{"id":6881,"date":"2017-11-08T08:57:41","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T13:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6881"},"modified":"2017-11-08T08:57:41","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T13:57:41","slug":"a-mysterious-affair-the-ur-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6881","title":{"rendered":"A Mysterious Affair & the Ur-Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(image: pixabay, creative commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n

Last Saturday the Princeton Arts Council hosted an afternoon conference featuring an impressive gang of mystery and crime writers who ply their trade between New York and Philadelphia. A first of its kind, in my memory at least, it drew around a hundred writers and readers and fans.<\/p>\n

Panels talked about writing stories set in a region\u2014does it matter whether you\u2019ve actually been there? Or, when is Google Earth not enough?<\/em>\u2014and stories where the author can\u2019t have been there, because they\u2019re set in a different historical time\u2014how much research do you really need?<\/em> Even stories set in the future, in the case of some thrillers\u2014is research even important? Don\u2019t you just make it up?<\/em><\/p>\n

Audience members asked the burning question: how do people react when the find out you write about murder?<\/em> And, while this prompted some humorous replies, in fact, most people are fascinated. They often say they would like to write a mystery themselves, though few end up doing it. Panelists encouraged them to. As to how they manage writing, other jobs, families, and so on, panelist Jeff Cohen (who writes as E.J. Copperman<\/a>) had the best reply: \u201cIf you can swing it, it helps to have a wife with a full-time job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guest of Honor S. J. Rozan<\/a>, a mystery writer with 15 novels, more than 60 short stories, and \u00a0multiple awards on her c.v., gave the keynote. She talked about how genre writers\u2014crime (including mystery and thrillers), romance, Westerns, science fiction, and she\u2019d include coming-of-age\u2014are still disparaged as \u201cnot literature,\u201d yet remain wildly popular.<\/p>\n

Why is that? She said genre writing can be distinguished by having an ur-story, a fundamental story line. Readers (and moviegoers) expect and take comfort in those ur-stories and in their very predictability, and writers violate the established genre conventions at their peril. The ur-story in the romance genre is \u201clove conquers all\u201d; in science fiction, it\u2019s \u201cwhat it is to be human.\u201d Mysteries and thrillers, despite their uncountable variations, have ur-stories too, she maintains. In mystery, it\u2019s \u201chere\u2019s why<\/em> this happened\u201d\u2014attractive in a world where so much seems inexplicable\u2014and in thrillers, it\u2019s \u201cis there time?\u201d This last manifests itself in the frequently encountered literal \u201cticking clock\u201d that thriller protagonists are trying to beat.<\/p>\n

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em>, Joseph Campbell<\/a> maintained there is a single ur-story underlying all fiction, ancient to 21c. This has led to the \u201chero\u2019s journey\u201d school of story construction, in which a protagonist is marched through a call to adventure, begins a quest, overcomes trials, brings home the goods, and so on. That fundamental storyline can be detected in Rozan\u2019s more descriptive genre-specific ur-stories. Whatever it is, however it\u2019s aggregated or subdivided, we love hearing and seeing the ur-story over and over in books, on stage, and in the movies.<\/p>\n

The event, sponsored by Princeton\u2019s Cloak & Dagger bookstore<\/a>, was co-hosted by the local chapters of two organizations I belong to: Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime.
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Last Saturday the Princeton Arts Council hosted an afternoon conference featuring an impressive gang of mystery and crime writers who ply their trade between New York and Philadelphia. A first of its kind, in my memory at least, it drew … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A Mysterious Affair & the Ur-Story - why genre fiction tops the best-seller lists","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,40,174,311,29],"tags":[1171,1169,1168,412,89,1167,415,1170],"class_list":["post-6881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-novel","category-writing","tag-cloak-dagger","tag-heros-journey","tag-joseph-campbell","tag-mystery","tag-reading","tag-s-j-rozan","tag-thriller","tag-ur-story"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1MZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6881"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6882,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6881\/revisions\/6882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}