Storytelling is at the heart of the indigenous people of Australia. There were over 400 distinct Aboriginal clans when the first British settlers arrived in Australia, and each of them had their own body of stories that describe and link the eternal mythical world of what they call the ‘Dreaming’ with the everyday world of living. The stories are called ‘Songlines’.
It’s almost impossible for a non-Aborigine to understand the idea of the Dreaming which underlies the Songlines. The Dreaming is an English word that attempts to describe the entire mystical and ontological life of the Aborigines and encompasses how they are linked to the contours of the landscape in which they live. Aboriginal actor Ernie Dingo tries to explain: ‘When you talk about it, you think about it in the back of your head – “Now hang on a sec, how did that story go?” – and that moment of thought would come like a dream. So it’s going back into the past through memory, rather than in the English sense, through the history books.’
The Dreaming is an extraordinarily complex body of stories that guide the Aborigines in their quest for water, hunting, fertility. Each of the Aboriginal tribes has its own stories, and these are sung in Songlines or Dreaming Tracks, the paths created by the ancestors during the Dreaming as they criss-crossed the country. This is one from the Grampian Mountains of Victoria.
The Gariwerd Creation Story
In the time before time began Bunjil, the Great Ancestor Spirit, began to create the world around us: rivers, mountains, forest, desert. He created the animals and plants. He appointed the Bram-bram-bult brothers, the sons of Druk the frog, to finish the task of naming the animals and making the languages and laws. At the end of his time on earth Bunjil rose into the sky and became a star, where he remains.
There was a giant ferocious emu named Tchingal, who ate people. His home was in the scrub, where he was hatching a giant egg. One day, Waa the crow flew past and, feeling peckish, started to eat the egg. When Tchingal came back and saw this he was furious and chased Waa all over the place and each time he escaped Tchingal crashed into mountains creating the gaps in the rocks and the streams than run through them.
So do Aborigines sing their stories because songs tend to be more memorable?
Ernie explains, ‘It’s both a rhyme and rhythm, and the rhythm is the heartbeat. You sing this, your heartbeat can tell you how much time you’ve got to travel. So the song that you sing, if it’s a good old slow song, you know that this is a long journey, before you get to the next part of the verse. The story will stay similar to the rhythm of the walk and it tries to get your heart to pace you so that your step paces you to the next location in the song.’
Songlines explore themes of hunting and fertility and each Aborigine tribe has their own set of stories
The Songlines are a brilliant, practical way of navigating. They tell you compass points, give you landmarks (depressions in the land, for instance, are remembered in the songs as the footprints of the creator beings), and reinforce the identity of each tribe by making everyone learn by heart their collective history. They also, as any parent will know who’s tried to coax a child on a long walk, provide sufficient distraction and entertainment to make the journey more bearable.
Homer
If you like a gripping story, packed with adventure and heroic exploits, jealousy and loyalty, friendship and family, love and loss, and the yearning to find the way home, then read – no, listen to – this:
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.
Even so, he could not save his companions, hard though
he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness,
fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God,
and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point
here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak and begin our story.
It’s the opening lines to the Odyssey (from a translation by Richard Lattimore), the towering epic poem of the trials and tribulations of the Greek warrior Odysseus, as he tries to sail home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy.
Homer’s Odyssey may be Western literature’s first – and some would say most influential – work but it was not a written creation. It was born out of, and shaped by, an ancient oral tradition which memorized and passed on stories, cultural values and information from generation to generation, long before we learned to write. It’s more song than words.
Except that, at some point, it was written down. We’re not sure when and we’re not sure by whom: probably some time around the late eighth century BC, by a man we call Homer, but who might have been more than one person, according to scholars. Around the same time, a few decades earlier, probably, Homer’s other masterpiece, the Illiad, was also written down, and together they form the bedrock of the Western literary tradition.
Homer’s epics are great yarns, wonderful stories and, far more, they create vivid worlds of complex human desires and contradictions, where people love and suffer, fight and die, live with dignity or dishonour, struggle against misfortune and tragedy and fate. The characters try to understand the world they live in, the physical and the unseen, against a backdrop of heroic deeds and all-too-human gods. Like all the best tales, they’re in essence stories of the human condition, and their depictions of the ancient world, their plots, styles, literary devices and imaginative sweep have soaked into our culture, language and art. Every epic journey, road movie, every tale of the returning warrior, every story of the absent father and the coming-of-age son, Dante’s Inferno, the epic poetry of Milton and Pope, the classical poets, the Romantics, James Joyce’s Ulysses – they all owe their inspiration and origin to Homer’s Odyssey.
