Chapter 14:

Summary

Careless Wish: Here Clark introduces the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Careless Wish: Clark calls the careless wish one of the oldest forms of story generation. He advises that this also occurs in non-fiction with the connection to human aspiration.

Look it up in the OED: Clark emphasizes research in this section. In the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there is a point where the court is kicking the green knights head around. Clark conducted research and found out that pagan rites that lead to soccer would be a fertility practice. He then asserts that his idea could be off base but that the scene could have extra meaning within the story, specifically due to his research.

Up the Ante: This section talks about always drawing a greater amount of tension in writing and not settling for basic repercussions for the characters actions.

The Wasteland: Clark emphasizes the importance of separating settings and how this separation can be used as a literary device. The importance of X-ray reading is to see similar patterns in literature, as Clark does with Gawain and Gatsby in this section.

Writing Lessons

1. The careless wish and the rash promise are two ancient story motifs commonly associated with folk literature. But all such narrative archetypes have potential for use in contemporary stories, whether fiction or nonfiction. It is a universal condition to wish for something, a desire that too often produces a bad result. Don't be afraid to shape the stuff of experience with these older motifs as long as they don't exaggerate or distort your story.
2. How sharp was the Green Knight's axe? Sharpness is as sharpness does. Before you are tempted to describe a quality with a bland adjective, try showing the audience the evidence. Let them decide how sharp it is through the action of the blade.
3. Follow the severed head. It's a grisly detail, to be sure, but not every author would have bothered to follow the head after it had been severed from the body. It's another example of a pre-cinema cinematic detail- the "camera" following the rolling head and seeing it kicked along by the courtiers.
4. There may be no more pleasurable activity for a reader of old literature than to look up odd and interesting words and phrases in the Oxford English Dictionary. My quest was to find the beginnings of English football, and the OED provided me not just with the origin of the word and a date but also with its link to violence.
5. What is so cool about Gawain is the way the author ups the ante- this is , raises the stakes of the narrative. This can be done any number of times in a story when you think the hero may have a problem and suddenly you realize that interruption of a spectacular creature whose appearance would be miraculous enough but whose actions raise again and again the stakes of the game.
6. Cross the wasteland. A virtue of X-ray reading is to recognize motifs in the work of writers centuries and cultures apart. For Gatsby, it means crossing the ever-dangerous valley of ashes to visit the castles of the Jazz Age. For Sir Gawain, a deadly wasteland must e crossed as a rite of passage before he can find the desired landscape. For writers, such forbidden areas can be natural- a stretch of desert- or man made, such as a cemetery for junked cars.

Critique

Since this section deals exclusively in narrative writing, it is worth noting some of the habits of mind that Clark alludes to with his writing lessons. The NCTE has created the "Framework for Success in Post Secondary Writing". Based on that framework, Clark's lessons fall into a couple of categories, mainly openness and creativity. Learning from past writing researching about it to become a better writer also falls into the category of meta cognition. The flaw lies only in Clarks restriction in this section tot he writing of narrative with these lessons. While these lessons work for more creative endeavors it would have been effective to see Clark lend them to more non-fictional examples as well.