Creativity: Making Connections, Part III

Last blog, I talked about how one of the earliest creative leaps the human race made was the equation of animal behavior with human behavior. From the trickster stories of coyote and fox the native American tribes told, to the “brother rabbit tales” originally from Nigeria, to Aesop’s fables and onward, the obvious connection between human and animal traits were exploited in story. One of the best examples of this, and one of the most instructive for creative writers, was Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

If you haven’t read this story, it is about a group of animal friends. Okay, that’s easy enough, but Grahame performs a tour de force by carrying the story much further than the simple correlation that has been the mainstay of storytelling for millennia. He expands links between human and animal behavior in ingenious and innovative ways.

His characters have personalities, as we might expect. But he weaves his characters out of traits that are already there. Water Rat, his main character, is “cool”—not in the slang sense we use it today, but he is calm, even, and temperate. Rat befriends Mole. Mole is a bit obtuse (moles are almost blind), stodgy, and plodding, but has a great heart. They meet Rat’s friends: Badger, who, in his own way, is vicious (badgers are not nice animals if you encounter one). Last of all, there is Toad. Toad is an egotist. He is “puffed up,” as toads will be.

All the creatures, then, take on personalities suggested by the appearance or behavior of the animal they are. But Grahame goes further. He places them in a social setting. They live in the woods, but not entirely. Rat has a boat. The animals live in houses. Mr. Toad is rich and lives on an estate. Apparently (though you don’t get a lot of information on this) they interact with humans and the humans don’t seem to think their presence odd. The animals constitute their own little society. In fact, Toad’s out-of-control behavior is, according to Badger, “giving us a bad name.” He is harming the social reputation of the animals in England.

This is funny, and the animals cross backward to remind us of human types we know. A sequence of hilarious events unfolds. Toad, who is wasting his money on gadgets, becomes enamored of the newfangled motorcar, gets in accidents, and eventually steals a car and is thrown in jail. He escapes and gets home only to find his estate has been taken over by unseemly animals—weasels, stoats, and foxes—and he must fight to get it back. His animal friends help him.

The theme of the book is friendship. The animals care for each other. They are considerate of each others' needs and feelings. They love each other.

I like art about friendship. Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and Tombstone are three of my favorite films because they are largely about friendship. There is no better book on friendship than The Wind in the Willows. It is not only funny, but a touching and moving tale about human (in the guise of animal) friendships.

What is the ultimate experience of friendship? One afternoon, Mole and Rat are out in Rat’s boat and

experience the ultimate:  they see God. The god of animals is Pan and the two of them encounter him. In a magnificently written piece that stuns me with its creative imagery, the little creatures are overwhelmed by Pan’s presence. The god—knowing that nothing in life will be wonderful for the two animals after the supreme experience of seeing him and being in his presence—makes them forget what they have just known so they can go on being happy. Instead of hearing Pan’s pipe and his song, they only hear “the wind in the willows” as they go their way.

How did he think of that?

But if you’re making a story out of connections between humans and animals, humans have always been religious. They have always had “theodicies,” moments when they see God or the gods or the spirits. Why not animals as well? And what would it be like to see the Supreme Being? It would be difficult to convey that via a human character, but an animal character opens the door to such a description. And Grahame does with a masterful hand.

So, I’ve made the point in three blogs that one facilitates creativity by seeing connections, links, and analogies—between the homeless and supernatural creatures, between animals and humans, between the content of rock songs and the paranormal. Add whatever else presents itself to your imagination. Look for the connections. This is one path to writing creatively.

Next, I want to look at other ways writers have been creative in what they did with genre, subject matter, and other literary conventions. Stay tuned.

I’d love you to check out my Writer's Page.

I would love you to buy a copy of my novella, Strange Brew.

Creativity: Making Connections, Part II

In my last blog, I talked about how to make creative connections. I want to pursue the idea of making

connections, seeing parallels and analogies and exploiting them, and I want to do so by focusing on the most basic fantastical connection that human race knows. It is ancient, found in the literature of most cultures of the world (I would even say all cultures). It is very present today. The thing to which I refer is making animals into characters—giving them human abilities and using them to illustrate vices, virtues, and numerous other attributes.

Examples are abundant—from Aesop to Huckleberry Hound—but I want to start with a poem by C. S. Lewis that maybe gets to the core of why this is so attractive to us and so much of a basic creative move. The poem is called “Impenitence.” In it, the speaker says he will not “repent” of his love of stories that involve talking animals, even though critics and intellectuals say they are not for adults and are silly and juvenile. The poem is too long to quote here in its entirety, but one section is particularly instructive. Lewis’s narrator says

                                               

                                    Look again. Look well at the beasts, the true ones.
                                    Can't you see?...cool primness of cats, or coney's
                                    Half indignant stare of amazement, mouse's
                                    Twinkling adroitness,

                                    Tipsy bear's rotundity, toad's complacence...
                                    Why! they all cry out to be used as symbols,
                                    Masks for Man, cartoons, parodies by Nature
                                    Formed to reveal us

                                    Each to each, not fiercely but in her gentlest
                                    Vein of household laughter . . .

Animals, he tells us, “cry out to be used as symbols.” We all recognize it. If we have pets, we’ve done just what the poem says. We’ve attributed human characteristics to animals. We’ve seen them as examples, archetypes of humans, and as “parodies of Nature / Formed to reveal us.”

The human race caught on to this early. Tribal cultures had their “trickster” stories of the fox or

coyote. Brer Rabbit (Brother Rabbit) is example of an African trickster figure brought to America by captives transported here from there who adapted the tales to our own culture. Native American tribes abounded in such trickster stories. Going further on, Aesop told animal fables in ancient Greece.

In the Middle Ages, there were “bestiaries,” books that taught moral lessons using the animal world (beasts). We still recite vestiges from those books:  the idea that an ostrich hides its head in the sand when afraid is from medieval bestiaries. Talking animals come to us today, whether it’s Scooby-Do (well, he doesn’t talk exactly), Buggs Bunny, or Sponge Bob.

From this, we glean that for creative, entertaining stories, human beings have always relied on analogy; that is, storytellers noticed similarities and use these similarities to create entertaining or enlightening tales. In a world where animals abounded and human beings had a great deal of contact with them, the connections were an obvious choice.

Donkeys were patient and stubborn; lions were ferocious; foxes were sly and crafty; horses were true-blue. Out of these similarities of animals to humans, stories were born. By connecting something outside the boundaries of human life with things inside human life, we could learn about ourselves. Maybe this is where imagination and creativity first came about. It’s still with us today.

We continued to use animal characters. But we can take it beyond this. I’ve noted how Neil Gaiman exploited the similarities between the homeless and supernatural beings in his novel Neverwhere. Though J. R. R. Tolkien adamantly insisted Lord of the Rings was not a political allegory, it seems plausible that the easy-going, food-loving citizens of England inspired hobbits; and the aggressive, rapacious, militaristic figures the British fought and World War I and World War II suggested the Evil Races of Middle Earth. He made the connections, at least to some extent, and used them to create one of the greatest stories of all time.

So notice the connections.

I’ll have one more blog on this subject and then go on to some other things related to creativity.

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