Thoughts On Word Trails & No Longer Seeing the Forests for the Trees

I saw a wonderful scene this week. Bear with me as I share it and hopefully I'll explain what I believe it has to do with fairy tales:

The scene was from the show The Americans*. While I'd be hard pressed to relate this show to fairy tales generally, it makes interesting observations about the human condition, love, despair and choices. The following scene is of the main male character, Philip, with his KGB handler, playing scrabble. Philip, at this point in his journey, is questioning the wisdom of orders given to him and his wife, feeling that it is compromising him as a basic human being - as a father and husband:

[Scene: Philip and his Handler playing scrabble.] 

H: Stuck between a geode and a hard place. (shuffles tiles) "Amatory" -(counts points)  24 yes, - 24 -loving , devoted,adoring. 

Philip: Where do you come up with this stuff? 

H: I love words. They leave a trail. For example, amatory is from the Latin word for 'love'. While wedlock - the condition of being married - is Norse, Norwegian: wed, lock. Which means perpetual battle. 

Philip: Your point being? 

H: Love and marriage in many ways are antithetical: one is a bolt of lightning, an epiphany, and the other is planting, tilling, tending. It's hard work. 

Philip: (glares at H) I'm trying to concentrate here. 

H: Oh sorry. 

Philip: (puts down scrabble letters)  

H: (reads) "sphinx" - excellent. 59 - bravo.**

Such a great exchange.

He's right. Words leave a trail.

At Myth & Moor yesterday (Terri Windling's wonderfully mythic and inspirational blog) Terri talked about the sense that our stories are disappearing, like many of the world's forests. She was quoting the book Tales Of Faerie and I have started discussing (From the Forest by Sara Maitland) and began by referencing a passage that caught my attention too - about the frustration parents have with the lack of response when they ask their children what happened in their day, ie. "Nothing." My reaction when reading this was so strong I went and grabbed a pencil, underlined it and bookmarked it to read to my husband later.

It finishes by explaining: "... but the 'nothing' is a cover for "I don't know how to tell a good story about it, how to impose a story shape on the events.' "

by Banksy (one of my favorites!)

Using words to tell stories is hard now. We're not only out of the habit, most people don't grow up with this; it's not as common a developmental skill as it used to be. For many, there just isn't time. At least, not to tell stories in that form. For others the gap between everyday expression and "word "smithing is just overwhelming and intimidating. Since oral stories (and general yarns and tale telling) have fallen out of everyday use, being able to tell tales is no longer a common-man thing to do. Whether or not it is true, to many it feels like telling stories are the territory of "true writers" only, so people just... don't. (Using myself as an example, Myth & Moor is full of beautiful, inspirational and thought provoking writing - I highly recommend it - and the comments on Terri's posts range from articulate to poetic - so much so, I often feel unable to comment, certain that I have nothing to add, even though I've always been made welcome there. And this is from someone who does write every day, adores words and has a rudimentary understanding of Latin and other base languages.) As a result, the people who understand those trails of history and stories within the words seem to be fewer and fewer every day. When it comes to tales, people not only get tongue-tied, the stories they stumbling-ly tell, lack vitality, the tales become muddied and, in some ways, they start to die.

The Grimms were motivated to write down fairy tales because they felt their language and tales were disappearing rapidly in the cultural clime. And they were right. Their work in stopping this from happening altogether is often underestimated but we owe them much.

Today we have the same sense, that stories and tales are disappearing, along with our language. Forget correct grammar, people don't even use full sentences anymore. (See? Just like that.) We resort to catch phrases, memes and emojis to communicate and express sentiments. We summarize in infographics. It's alarming in many ways but the lack of words doesn't mean language and stories are disappearing. It means they're changing shape.

In an age of the internet, in which we need to navigate the constant press of information overload, we've turned the bulk of the words off altogether and begun processing everything the fastest way possible - visually. And it works. After all, visuals are processed 60 000 times faster in the brain than text. We now live in a visual culture and there's no escaping it.

What tends to happen as a result though, is that WE DO LOSE STORIES through the gaps. And tales, and those word shapes with their trails. So what do we do?

"Knock Knock" by Hilary Leung

This is something I've been looking at seriously for a good couple of years now - the impact of visual communication and visual consumerism on storytelling. In many ways, this new form of language has opened up new forms of stories to people who weren't interested in telling tales before (for whatever reason). People who always responded with "Nothing" now fill their Tumblr accounts and Pinterest boards with fan-made images and quotes, blending ideas and sentiments, suggesting avenues of thought and inspiring conversation.

by Raquel Aparicio

"The hyper-visualisation age is now upon us, where any visual media object can act as a portal to other media." (source)

A truly interesting thing (and hidden treasure) is this: the best forms of these new "stories" (however fractured and incomplete they are) lead to words. And more words. The image shorthand is being used like a filtering system in an age of information overload. And the best, most useful "filter caught" images, usually use words too.

Sometimes trying to find what you want is like opening a Matroyshka doll - layers within layers within layers... and sometimes it seems more like hunting Koschei's soul which was hidden inside of a needle, inside of an egg, inside of a duck, inside of a hare, inside of an iron chest,buried under an oak tree, on a island, in the middle of the ocean... but ultimately, the words - and the tales - they're in there.

(There are hundreds of articles explaining to business people and marketers just how important the use of images with the right phrase is.) But it can't be just any words. They specifically use 'the right ones', the succinct ones, the ones that, in conjunction with the image, tell a spare story with a lot of resonance; very much like fairy tales always have.

