate group that had traditions, values, rites of passage, ceremonies, and legends. When we forget our stories, leave our heroes unsung, and ignore the rites that mark our passage from one stage of life into another, we feel nameless and empty.
We can rediscover the uniqueness of the person if we reassemble our myths and stories which have been homogenized into business, education, politics and dissipated in the media. Find the unconscious and make it conscious, find an audience for the untold tales, and you will discover you are already on a rich mythic journey. What most of us lack is only the permission to tell the stories that are our birthright.
[pp 1-2]
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Excerpt from The Creative Habit
By Twyla TharpI believe that we all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations. These strands are solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except they govern our creative impulses. They determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them. I’m not Watson and Crick; I can’t prove this. But perhaps you also suspect it when you try to understand why you’re a photographer, not a writer, or why you always insert a happy ending into your story, or why all your canvases gather the most interesting material at the edges, not the center. In many ways, that’s why art historians and literature professors and critics of all kinds have jobs: to pinpoint the artist’s DNA and explain to the rest of us whether the artist is bring true to it in his or her work. I call it DNA; you may think of it as your creative hard-wiring or personality.
…Each of us is hard-wired in a certain way. And that hard-wiring insinuates itself into our work. That’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s what the world expects from you. We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us. If you are by nature a loner, a crusader, an outsider, a jester, a romantic, a melancholic, or any one of a dozen personalities, that quality will shine through in your work.
[pp 37; 40]
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Excerpt from Art & Fear
By David Bayles and Ted OrlandTo a remarkable degree the outside world consists of variables and the interior world consists of constants. The constants are, well, constant: barring mental breakdown or a tropical fever, you’ll carry the same burdens tomorrow and next year as you do today. We experience life as artists no differently from the way we experience life in any other role—we simply exist, perhaps watching from an imaginary point a little behind our eyes, while the scene we observe from that steady vantage point changes constantly.
This sense of interior stability is consistent with one widely observable truth: the arc to any individual life is uniform over long periods of time. Subjects that draw us in will continue to draw us in. Patterns we respond to we will continue to respond to. We are compelled by forces that, like the ocean current, are so subtle and pervasive we take them utterly for granted. Those odd moments when we notice the sea we swim in leave us as surprised as the discovery by Moliere’s character that he was speaking prose, that indeed he had always spoken prose.
The artistic evidence for the constancy of interior issues is everywhere. It shows in the way most artists return to the same two or three stories again and again. It shows in the palette of Van Gogh, the characters of Hemingway, the orchestration of your favorite composer. We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in—and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing—the only work you can do convincingly—is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.
[pp 115-116]
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Excerpt from Bird by Bird
By Anne LamottIf you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever both finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. You need to put yourself at their center, you and what you believe to be true or right. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing.
These concepts probably feel like givens, like things no one ever had to make up, that have been true through all cultures and for all time. Telling these truths is your job. You have nothing else to tell us. But needless to say, you can’t tell them in a sentence or a paragraph; the truth doesn’t come out in bumper stickers. There may be a flickering moment of insight in a one-liner, in a sound bite, but everyday meat-and-potato truth is beyond our ability to capture in a few words. Your whole piece is the truth, not just one shining epigrammatic moment in life. There will need to be some kind of unfolding in order to contain it, and there will need to be layers. We are dealing with the ineffable here—we’re out there somewhere between the known and unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.
[pp 103-104]
Sources
Bayles, David, and Ted Orland. Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Image Continuum Press, 1993.
Keen, Sam, and Anne Valley-Fox. Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. TarcherPerigee, 1989.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Pantheon, 1994.
Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Simon & Schuster, 2003.