The Red Brick Store

Early in my MFA, a teacher warned us, “Dreams are exposition in a ball gown.” And if you think about it, it’s pretty true most of the time. How often have we watched a character wake screaming from a nightmare that had revealed bits of his backstory? How many musical dreams have we suffered through in order to understand the roots of a farm animal’s anxieties?

I must admit that expository dreams are a step up from listening to a character talk about her backstory. At least we get to watch chase scenes and flying elephants instead of listening to a voiceover while the main character drifts glumly along barren streets.

But still, it seems like dreams have more dramatic potential than that. The first thing that comes to mind when I try to think of a dream with actual dramatic weight is The Wizard of Oz where almost the entire story takes place in a dream. Or Alice in Wonderland where the heroine creeps into a dream world through a rabbit hole. But in both these cases, the dream world functions as the real world, while the “real” world acts like an expository dream. In it, we meet characters that will show up later in altered form, or we learn of problems that the protagonist will find the fortitude to overcome while in the fantasy world.

So again, the dream–the reality alternate to the main reality of the story–functions as exposition.

As I consider what I’ve written, I suddenly realize that I’m defining dreams as alternate, ephemeral realities that have no impact on the “real” world. I also realize that this definition of a dream is historically pretty recent. Looking back on older literature, such as the Bible, I remember that people considered dreams as valid playesr in the real world. Pharoah took them seriously enough to hire dream interpreters. Joseph followed a dream and whisked his young family to Egypt. The premise of Revelation is that a dream can show a hidden reality that affects seen reality.

So there seem to be two basic approaches to dreams. The first treats them as valid realities. The second considers them mental phenomena that have only symbolic meaning. It seems to me that the second approach is considered the more realistic one these days. Thus, when a story treats a dream as a reality equal in validity to the “real” world, we call it fantasy or magical realism, while a story that treats a dream as unequal to the “real” world is called realism.

When a dream is a valid reality in a story, it obviously has all sorts of dramatic potential. We have thousands of years of literature to prove that. But the current conception of a dream, and the demands of realist literature, seems to strip a lot of that potential away, leaving us with the imaginative but dramatically limp dream scenes we read and see today. I even admit, with great sadness, that one of my favorite movie scenes–the dream sequence from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries–though a masterpiece, is exposition.

In order to regain their fertility in realist writing, I think dreams need to become more like characters than settings. They need to be an antagonist or ally to the protagonist, working for or against the character’s goals and dramatic needs.

One metaphor for what I’m getting at is the movie Stranger than Fiction where a man discovers that he is a character in a novel-in-progress and tries to derail the plot. At one point, he decides that his best course of action is inaction and he holes himself up in his apartment, watching television, refusing to move even to change the channel. But suddenly a crane tears down the outside wall of his apartment and it becomes apparent that the plot, refusing to be stopped, has come to get him.

Judith Guest’s novel, Ordinary People, has a good example of a dramatically weighty dream. Conrad, a teen who survived a boating accident his brother didn’t, is the victim of nightmares that push him toward suicide. He spends the book wrestling with these dreams with the help of a psychiatrist, trying to beat them before they beat him.

I’m on the lookout for dramatically weighty dreams in realist  literature or film. Any suggestions?

November 17th, 2009 | Category: Sunstone | Comments (9)

Jan Shipps, noted author and long-time scholar on Mormonism, will be speaking on Tuesday, November 17th, at the Salt Lake City Main Library. This special lecture is sponsored by Sunstone and is free to the public. Ms. Shipps will be reflecting on the field of religious studies, and how the advances and techniques of this larger field equips scholars of Mormonism.

Tuesday, November 17
Level 4 Meeting Room, Salt Lake City Main Library
210 East 400 South, Salt Lake.

Mingling at 6:30 pm, lecture starts at 7:00 pm.

You can also connect with this event on Facebook.

November 14th, 2009 | Category: Red Brick Store, Sunstone | Comments (5)

The UVU Religious Studies Program presents the

Tenth Annual Mormon Studies Conference

Outmigration

and the

Mormon Quest for Education

November 5^th – 6^th, 2009

Library Lecture Hall

Utah Valley University

More »

November 3rd, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The following letter will be sent to all past Irreantum subscribers. Of course, the incentives described below will apply to anybody who chooses to subscribe. So don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Subscribe!!

Dear Friends of Irreantum,

Irreantum’s Spring/Fall 2009 Anniversary Double Issue will soon be released. As we celebrate Irreantum’s tenth year, we’re offering special incentives for all subscribers—past, present, and future.

