Changing Direction Mid-Creation (or: Why Writing Long Poems is a Terrible, Terrible Idea)
This morning I managed to finish another stanza. Yippee! At this rate, I'll be finished with the poem in the year that I retire. Part of my sluggishness over the past few days is a direct result of changing a major plot element of the poem. Perhaps I should explain first that I had, more or less, mapped out the course of the poem/fairytale according to 1) fits of inspiration and 2) guidance from the last few pages of a text titled The Classic Fairytales , edited by Maria Tatar. The last entry in this anthology is taken from Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale . This essay is, crudely but very admiringly put, The Shit. Propp analyzed 100 Russian fairy tales and managed to come up with a list of 31 "functions" -- or events/details/characteristics -- that fairy tales possess. "Propp's Thirty-One Functions" was extremely useful in helping me shape the plot line of my own fairytale. Most important was the following: 3. The sequence of functions is...