LESSON 4


FABLES
SHORT IS SWEET. HORT IS WEET. ORT S EET

Now let it be said that this thread is "what I learned in writing school" so... expect crass lifting of direct lessons. If I can cobble up something original then, what luck! but

hrmm... don't expect it.

EXERCISE ONE:

Grab a piece of paper and a #2 pencil. Chew pencil.

Roar.

EXERCISE TWO:

Write a FABLE

A fable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.

A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech and other powers of humanity.

OK so how do you write a fable? Easy.

Turn on the television and turn the channel to animal planet. I just did. A whale is doing something graceful giving the middle flipper to a harpoon ship as I type.

ok so now I need to cobble up a plot or some shit. ok wait. why think. flipping to The History Channel. Genghis Khan is doing slow motion with a sword against a fiery backdrop of burning cities & a burning town or someshit. He's ordering his most loyal general to hunt down his son, who betrayed him and ran off with his soldiers (the son himself is a general) into the mountains because dad was mean. The General dutifully hunts down the son. "leave with me to go back to be executed by the Khan and I will spare your soldier's lives."

son obeys. dutiful general kills him. the painful twist being, the dutiful general is the man who trained the son. further rumors suggest that maybe the son is illegitimate. which is why genghis didn't like him in the first place. so really, the dutiful general is really in a sense, killing his own son.

so anyway. the son dies so the troops will be spared, the dutiful general mourns the loss, brings his head to the khan, who acts like an asshole and dies from shenanigans anyway much much later.

bah I'm lazy. I don't want to write a fable about WhalusKhan. Dunno. Treat it as a prompter as you like. Mixing & matching whales & the mongol hordes, write a fable.

THE POINT OF WRITING A FABLE IS THAT IT IS AN EXERCISE IN STRUCTURE.

a mini exercise. half page, no more. ideally you do it in a paragraph. whatever you're writing, novel, novella, whatever, you should be able to summarize the damned thing succinctly. the fable is your litmus test. glaring errors/problems with causality will be instantly evident. your plot twist/resolution/all of it-

really it's among the shortest forms with a beginning/middle/and end. and banging out like, a fable a day is damned good practice and shouldn't take too much time if you're willing to not take it very seriously. taking it seriously can come later.

speaking of flash fiction you *could* do the one sentence story- the famous Hemingway's : For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.

www.sixwordstories.net/ collects them & is well worth the look. it's a whole art form well worth exploring.

bit of a blabbity blab primer/ thanks for bearing with me. kind of redundant for anyone who's been listening to me babbling @ the coffee shop sorry.

But before writing the whole Russian epic & spending five years rendering your characters, details, plot, resolution, all that other crappola,

you should be able to summarize the damned thing. nice n short. think of it as a movie pitch.

practice it in front of a mirror: "A whale general is ordered by the whale khan to hijack a harpoon ship and hunt down the whale khan's disobedient son."

see? I just pulled it out of my ass. You can do much, much better. There is no shortage of animals (for the time being), issues, conflicts past and present to choose from. then just play boggle & scrabble with it until something pops up.

PERSISTENCE AND A COMPLETE LACK OF SHAME IS CRUCIAL.

Write it in crayon and tack it to the refrigerator and upload your fable to WP & I will personally give you lots of empty praise!

actually...

if you actually, actually do it

that's kind of BAD ASS.

be a bad ass. write a fable. tough men & women write fables. sissies write all that other emo crap. but FABLES. yeah.

drink coffee, eat beef, write fables- Temujin would be proud. The Khan will gargle with pride, toasting your name, bonking beer-filled horn-cups with Thorelvisaurus, celebrating your name up in ValhallahGracelandtopia