Everybody, writers included, likes a list. (As soon as someone starts a sentence with the words, “There are N kinds of [people, whatever] in this world…,” he’s started to construct a list — even if N is only 2.) It’s one of the signs that among other things we are, humans are mathematical creatures. Even writers and other artists, who often profess ignorance about such things, just love to put one thing… after another thing… after another thing… And more, once they’re listed, to ascribe relative value to each item in the list.
Consider a recent post at Shelly Lowenkopf’s Blog, in which he explores the notion of a “dramatic genome.”
You’ve probably heard the term “genome” before. From the Genome News Network:
A genome is all of a living thing’s genetic material. It is the entire set of hereditary instructions for building, running, and maintaining an organism, and passing life on to the next generation. The whole shebang.
In most living things, the genome is made of a chemical called DNA. The genome contains genes, which are packaged in chromosomes and affect specific characteristics of the organism.
…Each one of earth’s species has its own distinctive genome: the dog genome, the wheat genome, the genomes of the cow, cold virus, bok choy, Escherichia coli (a bacterium that lives in the human gut and in animal intestines), and so on.
So genomes belong to species, but they also belong to individuals. Every giraffe on the African savanna has a unique genome, as does every elephant, acacia tree, and ostrich. Unless you are an identical twin, your genome is different from that of every other person on earth—in fact, it is different from that of every other person who has ever lived.
Most often, a genome is represented by a sequence (yeah: a list) of letters indicating the order in which various components of DNA exist in a particular species or individual: A (for adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), or T (thymine). If you’re a molecular biologist, a sequence like ACCGTAG means something different than TGGACTA — even though the components (A, C, T, and G) are identical. If you can learn enough to understand what each component represents, then you (presumably) can know how the sequence “AC” will differ, in practice, from the sequence “TG.”
Similarly, Lowenkopf proposes that writers interested in understanding their own work construct a “genome” of those units of drama (meaning fiction in general, not just stage works) which are most important to them. This job is a little harder, though, because Lowenkopf lists not just four components but twenty-nine. In alphabetical order, these are the ones he came up with — plus some others I might add:
Crazy week upcoming (as if the last one wasn’t crazy enough)… More details on that later, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have blog posts stacked up in the pipeline and ready to go, starting a week from today [double emphasis added 2008-08-29] and continuing for the next four days. (I know how the Web’s attention wanders if a site goes dark too long.)
, by Arthur Quinn. (Amazon says the book is 112 pages long, which may be attributable to a later edition; the one I’ve got here is copyright 1982.)
My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman handles edges defines his or her success at it. Buildings fall down; patterned wallpaper fails to match up at the seams; bookshelves wobble, and a marble placed on the floor rolls freely from one corner to another.
The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of them have). Instead, they’re authors who at one time or another bowled me over with the unexpected, offering surprising insights into what writing could possibly achieve.
Okay, look — so I don’t have kids of my own, and my niece and nephews and stepkids are all grown and the next generation is still somewhere out on the misty horizon.