Non-duality Press: Book review of The Way of Story

The Way of Story: The Craft and Soul of Writing, by Catherine Ann Jones.
#2290 – Tuesday, October 18, 2005 – Editor: Jerry Katz

Get an inside look at Amazon.com

Catherine Ann Jones gets to the heart of writing a story. The book’s emphasis is on knowing who you are. Jones tells about her personal experiences in the world of writing and writers and this contributes a texture of behind-the-scenes humanness. She has included “everything” she knows, appreciates, and understands about writing stories. She gives it up. She reaches way back for the stuff of this book. In writing her book that way, Jones demonstrates what is required of the writer: giving it up, putting it all out there, reaching way back. Here is an excerpt from her book that shows the kind of commitment and the work ethic a writer requires:

“I learned that the University of Texas at Austin had a fine collection of original manuscripts of such renowned authors as Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, George Bernard Shaw, and Tennessee Williams, among many others. I also learned that you could obtain a pass to sit and read them in an authorized room. Epiphany! I observed that Dylan Thomas would cross out one word twenty times until finding the one right word. In other words, a great published poem like Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas, does not arise perfect from the writer’s mind, like Botticelli’s Venus from the Sea, but has undergone several drafts first.”

There are varied and in-depth story analyses, scores of quotations, and the practical core of the book is made up of over twenty useful and challenging exercises. The exercises bring this book into the category of a college textbook. The exercises begin with basic ones intended to inspire the process of writing. They progress to consider story outline, then theme, plot, character, dialogue, conflict. Techniques for imagery, chanelling, and personal myth writing encourage the reader to reach way back and then to put it all out there, to put it into the story.

At the same time one also has to go with the flow and just be. Jones writes:

“I had not been working in Hollywood long when I was invited to a friend’s house for lunch. Sitting on my right was a Finnish film director, though I did not know it at the time. We spoke of philosophy, which is my passion and turned out to be his, also. I shared with him the years I had spent in India studying the Advaita Vedanta philosophy with a great Sage. Though I rarely speak of this as it is deeply personal, it seemed natural to do so in this instance. Only at the end of the luncheon did he reveal that he was a film director. Tavi went to explain that he had come to Hollywood for one purpose: to find a screenwriter who was also spiritual.”

“A few weeks later, during my annual spiritual retreat in South India, a young Indian boy on a bicycle rode out to my small, remote village and delivered a telegram from this same Finnish film director/producer, wanting to hire me to adapt the Finnish classic novel, Wolfbride, into a screenplay. While meditating thousands of miles away, I got a job. It was the story of a spiritual woman who was burned as a witch in the seventeenth century.”

“In case you haven’t guessed by now, I believe in destiny. One can either work with it or fight it. Having done both, I would recommend tuning in, listening, then following the path of least resistance, already there.”

The Way of Story is intimate, inspirational, useful, and educational.