The upcoming issue is one of Irreantum’s best yet, including fiction by Orson Scott Card, essays by Terryl Givens and Patrick Madden, poetry by Holly Welker, and photography by Val Brinkerhoff. You won’t want to miss it! (See a complete table of contents at the end of this message.)

This issue celebrates another milestone as well: having caught up with past issues, Irreantum now pledges to deliver Spring and Fall issues in a timely manner. Change, and even tragedy, has challenged Irreantum’s short history—including the death of our editor and dear friend Laraine Wilkins. Delays have resulted. But with this issue we’re officially back on track. More »

November 2nd, 2009 | Tags: Best of Mormonism, Christmas gifts, Free!, incentives, Irreantum, Mormon literature, subscribe, subscriptions | Category: Irreantum | Comments (15)

The October 19 issue of the New Yorker is very interesting from a writing point of view. The most provocative article to me was “The Gossip mill,”by Rebecca Mead, which takes the reader inside Alloy. a company that produces best-sellers by committee. They’re the minds behind the Traveling Pants and Gossip Girl series.

The first part of the article takes us inside a story meeting where a murder mystery morphs into a dozen different forms over the course of ten minutes. At first, I was a bit taken aback by this process, the story was like a rag doll of indeterminate species, its limbs being torn off and others being basted on, only to be replaced by something completely different and then turned inside out. But, you know, the story they were coming with was kinda interesting.

This approach to story making is antithetical to the solitary writer mythos. I’ve noticed that often people–consciously ot not–write a story to express a part of themselves. So when someone suggests changes to the story, the author feels personally attacked. The problem with hammering out a story in solitude and connecting it so deeply with oneself is that sometimes what seems obvious to the author is mystifying to the reader. The other problem is that storytelling, in the end, is an act of communication. It is the author knowing how to use the raw material of reader’s imagination to build something.

This rag doll approach to story might be a good way for writers to play constructively with storytelling. To explore the possibilities of a narrative and how it plays with an audience without having to put their own story on the line. Perhaps the insights writers have while playing this game will begin to seep into their work.

October 27th, 2009 | Tags: Alloy, committee, Gossip Girl, New Yorker, rag doll, story, Traveling Pants | Category: Sunstone | Comments (31)

At a recent symposium in Washington D.C., one person wrote on a survey that she enjoyed the symposium because she got to “have those conversations you wish you could have after Sunday school.” We realized that we shared this sentiment, and wanted more of those conversations. So, starting this Sunday, Sunstone will sponsor “firesides” twice monthly.

This Sunday, Bill Bradshaw, a professor of biology at BYU, will speak on the relationship between science and religion. It’s sure to be interesting and fun. Please stay afterward. Those cookies won’t eat themselves, you know.

Place:
Sunstone House
343 North 300 West
Salt Lake City
(parking in back and on the street)

Time:
6 p.m.

October 9th, 2009 | Category: Sunstone | Comments (4)

Musings by Lisa Torcasso Downing

From the October 6, 2009 New York Times (by way of the AML-list):

In an ingenious spin on the co-author strategy, Stephenie Meyer, who wrote the Twilight novels, said that her vampire hero appeared in a dream and then dictated the first book as fast as she could type. He did not demand a percentage of the advance. This does sound like a great strategy, and I understand that millions of American women currently have a dream of having that dream.

I am one of those American women. Oh, not for the reason I think the Times writer implied. I wouldn’t let a man for whom the destruction of the human female was his most primitive instinct near my computer, much less me. But I do dream of getting in on that “it-writes-itself” genre…especially since it seems to be paying now.

Heck, I give my writing away. I work my butt off trying to make my fiction good enough for someone to publish for free. Rephrase. Actually, I’ve worked my butt on, seeing as its grown rather large as I build my career as an unpaid artiste. So yeah, I want to write my dreams by dictation, make a boat load of money, and have a home gym and a personal trainer. And a maid. I’d even get a dog if I had someone to clean up after it. And a golf cart. I’ve always wanted to pick my kids up from school in a golf cart.  Way cool. Oh, and maybe I’d buy an electric can opener. No, an electric knife for Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t want to seem worldly.

What about the rest of you? What would you buy if you made millions off your dreams?

October 9th, 2009 | Tags: Dream, Money, Twilight | Category: Irreantum, Uncategorized | Comments (9)

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an old, strange film at BYU. It was melodramatic, the acting was uneven, the script had a way of slipping in and out of faux-Shakespearean language, the action scenes were hilariously clunky, and Hoochie coochie dance numbers rubbed up against gospel preaching. It was as if a Book of Mormon paint bomb had exploded all over a DeMille B-movie.

