Transcript
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Welcome to Writing with the Bog Owl. This is another course in a series that I’m calling Writing with Literature. And in these courses, they’re not literature courses. They are writing courses, but we’re going through works of literature together, sort of looking at the nuts and bolts of the way the writer has achieved certain effects. We are then seeing how we we can apply those methods and techniques to our own writing. Now, in the other courses in this series, I’ve often had to speculate on what the writer was doing, what the writer was up to. We’ve been talking about C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or Tolkien in The Hobbit, or Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird. I can speculate on what the author was up to, but sometimes I’m not sure. Well, we’re at a bit of an advantage with The Bark of the Bog Owl because I wrote this book. And so I have a better idea of what the author was up to, although admittedly, sometimes the author didn’t know what he was up to and was making it up as he went along. And it was 2001– no, 2002 when I wrote The Bark of the Bog And so there certainly are things that I have forgotten about what I was thinking when I wrote that book.
So there will be moments when I am speculating. But on the other hand, another interesting thing about going through this book together is that I’ve learned and grown as a writer since I wrote these books, wrote the Wilder King books. And so there are a few things that I would do differently. And I’ll bring that up as we come to them. So I want to start this course with a lesson about setting, setting and originality. We don’t think of setting and originality as going together necessarily. By the way, in the case of my setting, the setting that I created in the Bark of the Bog Owl, it’s especially unoriginal insofar as every outdoor place in the WilderKing trilogy is based on some real place in South Georgia or Florida that I can actually, we could go to.
And so in one sense, it’s not original at all. But the point I want to make is the way I handled setting in this series is a good example of what originality, how originality actually works, even though it is not, in some sense, properly speaking, not original at all.
I often say that the “Wilder King” is set than an imaginary island that looks suspiciously like South Georgia or Florida. So I grew up in the state of Georgia. I grew up right about here. As you can see– well, I don’t know if you can actually see, but up here is the sort of hilly, what we call the Piedmont of Georgia. And then this bottom half here is where it starts to get flat and sandy and swampy, and all the rivers slow down and start going toward the ocean.
And I kind of grew up right here where those two parts of the state change. Where the state starts to get a little sandy and a little swampy. And I was always interested in swamps. I’m just fascinated. There’s interesting critters that live in the swamp. There’s all kinds of interesting natural processes in a swamp that maybe you don’t see in other places. There was a river, the Okmulgee River is where I used to go fishing and it would flood so often and so broadly that there were fish whose diet, part of their diet was acorns because they would go out of the river and go scoop up acorns and then swim back to the river during flood time.
So all those kinds of natural oddities of swamps, they always fascinated me. And as much as I love mountains and as much as I love the ocean and those natural landscapes, for me, my sort of native wilderness always felt kind of swampy.
And so I always, from as long as I’ve known I wanted to be a writer, I knew I wanted to somehow, that swamps would be somehow involved in that storytelling. The Wilderking stories, The Bark of the Bog Owl and The Secret of the Swamp King and The Way of the Wilder King started solidifying for me when I read a book by the late, great Eugene Peterson called Leap Over the Wall.
It’s a book about King David, like his whole life, much of which, a lot of what we know about King David was before he was king, right, when he was young.
And David, the story of David just sort of came alive for me as I was reading Eugene Peterson’s book. I started understanding the narrative possibilities in, you know, it’s really an adventure story with lots of different kinds of adventure stories within the big adventure story. You know, there’s the David killing, you know, David the Giant Killer, which is maybe the most well-known story about David. I love this picture of David. Look at that kind of what’s up kind of look on his face like, I’ve just killed a giant. What have you been doing today? And so that’s a very familiar story about David. But more to the point, the story of David, what fascinated me was this idea of a boy who knows he’s going to be king someday, but he’s not king yet. And what’s it like to live in that gap? What’s it like, how do you live in loyalty to a king that you know it’s your destiny to take his throne, right? And so David has a lot of really difficult decisions in his life. He has, you know, even in the story of David and Goliath, I’m fascinated by this idea that this boy who was, the grownups in his life told him to trust God, that God was powerful, that God was on their side.
