Writing Skills – Wood and Stone: How Prophecy Changes Everything.

Ebook description: 3100 words. Many images and a video link. Illustrative artwork included by the author. Watercolours and ink.

SYNOPSIS;

*Comparing and contrasting the novels Moby Dick (by Herman Melville), and Macbeth (by William Shakespeare). Article: William Van Zyl (Published in 2021).

Read the full article for free: https://fivehousepublishing.com/writing-skills-wood-and-stone-how-prophecy-changes-everything-2/

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST:

https://williamvzyl.podbean.com/e/writing-skills-%e2%80%93-wood-and-stone-how-prophecy-changes-everything-part-1-full-episode/

READ THE ARTICLE AS A BLOG POST:

https://fivehousepublishing.com/2021/06/11/writing-skills-wood-and-stone-how-prophecy-changes-everything-part-1-full-episode/

EXCERPT:

Fantasy Prophecy is a fascinating and compelling technique for Writing Fiction and Non-fiction.

Prophecies, or a prophecy, can add a fascinating plotline to a novel. It gives depth. It cleverly weaves mystery and suspense into the fabric of the story. It elevates the storyline. It intrigues!

[Prophesy] instils [a] story with a great sense of importance – as if the ages were just waiting for this one conjuncture of events, or particular character to come to prominence.  It can sometimes be found in historical novels, but it is fantasy writing that the use of prophecy is far more common, becoming almost an art form in itself.  Many readers may think that creating a fictitious prophecy would be straightforward, but it certainly isn’t, and it is especially difficult if you wish to imbue it with a high level of mystery and complexity.  After sprinkling prophecy throughout Game of Thrones, George R R Martin said ‘Prophecies are, you know, a double edge sword.  You have to handle them very carefully; I mean, they can add depth and interest to a book, but you don’t want to be too literal or too easy…’

Credit: Thomas M D Brooke. Link https://thomasmdbrooke.com/2016/08/11/great-fantasy-prophecies/

 

When writers use this technique successfully – just like Herman Melville in Moby Dick and Shakespeare in Macbeth –advances their stories to a new level. The two famous authors display their accomplished writing skills by applying this technique very successfully. They produce anticipation, mystery, and suspense.

In this article, I look at these techniques. I also touch on prophesy and non-fiction writing. For example:

Non-fiction prophecy-skill techniques

A great example of non-fiction storytelling is the book: Hiroshima.

Hiroshima is a 1946 book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey. It tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the New Journalism, in which the storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reporting.

Here is a short excerpt of the book Hiroshima. I have added – just for fun – a prophecy at the beginning (in brackets, the first three sentences).  The rest of the excerpt is the excellent non-fiction work of John Hersey – outstanding non-fiction writing:

[Little Boy had a tumour in its belly. The tumour had a self-fulfilling prophecy written in damaged DNA code. What would Little Boy’s message be?]

‘At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassennann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tammoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one street-car instead of the next that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time none of them knew anything.’

Credit: https://www.wlwv.k12.or.us/cms/lib8/OR01001812/Centricity/Domain/1353/Hiroshima%20excerpt%20%20by%20John%20Hersey%20%201946.pdf