The Greeks themselves considered the Illiad Homer’s greatest work; and it was the story of Achilles, and not the wanderings of Odysseus, which Alexander the Great took with him as bedtime reading on his campaigns. Both poems draw their inspiration and material from the Trojan War myths. You know the story: Helen seduced by Paris and whisked off to Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, Agamemnon leading the Greeks against King Priam in the ten-year-long war, the burning towers of Ilium, Achilles dragging the body of Hector round the walls of the city, the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. And then one of the Greek generals, Odysseus, gets lost on his way home. It’s the ancient world’s equivalent of the greatest road movie ever – except it was by boat.
It’s the Odyssey which has given us some of the greatest stories and adventures in literature, as Odysseus and his men meet one obstacle and disaster after another: navigating between the lethal whirlpool and rocks of Scylla and Charybdis; being captured by the one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus, whom Odysseus blinds with a stake so that he and his men can escape clinging to the undersides of the Cyclops’ huge sheep.
Things are always going wrong, working against Odysseus getting safely home, either because of the gods or the stupidity of the men, or the weather. Like when Aeolus, the master of the winds, gives Odysseus a leather bag containing all the winds, except the west wind, to speed him home safely. The sailors think the bag’s got gold in it, and they wait until Odysseus is sleeping and then open it. All the winds fly out in a fury, and the resulting storm drives the ships back the way they had come – just as Ithaca had come into sight. Then there is the episode when Odysseus decides he wants to hear the irrisistible song of the Sirens, who would lure sailors to their death on the rocks. He gets his crew to plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast, with strict orders not to untie him, no matter how much he begs. So there he is, writhing against the creaking mast, straining towards the singing
Homer’s Odyssey may be Western literature’s most influential work
Homer wrote epics full of vivi
d worlds and complex human desires
So they sang, in sweet utterance, and the heart within me desired to listen.
And so it goes on, twenty-four books and 12,000-odd lines of pacy, vivid poetry which have burrowed deep into our Western collective imagination in the same way as the Bible stories have done.
The mystery of who Homer was and the scholarly debates about the exact origins of these epic poems only add to the allure. There’s no trustworthy information about the life and identity of Homer which have come down to us. All we have is what we read that the ancient Greeks believed, people like Herodotus, who thought Homer lived about the ninth century BC, and Aristarchus of Alexandria, who offered a much earlier date – he believed Homer lived about 140 years after the Trojan War (which we date around 1200 BC). The Greeks believed Homer was blind, and some thought he came from Chios, others from Smyrna. They also assumed that he was a poet who wrote. There was disagreement about when the poems assumed their final shape, and whether different poets wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey – but everyone, all the way down to Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century, assumed that Homer was a poet who composed with the written word.
Scholarship over the next couple of centuries challenged this traditional view and located the poems in a pre-literate culture, with an oral composition and transmission span of generations, until they were finally written down, probably in the eighth century BC. Academics argued that Homer was, in fact, one of a long line of oral poets and that the style of oral compositions is very different from written ones. They analysed the texts and identified the repeated use of descriptive phrases – what we call Homeric epithets – like ‘divine Odysseus’, the ‘wine-dark sea’, ‘grey-eyed Athena’, ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’, and even whole repeated lines and standard set-pieces of description. They argued that these formed a vast repository of word-groups, a sort of poetic diction, which the oral poet would draw on. He would hear them and learn others from other poets, and during the live performance of his poem, which could go on for hours, he could use them when he improvised. He could draw on words and phrases which would fit the metre and rhyme, signpost the characters for the listeners, give shape and pace to the whole. The argument continued that this kind of poetic diction could only be the cumulative creation of many generations of oral poets over centuries, and was so complex that it couldn’t have been the work of a single poet.
No one today would claim that one man called Homer sat down and wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey at one sitting. But we can say that one man probably perfected what generations worked at, a magnificent poet who, perhaps over a lifetime, gathered the treasures and resources of an ancient traditional art, shaped and polished old stories, and created something vivid and new – these powerful dramas about the tragedy of Achilles and the desperate wanderings of Odysseus, which have stood the test of time and fired the imagination of succeeding generations. Whether this poet was called Homer or not doesn’t really matter. Because, whatever the origins and authorship of these epics, it’s their supreme storytelling verve, their poetry and the imaginative power driving them which still speaks to us.
Here’s another example, from the opening of the Illiad, in a modern, vernacular translation by the American scholar Stanley Lombardo:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
It’s rousing stuff, with the immediate promise of action and terrible deeds, and that ringing phrase which instantly turns the spotlight on the brooding, proud figure at the centre of the drama – Achilles and his ‘black and murderous’ rage.
Stanley Lombardo is so passionate about the poetry and the music of the Illiad and the Odyssey that he travels around performing them to live audiences, just as the bards did millennia ago. Armed only with a drum, which he beats at strategic points in the action, he recites sections from the poems. ‘You experience the poetry of Homer in a different way,’ he says. He thinks that Homer came to this level of composition through performance.
