Why Great Literature is Important

I’ve just finished re-reading Christopher Booker’s magnum opus, The Seven Basic Plots. If you have never come across this magnificent book, I urge and beg and plead with you to get hold of a copy and read all of its 704 pages cover-to-cover. I first read it about 15 years ago and since then it has sat in my bookshelves and gathered dust. Not that I didn’t think it was a great book back in 2005; it’s just that there are so many things to do in life -working, eating, sleeping, exercising, making love, reading other books and watching movies. That list could be added to almost without end. But here’s the thing: Booker took 34 years to write his book and it is unlike any other book you are likely to read on the subject of stories and what they mean to us. Booker posits that there are but seven basic plots behind every story that has ever been written (or is likely to be written): Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, Voyage and Return, the Quest, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. These plots are not bound to any one culture and it seems that their universality is most prevalent in the realms of myth and fairy tale. Thus Cinderella has many versions around the world and was widely known before Charles Perrault wrote it down in the version that is best known in Europe. I believe it is vital for a screenwriter (or any other kind of writer) to know what kind of story they are getting into when they sit down at the computer to type the first words of a script. Having just recently garnered two awards for screenwriting at prestigious competitions, I can now confess that when I first started writing stories and scripts I did so without recourse to a plan in any shape or form. I entered the forest of creation and just followed my nose wherever it led me -oh look at those beautiful flowers! And was that a Bambi I just caught a fleeting glimpse of in the undergrowth? What I’m trying to get across is that I was clueless and lacked direction. While it is true that a certain degree of patience is required to winkle out the true theme of a story (and this often only comes after perhaps half the story is written), it is almost impossible to know what your theme is if you are bogged in a morass of details and contradictory storylines because you didn’t take the time to ponder and reflect on what you wanted to say before you started writing! Let’s consider for a moment one of my absolute favourite films -It’s a Wonderful Life. You’d say it’s a Comedy and it’s about a man (George Bailey) who struggles all his life to get on and make something of himself. He is nearly undone and considers suicide after his well-meaning fathead of an uncle misplaces $8,000 of the company’s funds. He is saved by the intervention of an angel, Clarence, and by the unstinting devotion of his wife, Mary. Even in that brief synopsis you have a strong story. But reading Booker’s analysis of stories is eye-opening and reveals the power of this film and how it draws on archetypes that go back to the very dawn of the invention of story as an art form. One of the most basic plots is Overcoming the Monster: from 2,500 years ago came the story of Theseus fighting and destroying the half-man, half-bull Minatour. George Bailey has his own monster to overcome -Mr. Potter- who owns nearly all of Bedford Falls and is constantly plotting to get his talons into that part which has escaped his grasp. It’s a Wonderful Life could have been steered towards Tragedy if George had gone through with his hare-brained notion of killing himself, thus allowing his wife to collect the money on his insurance policy. But that would have made a terrible movie and one which would have been quickly confined to the rubbish heap of cinema history. Instead, what we have in It’s a Wonderful Life is not only the happy outcome of seeing a monster bested: we see a soul brought to the edge of destruction and then hauled back and renewed with a vigour and vim that makes grown men sob into their hankies. Rebirth is really the best of the plot archetypes because it speaks to what is deepest within the soul of a man or a woman: as we grow older and the years bring disappointments and sorrows, there is a deep yearning to live fully and recapture the hope and optimism of youth. Change is about renewal, stasis means standing still, not moving forward; ultimately it means death. Because film is a visual medium, it can be very beguiling. You can watch a sequence in a film for as much as twenty minutes with little or no dialogue. You may not even ask yourself what it is about or where it’s taking us. But there is a cautionary caveat I must put in about the kind of film making that flouts all rules and rejects any and all plots -once you’ve seen it, I don’t believe you will keep coming back to it over and over as you do with the greatest stories. When we go to sit in the dark and watch the flickering ghosts on the silver screen, we want to see ourselves up there and that’s not a simple, shallow desire to identify with a better-looking version of ourselves as portrayed by Brad Pitt or Charlize Theron. No, we want to be redeemed and reborn. We want to see the stark injustice of the world overturned. And we want to love or hate so deeply, indeed more deeply than we can in real life. And great Literature provides models for these deepest of feelings. It’s true that a story can come from an experience in life or a snippet in a magazine or a newspaper. Or a story your old grandad told you when you were a child. But to ignore or push aside the store of World Literature is to cut yourself off from the wellspring of the deepest thinkers and subtlest wordsmiths of all ages. It is said that great films often come from 2nd rank books. I believe that to be true, and it is so because great books carry far too many nuanced feelings to ever get even a small portion of them into a screenplay. Literature is important for screenplays and screenwriters because we writers are like instruments that need fine tuning and need to resonate with power and empathy. You will not want to describe a death as Shakespeare does in Hamlet: ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook, that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream…’ But to know these tender and heart-piercing words is to understand something of the pain and suffering that death brings. What Booker’s insights bring to us is the realisation that characters in stories stand for more than themselves, they are always working on a symbolic level as well as a literal one. So George Bailey’s loving mother is the Good Mother and if we have had a great relationship with our own mother, we can see the truth of that relationship brought to life -becasue it is within us. What is projected on the screen or brought to life in a great play or novel resonates with us because at the symbolic level it shows aspects of ourselves. If we think and feel ambivalent towards the world, we are Hamlet. Or Holden Caulfield. If we feel the pain of the green-eyed monster and want to hurt the one we feel has betrayed us, we are Othello. We are, all of us, struggling to be whole, to be the best we can possibly be in this imperfect world. Booker talks about ‘light’ characters and ‘dark’ characters. But his argument builds throughout his book to show that the lightness and darkness is not outside us, it is within. No one sets out in life to be a murderer, yet murders happen and people succumb to the darkest impulses which they often cannot understand. And they blame the world, society, or a bad influence from someone they put their trust in. These are factors, of course, but somewhere along the line they got overtaken by their Shadow, the dark symbolic part of themselves that is ego-driven and has shut them out from the Light. Of course, the greatest of the dark characters is Lucifer. But don’t forget that he was once an angel and fell so far from grace. I recently garnered a semi-final place in the Toronto Metropolitan International Screenplay Competition for a Western script titled Retribution. The kernel of this story came to me in a dream and it took me some time to unpack it and understand what it was telling me. But one thing I knew straight away: it was about my relationship with my ‘dark’ father. He died many years ago, yet he still lives within me and haunts my thoughts. This is a big part of what it means to be a human being: to hold in memory the essence of a person you once loved and continue the relationship beyond the grave. Even if it causes you pain. As a writer this is the rich field you must plow. Great Literature is there to help remind us of the pain and joy of life. Let me put that in a simple maxim: Art exists to make the stone stonier.

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