Miss Moody

I wouldn't traditionally categorize myself as a procrastinator, but then again, I wouldn't categorize this week as a typical one for me either. Here goes... :)

Howdy! I'm Vanessa. I was born in my favorite state, Maine, but I've lived most of my life in the weirdest state, Florida. I see these two places as characters and write about them plenty. My mom (and all of her family) is from Brazil, so I see my upbringing as pretty vertical along that general longitudinal area that encompasses ME, FL, and Br.

I'm a junior and an English major. I'm also a peer advisor in the English dept, and I'm teaching a class this quarter in children's lit. This year I'm the kitchen manager at XOX, a co-op. I'll be RA there next year! I like otters, chocolate, Guinness, short stories, Marilyn Monroe, eucalyptus, October, and dipping french fries in milkshakes.

Get it? OTTER SPACE.

I think that to answer the question, whether there can be any new stories, we first have to define a story means to us. Usually when I hear the argument that there are no new stories being told, the evidence I'm given to back up that claim revolves around repeated elements of story: plot (the Cinderella story, for instance), characters (stock characters like the "girl next door"), themes (death, death death, love, death), style (lyric, sparse), form (the short story, the novel), language (goes along with style), imagery (you know that black crow means nothing good is coming), tone (ironic, distanced) etc. I believe each and every one of those individual categories holds the potential to develop anew.

We listen to stories sometimes at the edge of our seats, uncertain what will happen next. That sort of suspense is surely created by the language, crafty mastery of narrative technique, but if there are no new plots, then reading would still get pretty boring for the avid reader. Wouldn't we be able to guess all of the beginnings, middles, and ends? Wouldn't reading become an act of detective work--guessing and checking--rather than an act of experience, discovery, living, becoming?

Characters are as limitless as the people, animals, creatures, beings, whathaveyous on this planet or any other. Laziness or an inability to escape the people we know perhaps creates familiar characters. Or maybe readers impose that familiarity on the characters because identity is part of what some seek through the experience of reading. I know I saw some of myself in Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, for instance. (Your reaction should be, "Da fuq???") We are totally different people, characters. But there are recognizable or relatable elements there.

Themes, style, form, language, imagery, tone are all items I want to discuss in the future, and will, but this ish is getting long. Huzzah!

But I also firmly believe that not a single one of those elements alone constitutes a story; stories are what happens when these ingredients are cooked together. A lasagna is not the same dish as spaghetti bolognese. They both might have pasta, meat sauce, and cheese, but they're inherently different dishes. It's the recombination of story elements that allows for new stories to continue to be created, even when a generation of writers hasn't yet developed new variations on those elements.