Rufus Jones, 1920

Rufus Jones (quakersintheworld.org)

In summary, it has the following qualities:

In a consistent and cause/effect reality like the one we all inhabit in our everyday lives, Archplots feature a single active protagonist. This lead character pursues an object of desire (a new job, the love of his life, a college education etc.) while confronting primarily external forces of antagonism (more qualified candidates, a better looking suitor, a high school teacher out to get him). The story ends “closed” with absolute and irreversible change in the life of the protagonist. There is no going back to the way things were at the beginning of the story. Novels like The Firm, Sense and Sensibility, Carrie, The Hobbit and movies like The Fugitive, Chinatown, Kramer vs. Kramer and plays like Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Importance of Being Ernest are all Archplots.

Archplot is human life Story, the one we all use to evaluate and direct our own lives. This is why Archplot has the greatest potential for the largest possible audience. Every person on the planet is a potential reader/viewer.

The Archplot is the narrative form made famous and delineated so well by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Having evolved over thousands of years, it has the structure that every single human being on earth can relate to. We see our own lives within the frame of Archplot. We all strive to fulfill our desires, be they material, romantic, or professional and believe that there are forces aligned against us to keep us from what we really want and deserve. It is only through active confrontation and defeat of these antagonistic forces do we believe we achieve anything of value.

Once we achieve or fail to achieve our desires however, we find that we can’t go back again. Once we’ve left our hometown and conquered the big city or fallen flat on our face, going back to the way things used to be is impossible. It is like Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge. At the end of a particular quest—getting into college, finding the right mate—we can’t reverse course and go back to the way we saw and felt before we successfully attained or unsuccessfully botched it.

Archplot is linear.  This is the way we view our own lives.

We love Archplots because they mirror the way we choose to privately examine ourselves. There is nothing more powerful in a Story than having a lead character desperately pursuing something. The reader or viewer cannot help but attach himself to that character because he has objects of desire too. If the lead character in a Story gets what he wants, our brains are wired to believe that we can too. Stories fuel our courage and offer the cautions that we believe will help guide our own paths.

Whether you know it or not, your desire to write comes from the urge to not just be “creative,” it’s a need (one every human being on earth has) to help others. A well-told Story is a gift to the reader/listener/viewer because it teaches them how to confront their own discomforts.

In his wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on the 98^th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She recalled that when the first plane hit the North Tower on September 11, 2001, a wave of hot air came through her glass windows as intense as opening a pizza oven.

Panigrosso did not hesitate. She didn’t even pick up her purse, make a phone call or turn off her computer. She walked quickly to the nearest emergency exit, pushed through the door and began the ninety-eight-stairway descent to the ground. What she found curious is that far more people chose to stay right where they were. They made outside calls and even an entire group of colleagues went into their previously scheduled meeting.

Why would they choose to stay in such a vulnerable place in such an extreme circumstance?

Because they were human beings and human beings find change to be extremely difficult, practically impossible. To leave without being instructed to leave was a risk. What were the chances of another plane hitting their tower, really? And if they did leave, wouldn’t their colleagues think that they were over-reacting, running in fear? They should stay calm and wait for help, they must have thought to themselves, maintain an even keel. And that’s what they did. I probably would have too.

Grosz suggests that the reason every single person in the South Tower didn’t immediately leave the building is that they did not have a familiar story in their minds to guide them. This from his book:

We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even – or perhaps especially – in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts. (Grosz, Stephen. The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (p.123) W. W. Norton & Company)

Even among those people who chose to leave, there were some who went back to the floor to retrieve personal belongings they couldn’t bear to part with. One woman was walking down alongside Panigrosso when she stopped herself and went back upstairs to get the baby pictures of her children left on her desk. To lose them was too much for her to accept.

That decision was fatal.

When human beings are faced with chaotic circumstances, our impulse is to stay safe by doing what we’ve always done before. To change our course of action seems far riskier than to keep on keeping on. To change anything about our lives, even our choice of toothpaste, causes great anxiety.

