"Living Local Fiction"

things fall apart

“On first moving to Maine and seeing a line of tall ledges from a nearby road, I was enchanted, surprised. I’d never seen anything like them before: Mountains like waves of rock waiting to crash over the land.

Home territory is well known to the author which makes the story… a little easier to tackle. At least something looks familiar. It’s a little like traveling to some faraway place where they turn out to speak English after all. It’s still an exotic journey, but you feel comfortable nonetheless.

“So wrote Maine writer Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys and Ernie’s Ark , via e-mail to me. She kindly responded to my request to quote her for this essay. I was interested to see what others had to say about writing local fiction.”

The above intro is from "Living Local Fiction" which was first published in longform at Mere Orthodoxy.

On the Close Reads podcast we are reading Things Fall Apart by China Achebe, published in 1959, the story takes place in Nigeria in a culture, including machetes, far different from ours. This novel is an excellent example of living local fiction. Halfway through the reading I’ve been treated to Life in the communal nine villages, how children, men and women, live their lives in paternal compounds, following farming/economic survival and rituals established long ago. The signature of a man’s wealth was based on the number of yams he harvested, sold, bartered, gave away. Gods and priestesses played their part. “A man’s life from birth to death was a series of transition rights which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.”

I may be mistaken but believe his characters are based on archetypes, not real live individuals made in the image of God. His characters feel archetypal solid, with few individual quirks or personalities. Reading slowly, halfway through, I began to see it coming, that the main character—the type of flawed hero in this story, with his given weaknesses—will be the one, along with his family, experiencing the eponymous situation.

Why do I called them archetypal? Because anyone in our culture, any culture East or West in the world past and present, might be able to identify with their familiar and communal situation. We are all living mythic lives…. In which “violent deaths were frequent, but nothing like this had ever happened.”

More from the article at Mere Orthodoxy,"Living Local Fiction:”

“If you are sub-creating characters from mythic types instead of using actual people as though raw material, you have ahold of something deep and telling to help make your characters. For archetypes themselves are made of God’s crafting. Familial and community ROLES are one place to extrapolate archetypes, the pantheon of mythic gods a second, the various components of image-bearing personality a third. But too close an inquiry here would be deadening. We do not want to cut and dry our stories. Hold a type in your hand and then release it. Explicitness, so useful to science, is of little value to writerly magic.”

Image by R. Dorman

Living local Reality

Deliver us from evil beauty

© S. Dorman December 2023