There is nothing in the gospels that says Mary Magdelene was a whore, afair.
If you wanted to write something that is completely original you would have to ignore everything ever written. It's much easier to consciously draw elements from more than one work. This is called "research". Hell, in academia there's a whole area of work consisting of reviewing - gathering together everyone's work in a particular field and saying "this is what's been done". These people write hundred- (or more!) page reviews, and get their photos on the front page of the article (which is more than you get for most papers).
Of course, in fiction you can't just cite previous works, so you have to work in homages or allusions to previous works. "Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis" etc.
The best way, I think, to repeat a literary meme (has this term ever been used? I'm using this term now) is either to give the barest essentials to the reader so that they recognise it, and let them imply the rest of it, or to subvert it. Your example - the opposing pair. You run them on a scale of virtue, but I've seen the same run with brawn (Conan often adventures with a thief or a young woman...in this way you have the scale of masculinity/femininity as well), morality (Caramon and Raistlin Majere from the Dragonlance series). Now, we assume when you say a priest and a whore that the priest is male, the whore is female. Maybe this isn't the case (as kugelblitz suggests). Maybe it turns out that the priest is actually corruptible, while the whore is their moral compass*. This could venture very close to romanticising or glorifying whoredom though, if you don't watch out.
-- *Not riffing off real life or anything at all here.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-09-25 09:41 pm (UTC)If you wanted to write something that is completely original you would have to ignore everything ever written. It's much easier to consciously draw elements from more than one work. This is called "research". Hell, in academia there's a whole area of work consisting of reviewing - gathering together everyone's work in a particular field and saying "this is what's been done". These people write hundred- (or more!) page reviews, and get their photos on the front page of the article (which is more than you get for most papers).
Of course, in fiction you can't just cite previous works, so you have to work in homages or allusions to previous works. "Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis" etc.
The best way, I think, to repeat a literary meme (has this term ever been used? I'm using this term now) is either to give the barest essentials to the reader so that they recognise it, and let them imply the rest of it, or to subvert it. Your example - the opposing pair. You run them on a scale of virtue, but I've seen the same run with brawn (Conan often adventures with a thief or a young woman...in this way you have the scale of masculinity/femininity as well), morality (Caramon and Raistlin Majere from the Dragonlance series). Now, we assume when you say a priest and a whore that the priest is male, the whore is female. Maybe this isn't the case (as
--
*Not riffing off real life or anything at all here.