How we are convinced finally to change is by hearing stories of other people who risked and triumphed. Not some easy triumph, either. But a hard fought one that takes every ounce of the protagonist’s inner fortitude. Because that’s what it takes in real life to leave a dysfunctional relationship, move to a new city, or quit your job.  It takes guts, moxie, inner fire, the stuff of heroes.

Change, no matter how small, requires loss. And the prospect of loss is far more powerful than potential gain. It’s difficult to imagine what a change will do to us. This is why we need stories so desperately.

Stories give us scripts to follow. It’s no different than young boys hearing the story of how an orphan in Baltimore dedicated himself to the love of a game and ended up the greatest baseball player of all time. If George Herman Ruth could find his life’s work and succeed from such humble origins, then maybe they could became big league ball players too.

We need stories to temper our anxieties, either as supporting messages to stay as we are or inspiring road maps to get us to take a chance. Experiencing stories that tell the tale of protagonists for whom we can empathize gives us the courage to examine our own lives and change them.

So if your story doesn’t change your lead character irrevocably from beginning to end, no one will deeply care about it. It may entertain them, but it will have little effect on them. It will be forgotten. We want characters in stories that take on the myriad challenges of changing their lives and somehow make it through, with invaluable experience. Stories give us the courage to act when we face confusing circumstances that require decisiveness.

These circumstances are called CONFLICTS. What we do or don’t do when we face conflict is the engine of storytelling.

What I’m describing is the Archplot’s inherent quest. It is the structural narrative of humanity and it’s irresistible.

Primal Archplot (from cave drawings to oral tradition) is all about external antagonism. There is little, if any internal struggle in the lead character. Which makes sense. When life’s concerns are all about finding water, food, and shelter, there is very little time to indulge one’s inner development. The equivalent Archplots today live inside the External Action Genre.

Pure action genre protagonists are not plagued by inner doubts or perversions or deeply seated anxieties. In these Stories, a heroic protagonist overcomes Arch Villains and/or Nature and ultimately sacrifices himself in order to save another human being or even the entire planet from annihilation. While often derided, the Action/Comic Book Story is one of the most difficult to write/innovate and thus is rife with cliché. It’s been with us since the first campfire story, so it ain’t easy to reinvent.

The commercial Story marketplace is Archplot central and is the stuff of 200 million dollar movie budgets from film studios and blockbuster novels from big publishing. Pure Archplot is all about external conflicts. And there is nothing wrong with a great fastball external-only Archplot story. When done well, they’re better than peanuts and popcorn.

But, Archplot can also be used to explore inner conflict. The way a writer can do so is to combine a big external content genre with a compelling internal content genre. This is exactly what Thomas Harris chose to do in The Silence of the Lambs. The result is an Archplot structure for his global external and internal content genres. The conventions and obligatory scenes of the serial killer thriller drives the external, while the internal hinges on the progression of the protagonist from blind belief to disillusionment. Much more on both the external and internal content genres to come.

There are no mistakes for any portion of the one Creator which seeks its source and its unity with all. There is in this illusion that you now inhabit, the great desire to seek, to love, and to be loved, for this is the lesson before you. The ability to know whether or not one has served well, is not a portion of this illusion, for it is that which partakes of wisdom. In this illusion one cannot know anything for certain. One can seek. One can desire. One can build the framework, the foundation for the metaphysical self, and build this foundation securely without knowing anything in detail or in particular. For there is in this illusion the great interplay and interchange of energies as each relates in one form of relationship to each other [person] within the illusion. The many steps forward, backward, sideways, missteps, bumped feelings and knees, all of this great cacophony of experience is that which eventually informs each [person] precisely as that [person] needs be informed. It is a great dance of the one Creator and Its many portions with Itself and though there seem to be many missteps and paths travelled that one may not wish to travel beforehand by [people], indeed, each step is taken with perfection. The ability to learn from what you call the mistake is oftentimes more valuable than avoiding the mistake, as it is called, originally.
 