And when he shows up at the battlefield, everybody’s terrified of this giant. And nobody– the people who told him not to fear are cowering in fear. And I was fascinated with that as a way of thinking about what’s it like to be a young person, to be in a situation where your parents, or your teachers, the people around you expressed one set of truths, what do you do when they’re not living up to those truths? All of these things about young David just captured my imagination to think about– I think it’s a good way of talking about what it’s like to be a young person, to know you’ve got an interesting future ahead of you, but not to be there yet. And so I wanted to write stories about that. And the other thing about the Eugene Peterson book, Leap Over a Wall, is that it really awakened me to how important wilderness is to David’s story, especially before he becomes king. Actually, after he becomes king, he runs out of the wilderness a time or two. But wilderness, it’s in many ways a wilderness story, a frontier story. And so I started putting together in my mind, huh, the David story is a pretty rich source of story. What would that look like if it were in a swampy place instead of a desert-y place? And I started playing with those ideas in my mind. This was before the Feechee folks kind of showed up in my imagination. And then I just thought it might be just for fun, What if we set this thing in a medieval, castly kind of world? And so what ended up happening is I put the David story together with us in a swampy environment where there were kind of castles, in a sort of– as if this were medieval Florida, if there were such a thing as medieval Florida.
And I put those things together. And that’s kind of where the Wilder King stories come from, is that confluence of a swampy kind of wilderness with a David-y kind of adventure story and then plus the castles and the medieval stuff.
Although I will say as the stories went on, you may notice as you read those stories, the medieval aspect of things gets less and less important as the story goes on.
And then in the, so it was always kind of this mixture of frontiersy stuff with medieval castle-y stuff with less castle-y stuff as you go along and more frontier stuff.
And then by the time you get to The Charlatan’s Boy, another book that’s not part of the Wielderking trilogy but set in the same world, it’s just kind of a frontier world and it’s not very medieval-y at all. But anyway, I point all this out, and I put these things together in this lesson as a way of talking about where originality comes from.
Because I think people perceive, and I hope they do, they read the Bark of the Bog Owl or any of the Wilder King stories and feel that this feels original to them.
I hope that’s true and I have people tell me that that’s the way they, that’s what they think, that it feels original, it feels fresh. But to tell you the truth, there’s nothing very original here. Okay? I mean if you even, it’s just some, you know, I borrowed some plot points from David. I dropped them in the kind of, an environment that I was very familiar with and as I mentioned before, literally every outdoor place in the Wilbur King trilogy, I can tell you what place in Georgia or possibly Florida that’s based on. And it’s usually–with a couple of exceptions, places I’ve been. And then none of this is original except that when you put these three things together, that’s never been done before, putting those three things together. And so that combination of things starts to feel original. My point here is, we all want to be original. Creative people want to feel like they’ve done something that’s original. What you need to do is don’t sit down and think, what’s something original I can do? Don’t strive for originality. What you need to do is trust that as you rework the materials that you have at your disposal, you’re going to put those together in a way that nobody’s put them together before. That’s where originality comes from. Not from just completely trying to invent something completely new. The only person who ever did that is God. You may know the phrase creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. That’s not what we do. Human beings don’t do that. We just take the raw materials that we find and put them together and that’s where originality comes from. Speaking of being unoriginal, this is a map of Cornwall from the front of the Bark of the Bog Owl. This is a map of Georgia and as you can see, this is just basically the southern half of Georgia with new river names. Alright, that’s how original I am. Here’s the Ocmulgee River coming down and here’s the Oconee and they become the Altamaha and go to the ocean. Well look, that’s what’s going on here. Here’s the Echikunee Creek. The Echihouli River is just another name for the Flint River and this, the Feechee-Fin Swamp, it’s really just the Okefenokee Swamp that drains out to the coast there, to the Gulf. Alright, not very original but hopefully it feels original. I mean, it’s not original to me because I know where all this stuff came from. But hopefully it’s fresh to somebody who’s never thought about putting these things together before. So originality is just putting familiar things together in unfamiliar ways. And I offer that as a, hopefully an encouragement to you as a writer. Okay, that’s most of what I wanted to say about setting in a sort of macro, at the macro level. do a little bit of thinking and talking about the idea of setting in some more really more specific ways. Specifically I want to talk about where this story starts. Geographically where the Wilder King trilogy or where the Bark of the Bog Owl starts. Here is the description of where Aden is sitting when the Bark of the Beigel starts. Of all the pastures on Longleaf Manor, the bottom pasture was Aidan’s favorite. Situated at the farthest edge of the estate, it was a floodplain meadow of the River Tam which formed the eastern boundary of Errol’s lands. Notice this language of boundary. We are at the edge and so when Aidan faces one way he sees sheep grazing in a pasture, this cultivated land and When he turns this way, he sees a forest that looks just like it looked when his forefathers came to the country and there’s wolves and there’s bobcats and there’s alligators and all that kind of stuff. And he’s at the edge of that. Now this is not a coincidence, right? This is not an accident. The point is this is where story happens. And by the way, this is another reason I’m interested in swamps because swamps is where the land and the water comes together and the land animals and the water animals get mixed up with each other and you know, there’s a–anything can happen in a swamp because that’s where two different ecosystems come together. Well that’s basically what’s going on here. Two different ecosystems. The ecosystem of the civilized world and the ecosystem of the forest and Aden is standing right there at the edge. Aidan is the kind of person who’s interested in that edge because he’s a person of imagination, a person of adventure. And so even though his job is to be a shepherd, which is not a very exciting job, he likes to be a shepherd right there at the edge of the forest.