The Illiad is full of passionate, rousing language
Bonnie and Clyde, a modern tragedy
The Seven Basic Plots
What makes a good story? Compulsive characters, scintillating dialogue, wonderful writing – certainly – but for most of us, the plotline is the vital ingredient in a story, the roadmap, as it were, for characters.
Most writers will tell you that there are only so many storylines to be told. Some have even tried to put a number on it. Rudyard Kipling is thought to have had a list with sixty-nine basic plots; others have argued for thirty-six, twenty and – in the case of Professor William Foster-Harris – three. He suggested happy ending, unhappy ending and the ‘literary’ plot, ‘in which the whole plot is done backwards and the story winds up in futility and unhappiness’. Ronald Tobias argues that all plots can be boiled down to two – ‘plots of the body’ and ‘plots of the mind’. Some have even managed to squeeze all the stories in the world into one plotline: exposition – rising action – climax – falling action – denouement.
The most useful list – certainly the best fun at dinner parties – is probably that of journalist Christopher Booker, who proposes that all narratives in the world are variations of a basic seven plots. Here they are, along with some story suggestions to get the conversations going:
Overcoming the Monster: the hero confronts and defeats a life-threatening monster or evil force. The hero returns home victorious. Beowulf, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and Dracula would fit into this category, along with all the James Bond films, High Noon, Jaws and Alien.
Rags to Riches: a commonplace character, often in wretched circumstances, achieves wealth, status, beauty, happiness. ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘Aladdin’ (and a host of other fairy tales) have common links with Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The Quest: the hero sets out on a hazardous journey to reach his goal, confronting dangers and temptations along the way. The Odyssey, Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote, Lord of the Rings, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Watership Down (yes, rabbits can be heroic).
Voyage and Return: the hero leaves home to explore another, often magical, world and, after a dramatic escape, returns to the familiar world. The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, The Wizard of Oz and Gulliver’s Travels. Many of the Quest stories fit this bill as well.
Rebirth: the hero is overcome by dark forces and then redeemed, often by the power of love. ‘Snow White’, Silas Marner, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, Star Wars, The Grinch.
Comedy: a chaos of misunderstanding which eventually resolves itself into a happy ending. Everything from Oscar Wilde plays and Jane Austen novels to Feydeau farces and most of Shakespeare’s comedies.
Tragedy: a flawed character spirals down into evil and inevitable death or disaster. From Macbeth and King Lear to Bonnie and Clyde and Madame Bovary.
There are other genres, of course – mystery, romance, sci-fi – but most of the stories will fit into the framework of one of these seven basic plots.
William Goldman
Why is it that some books have us staying up all night to finish them and others stay unread after the first few pages? What is it about one story which has us quivering for more and another which has us wriggling with boredom? The secret of what makes a good story is the Holy Grail of writers, publishers and movie and TV executives. Get it right, and you’ve got a chart-topping book or film on your hands. Get it wrong, and you’ve got a flop. Nowhere is the secret of a good story more hungrily sought than in the movie business, where hundreds of millions of pounds are made or lost at the box office.
William Goldman, doub
le Oscar-winner and considered by many to be Hollywood’s pre-eminent screenwriter, should know a thing or two about the ingredients for a good story – or perhaps not, as his most famous quote is ‘Nobody knows anything.’ Goldman described in his memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, how one of the highest-grossing films of all time, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was turned down by every studio in Hollywood except Paramount. And Star Wars was passed over by Universal. ‘Nobody – not now, not ever – knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.’
It’s hard to believe that, after more than fifty years in the story business, Goldman doesn’t have an inkling of what works and doesn’t work. After all, he’s the screenwriter of some of the most intelligent films of the 1970s and 80s – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men, The Stepford Wives, The Princess Bride …
Goldman has described with real feeling the torment of writing.
‘Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before.’ As he says, ‘The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.’ It’s reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer – a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
So how does Goldman find inspiration for his stories? His screenplay for Marathon Man was adapted from his own novel and was made into an iconic thriller staring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier in 1976. Goldman says it was based on two ideas. The first was what would happen if someone in your family wasn’t what you thought they were. (That’s the Dustin Hoffman character, who thinks his brother is an oil man and actually he’s a spy.) As for the second idea: ‘I was walking on 47th Street in New York – the diamond district – about forty years ago, and it was a hot day, and all the people that worked in the diamond district were wearing short-sleeve shirts, and you could see all the terrible marks from the concentration camps – because they were all Jewish and they all had their tattoos – and I got the notion: what if the world’s most wanted Nazi was walking along this street?’
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