What more could you ask for?

The movie is called Corianton: A Story of Unholy Love. Based on the story of Alma’s wayward missionary son, it premiered in 1931, being produced by Lester Park, Orson Scott Card’s grandfather. However, after a disappointing six-week run, the film vanished until three years ago when the Card family donated a long-hidden copy to BYU.

I don’t think anyone is going to argue that Corianton is great cinema, though its camp quotient may be enough to win it a solid place as a favorite group date movie at BYU. However, it has one huge thing going for it: it pulls out all the stops, throws them away, and pounds the keys for all it’s worth. More »

September 28th, 2009 | Category: Sunstone | Comments (8)

Musings by Lisa Torcasso Downing

I am making my way through the Carter-touted Story Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee and have met some challenging ideas. I’d thought I’d run one up the flagpole.

Early in the book, McKee discusses his take on the decline of the storytelling craft. He faults what I’ll call the assembly line manufacture of stories. But he concludes this section like this:

The final cause for the decline of story runs very deep. Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of our art. The writer shapes story around a perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for, what’s foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth–the essential values. In decades past, writer and society more or less agreed on these questions, but more and more ours has become an age of moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism–a great confusion of values….

This erosion of values has brought with it a corresponding erosion of story. Unlike writers in the past, we can assume nothing. First we must dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning, then create a story vehicle that expresses our interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world. (17)

There is much to digest here. I’ve read the passage a billion times, trying to process it, to decide whether or not I stand with him. I think he is equating values with truth, and truth with morality and ethics. So when he mentions  the “erosion of values,” he could just as easily have written “erosion of morals.” Maybe that’s a leap since he speaks of “what’s foolish to pursue” as a value. Still, he seems to set up “moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism” as the opposite of value, so I’m sticking to my interpretation of value as, at least in part, morality. This fits nicely with my Mormon worldview, so I accepted his position.

In fact, the idea that people with morals, or moral people, are best suited to craft stories that attain a level of greatness excited me. I thought, Hallelujah! What good news for Mormon writers!

But then reality hit: The most devout, or morality-based, of Mormon stories tend to be far from the mark of great literature, a term I admit limps. Oh, I know that some Mormon lit is deep and meaningful, but much is not, particularly if it can wear the label “faith-promoting.” And don’t we think of faith-promoting stories and their writers as being especially morally steeped? I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but to me, these kinds of Deseret Bookish tales are superficial because they will surely reach a moral conclusion that is not only predictable,  but is “authorized.” I know from the outset what the moral boundaries of such a story will be.

Interestingly, McKee doesn’t mention anything about boundaries in his discussion of values, morals, or ethics. In fact, he says writers must “dig deeper,” which, to my mind, suggests moving beyond established boundaries. Yet to most Mormons, morality is defined by its boundaries.

Somewhere along the line, it dawned on me that I was interchanging the concept of morality with the idea of religious. Suddenly I lost confidence that religious writers are, by default, moral writers. Certainly our faith-promoting stories are bursting with Standards, spelled with a capital S, but are these Standards the same as values, ethics, and morals?

I’m left asking why today’s best literature is not being created by religious people. Shouldn’t the very cultures that most vociferously defend choosing the right, or doing what Jesus would, be the best at developing ideas that explore moral and ethical controversies?

Of course I acknowledge that many of the greatest writers of the 20th century had strong religious ties. But that is McKee’s point. Great stories used to be written by moral people, but, he argues, the morality and values behind these stories is no longer lauded on a large scale. This brings me back to the question: Have religious people–including Mormons–stopped (or never been) the McKee kind of moral?

One of my dearest LDS friends has cautioned me not to read the kinds of things I read, worrying that the books and journals she questions might challenge my testimony. She, like many others, only ingests reading material she feels is church-approved, or definitively ‘right,” and therefore safe. To her, if anything Joseph Smith taught or did proved  to be not “true,” then her entire religion–her life–falls into the chum bucket. Her primary investment is not discovering truth, but sustaining truth as she already has it.

Can that be a moral way to live?

Can a person with such a strong, overarching need to protect his/her core identity “dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning”? Can he/she “then create a story vehicle that expresse[s his/her] interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world”?

Here my brain spins, so I ask your opinion. Can a person’s faith conviction prevent him/her from becoming deeply, truly moral? If so, is this lack of morality preventing our writers from crafting masterpieces? I tend to think so.

September 16th, 2009 | Tags: craft, McKee, Morality, story, Values | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (26)