12-3-12
Hi folks,
Hi folks,
We hope you are enjoying Narrow Way
Storytellers. Here you'll
discover past ages that are much like the present, strange worlds
that are strangely familiar, supernatural conflicts that are
frighteningly natural; and people just like us making life and death
decisions in the carnage of a fallen world. This is because
storytelling is not a creative act. An unusual statement to be found
on a new storytelling site? But think about it.
“There
is nothing new under the sun,” Solomon proclaimed in the Old
Testament. “Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look! This is
something new?' It was here already, long ago; it was here before our
time.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10)
What about Star
Trek?.........................Sinbad
the Sailor in space.
Superman?...........................................Hercules.
Butch and
Sundance?..........................Robin
and John.
Alien abduction stories with
beckoning lights, circular shapes and time
distortions?..........................................Fairy
tales with faerie lanterns, toadstool rings and overnight stays in
the Perilous Realm from which the abducted return years later
unchanged.
And
long before those tales?
Let's
go all the way back. “In the beginning, God created...” (Genesis
1:1) What humankind presumptuously calls creativity is nothing more
than rearrangement, reconfiguration—sub-creation. The father of
today's heroic fantasy, JRR Tolkien, described storytellers as
sub-creators beckoning readers to explore artfully constructed,
self-consistent secondary worlds. (Tolkien, Tree and Leaf,
p37)
Fantasy? Science Fiction? Historical
Fiction? All sub-creation.
Though the sum of the parts may be presented in a fresh and
distinctive manner, the parts are drawn from God's creation—His
story. And God's creation is all there is. Anything else out there
beyond our sight—well, God made that too.
Consider
aliens and the monsters of antiquity—composites and distortions of
the known. A famous SF writer (whose name escapes me—help!) once
said that anything truly alien in literature or film would, by
definition, be incomprehensible to the reader, unimaginable for the
writer. Pegasus after all was horse and bird in one.
Spock's
ears?..............................................Check
out the elves.
Elves?..........................................................Humans
with pointy ears.
What about Tolkien's
Middle-Earth?..........The
operative word here is earth.
The
world of Faerie, like that galaxy far, far away, is our world
mythologized. Its civilizations, ours reorganized. Its beings and
creatures, our peoples and beasts reconstructed. Victor
Frankenstein's step-children inhabit patchwork worlds constructed
with God-created building blocks. Man the creator? For God, its been
there, done that. Nothing new under this sun or any other.
And
where does a storyteller's imagination come from in the first place?
It's part of God's creation, of course.
So
what about Narrow Way Storytellers?
Never been done before? Well...not quite like this. Praise the Lord
for His gift of human sub-creation let loose on an unsuspecting
primary world.
--GKW
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