So this is, as I said, this is not an accident that the story starts at the edge of the farm, where the farm ends and the forest starts.
The setting here is not just a backdrop. The setting is a vitally important part of the story. The setting generates the action. I say generates, that may be overstating the case a little bit. But well, no, it’s not. There are plenty of situations in which the setting causes the action to happen. And so this edge of the forest is where it’s possible for Dobro the Feechy boy to encounter Aidan the Civilized boy. It’s also, by the way, the place where a panther might come out into the farm, right? The panther’s not going to come to the manor house. He’s going to be at the edge of the farm where the woods meet the sheep. That’s exactly where a panther is going to come. And so think about the action of here at the beginning of the story happens because it couldn’t have happened anywhere else but at the edge of the forest. And rather than thinking of setting as a backdrop on which your action can take place, I think it’s really helpful to think, I love the question, what are the kind of things that could happen in this setting that aren’t going to happen somewhere else? And that’s a really good place to start telling a story. Certain things happen in some settings, certain other things happen in other settings, and the settings not just the screen on which people stand and–where people can stand in front of the screen and do their actions.
Now the truth is there are some stories where it doesn’t really matter where it happened. There are stories where it’s just mainly two people talking and it doesn’t really matter if those two people are in an apartment in Seattle talking or an apartment in New Delhi talking or an apartment in Texas or an apartment in South America.
It doesn’t really matter too much. So there is that kind of story, but that’s not what kind of story the Bark of the Bog Owl is. Frankly, it’s not the kind of story that I’ll probably ever write. I’m just more interested in setting. So all I’m saying is don’t think of setting as just a necessary backdrop for your action. there’s a really good chance, depending on where your story is told, that that setting is going to play an important role in your story.
There’s a saying that there are only two kinds of stories. A person takes a trip, or a stranger comes to town. Now, that is a incredibly broad generalization that you can’t really– that’s kind of an unsupportable generalization. But the point is, stories start to happen when people come into contact with each other who don’t normally come into contact with one another. And that’s why a boundary can be such a rich source of storytelling. So at the beginning of “The Bark of the Bog Owl,” there’s the sheep pastures, and there’s the wilderness, and the story happens right here, right where those two come together. A story happens when things get thrown out of balance. And things get thrown out of balance. This boundary is a good place for things to get thrown out of balance. Because people run into each other who otherwise wouldn’t run into each other. So we’ve got an equilibrium over here. We’ve got an equilibrium over here. And when those two things come into contact, they throw each other out of equilibrium. So the Fiji world gets thrown out of balance because Dobro comes into contact with Aden. Aidan’s world gets thrown out of balance because he comes into contact with Dobro. So you may have seen Freytag’s Pyramid before. If you’ve taken my other Writing with Literature classes, you’ve seen this diagram many times. But our story starts at this, like I said, an equilibrium whereby Aidan is just a farm boy, takes care of the sheep, not super happy with his equilibrium, but it’s an equilibrium. That’s his complaint, is that his life is so, you know, there’s so much equilibrium and so little adventure. And we’re going to talk in the next lesson some more about that. And by the way, that dissatisfaction with this kind of very subtle life he lives probably is part of the reason he’s hanging out in the bottom pasture instead of elsewhere. He’s kind of living on the edge a little bit. The inciting incident is that moment that throws the equilibrium out of whack. And in the case of this book, that inciting incident is when Aidan hears the bark of the bog owl. That is quite literally the call of the wild that he responds to. And he hears, why does he hear the bark of the bog owl? Because he’s on a boundary. So think about boundaries as a way to start a story, one way to sort of in the middle of a story to sort of change the way things are going is to bring your character to another boundary where your character is going to run into another kind of people.
So I said a minute ago there are stories where the protagonist takes a trip and there are stories where a stranger comes to town.
Well if you have your story on a boundary then both of those things are happening at one time because everybody over here is a stranger to a person over here and the people People over here are strangers to people over here and they run into each other right here.
That’s all I’m going to say about setting for now. We’re going to have plenty more to say about setting in subsequent lessons, but I wanted to say that much just as a way of getting you to think about the way place plays a role in a lot of stories and especially in The Bark of the Bog Owl.
In the next lesson, we’re going to be getting into the idea of third-person close narration. This story is told very much from Aidan’s point of view, and we’re going to talk about why that makes a difference.