 There are forces, subconscious energies, in each [person]. There are teachers of an unseen nature for each [person]. All work in this great musical effort, this great dance that all participate in, allows each to exchange energies with others that are necessary to be exchanged. We applaud each [person’s] desire to move in a certain direction, metaphysically speaking. However, it is not so much the direction that is important as it is the desire that is important, the faith that such movement is possible, the faith that it occurs though one may not see it or measure it in any knowable degree. However, the faith that such movement is possible and the desire to move in the direction of love and light is that which is of importance.  

Remember at all times when you see hardheartedness in others or yourself, that you are powerful to serve as messengers of love, peace and joy. You may encourage, exhort, commune and just be with one who is having difficulty, and by your mirroring forgiveness and love to the one you wish to aid, you are connecting your subconscious and your companion’s subconscious in great echoes of compassion. Sometimes no word needs to be said for this comforting effect to take place. Never doubt your value to one another, for you are the Creator. You are love, each to the other. May you dwell in a world where forgiveness is actively sought and joy is nourished by all conversation.

http://www.ascensionnow.co.uk/quo--angels.html

Roger Wilson, 1949

Ted Hughes

 I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
 Something else is alive
 Beside the clock’s loneliness
 And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
 Something more near
 Though deeper within darkness
 Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
 A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
 Two eyes serve a movement, that now
 And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
 Between trees, and warily a lame
 Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
 Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
 A widening deepening greenness,
 Brilliantly, concentratedly,
 Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
 It enters the dark hole of the head.
 The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
 The page is printed.

 The Thought Fox - A Poem by Ted Hughes | Sergio Caredda

Real-life people in other countries have produced similar effects. Abdul Karim in India created a forest out of “nothing” over a period of 19 years, using the same method as Bouffier. An organization called Trees for the Future has assisted more than 170,000 families, in 6,800 villages of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, to plant over 35 million trees. Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, founded the Green Belt Movement which planted over 30 million trees to restore the Kenyan environment. Shanghai Roots & Shoots, a division of the Jane Goodall Institute launched The Million Tree Project in Kulun Qi, Inner Mongolia to plant one million trees to stop desertification and alleviate global warming.

(sources: Wikipedia)

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets in to you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green,
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

[Note: "Beannacht" is the Gaelic word for "blessing." A "currach" is a boat used on the west coast of Ireland.]

They are half right, but not as they
Imagine; rather, I
Seek in myself the things I meant to say,
And lo! the wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
The Listener’s role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew.

And thus you neither need reply
Nor can; thus, while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
No dreamer, but thy dream.

C.S. Lewis, 1964

 

“One early morning last spring, I came and found the woods floor strewn with bluebells.  In the cool sunlight and the lacy shadows of the spring woods the blueness of those flowers, their elegant shape, their delicate fresh scent kept me standing and looking.  I found a delight in them that I cannot describe and that I will never forget.  Though I had been familiar for years with most of the spring woods flowers, I had never seen these and had not known they were here.  Looking at them, I felt a strange loss and sorrow that I had never seen them before.  But I was also exultant that I saw them now – that they were here.

For me, in the thought of them will always be the sense of the joyful surprise with which I found them – the sense that came suddenly to me that the world is blessed beyond my understanding, more abundantly than I will ever know…..Though as a man I inherit great evils and the possibility of great loss and suffering, I know that my life is blessed and graced by the yearly flowering of the bluebells.  How perfect they are! In their presence I am humble and joyful.  If I were given all the learning and all the methods of my race I could not make one of them, or even imagine one…..It is the privilege and labour of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable”.

 

(Wendell Berry “A Native Hill” 1968, from “The World-Ending Fire”)

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry review – how America’s farmers betrayed the land | Science and nature books | The Guardian

Emily is an American Friend who 'travels in the ministry' between Yearly Meetings. She has visited Britain on several occasions.