Shameless Magpies

 Hey class! In this post, I'm really just going to talk more about being a shameless magpie. If you missed synchronous class on Monday for some reason, make sure you watch the recording. It's one of the most important classes of the year. Here's a link to the Annotated Poe I talk about, and here's a link to the annotated Dracula in case you're interested.

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal."
-Pablo Picasso

For your short story (due the Monday after Thanksgiving), you are going to be required to steal something from one of the authors we've read. You can be a Structure Magpie and steal POV or plot design. Or you can be a Content Magpie and steal subjects and ideas. Or you can be both. You will take some aspect and recast it, remake it as your own. You know, build your nest.

List of Things I Have Stolen/Collected:

• The analogy of writers as magpies from Edgar Allan Poe
• The titles of Medieval manuscripts in Lampeter, Wales
• The chiming patterns (cynghanedd) of Welsh poetry
• Bits of speech I heard in a lighthouse in St. Augustine, Florida
• A chess game I lost when a knight forked my queen and king
• A story about grouper and off-shore oil workers from my dad 
• The Grimm fairytale "Jorinda and Joringel"
• The Unfinished Window of All Things in Bath, England
• Thoreau's sentence structure
• Virginia Woolf's sentence structure
• Jane Brox's sentence structure
• The visit to the Underworld in the Odyssey
• The actual odyssey of the Odyssey
• The magician from Shakespeare's The Tempest
•  Lot's of poems and anecdotes from Tolkowsky's Hesperides
• The landscape of the isle of Skye
• The idea of a crossover world from Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
• The structure of Kevin Prufer's poems for my essays
• Details about sea voyages from Kon-Tiki
• Colonial life in The Witch of Blackbird Pond
• Screenplay structures for plotting novels (Save the Cat)
• The structure of the song "Petit Camusette" by Josquin des Pres
• The story of Persephone
• About 10 million recipes
• A little girl from my 1st grade reader
• A rich lady's rose garden
• A Pontet Canet wine review from Robert Parker ("black as a moonless night...")
• Umm... HERO'S JOURNEY. Hard.
• Quite a few rocks, actually

PS: The process of writing that list was surprisingly fun and revealing. It left me with all kinds of ideas for writing. If you are having trouble coming up with a short story idea, I recommend that you start off by writing your own magpie list.