-”Nobody actually believed there’s only four types of stories… well okay not nobody, obviously once the pithy observation that a Freshman writing class produced works that could easily be categorized into four types of stories was misquoted as saying all stories follow that formula, then someone believed it.” -”You’re confusing Borges saying that there are four fundamental stories with John Gardner’s exercise for students. Borges said the archetypes of the four fundamental stories are the archetypes are the Siege of Troy—a strong city surrounded and defended by brave men, the Odyssey—the return (presumably of those brave men home), Jason and the Argonauts—the search, and the Crucifixion of Christ—the sacrifice of a god. Gardner’s exercise asked students to write the start of a omniscient novel with a disruption of the order using either a trip or the arrival of a stranger...” -”And strangely enough, for a moment I believed that someone else believed my own conflation of the two”
-”Nobody actually believed there’s only four types of stories… well okay not nobody, obviously once the pithy observation that a Freshman writing class produced works that could easily be categorized into four types of stories was misquoted as saying all stories follow that formula, then someone believed it.”
-”You’re confusing Borges saying that there are four fundamental stories with John Gardner’s exercise for students. Borges said the archetypes of the four fundamental stories are the archetypes are the Siege of Troy—a strong city surrounded and defended by brave men, the Odyssey—the return (presumably of those brave men home), Jason and the Argonauts—the search, and the Crucifixion of Christ—the sacrifice of a god. Gardner’s exercise asked students to write the start of a omniscient novel with a disruption of the order using either a trip or the arrival of a stranger...”
-”And strangely enough, for a moment I believed that someone else believed my own conflation of the two”