People are drawn to the life in words (and trees), to the history in them but it's hard to know, when there is so much in front of us demanding our attention, what we should pay attention to. (Why should we care about this tree here when there are so many more?) 

Images help filter. Not too surprisingly, when you figure out it's not really 'words' people don't like, it's the tidal wave of text that feels impossible to process, people can start to sort out just what it is they want to pay attention to - and they go word hunting. Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and many other publications still do exceptionally well publishing multiple page essays. Novels are devoured in print and ebook form alike - perhaps more than ever. People want to read. They want words, and stories and forests and tales. They just want to choose their path so they don't feel so lost.

But how do we get people to the start of these paths and tales so they choose to walk them, themselves and, in doing so, keep them alive?

More specifically, what is a writer to do? How do we preserve our beloved fairy tales from becoming distant memories, footnotes in essays or forgotten tales in out of print books? 

The answer is simple. We have to find new ways to tell them. 

That also feels exceptionally difficult to figure out how to do. 

(The reason this post has taken as long to get up as it has is due to my search for appropriate visuals to include - and I'll be the first to admit, this whole post would have been better received had I been able to present it in a much more visual manner. I wish I had the skills to pull together reaction gifs and create "visual poems" to capture the essence of what I'm trying to communicate but I didn't grow up that way and don't have those skills... yet.)

Interestingly, dealing with this exact issue in their own times is, I believe, exactly why the Grimms, Andersen, Perrault and Wilde are still known today. (I have a post on this coming on this shortly - how these fairy tale writers made their tales truly live.)

We know, in principle, that fairy tales are very much a living thing. It's ironic that writing them down to preserve them serves to help them stagnate, almost as if they "solidify" in their written form. Often, it requires these coma-like story forms to get a jolt, usually from another media source, to wake up these 'sleeping beauties' and have people notice and love them again. And perhaps some savvy use of available tools in this "visual era" can help.

I know. It sounds exhausting and I'm right there with you. Can't we just sit in our corners and write our words and have them there ready for when people want them? I wish we could. But if we want to be part of making sure tales stay alive we need to be active as they're being redefined and retold. We need to be part of the 'telling'. The best historians don't just dig into the dusty past and tell us what happened, they explain why things happened the way they did and show us the direct connection to ourselves, how we can learn from history to learn about the world as it is now and to make a better future. Otherwise why bother with history at all?

Eventually, when the noise of the world is sorted and people know what they want to focus on, words become even more precious than before. It's then that they ask for more words, more tales. 

People will continue to come back to words. The trick is to keep the trail visible.

____________________________________________________________________

For those looking to learn more about this 'visual era', here's a short list (really!) to get you started, The ones with the orange stars are super quick, informative skims. The purple stars are recommended reads over the rest if you're short on time:

The Guardian: The New (Visual) Culture: how to produce quality in a world of quantity
*WallBlog: Turning advertising into a service: brands must embrace the hyper-visual landscape
*Social Media Examiner: 4 Businesses Leveraging Storytelling With Images
* Business 2 Community: Why Image Trumps Everything in Today's Visual Age
FastCompany: The Rise of Visual Social Media
Marketing Magazine: Brands Should Take the Visual Web Seriously, says Facebook's EMEA Boss
* Cyber Alert: Visual Storytelling Campaigns That Inspire, Motivate and Generate Action
MindFire Communications: It's A Visual World. Show Your Story
* LinkedIn: Market Researchers: Do you Speak Visual?
* MDG Advertising: It's All About the Images (Infographic)
* Wishpond Advanced Lead Generation Marketing Blog: 10 Reasons Visual Content Will Dominate 2014
SteamFeed: Why Visual Content Will Rule Digital Marketing in 2014
NeonTommy: Visual Poetry Collection 'Kern' Meshes Literature And Art

* It's one of the few shows I think is brilliantly done in every aspect and which I do my best to keep up with, even if I can only see 10 minutes of a show at a time. It's very brutal at times but I love the juxtaposition of a couple working on their relationship and raising an American family against the background of being KGB spies in America.

**  I thought the riddle response was a great touch too.

Animated Movies Infographic Reveals Disney Is NOT All Over the Map

Disney Palaces and Castles in Movies by M.K. Reddington
(note: Tiana's restaurant is included - not a palace but still a key building)

You can probably get a quick overview of the bias referred to in the post title, just by looking at a selection of the different styles of Disney castles together (created a couple of years ago). Even this small selection of iconic Disney buildings tends to lean very... "West". (They're beautiful but they're not particularly diverse.)

The referenced infographic is ENORMOUS (you can see a small version of it near the bottom of the post) and very interesting to look around in. It's a map of the most popular animated movies  - also known as, the most influential children's films - from a variety of studios, showing the locations each of their films are set in. Disney's films are color coded red.

Why am I putting this on Once Upon A Blog? Because a large percentage of these films are considered fairy tales or overlap with people's definition of fairy tales, this is the overall impression many children are getting of story in general (especially if they're not being read to, or told other tales by family and carers).

At least 50 animated movies are set in North America and close to 40 in Europe.

It should come as no surprise that Disney's movies are "Western-centric, as The Independent calls is, since the people who created them initially were largely American and of European descent (meaning the stories they themselves were most influenced by were European). BUT as time has gone on, society has changed and the workload been distributed more evenly across the ethnic board, little has changed in this representation. Again, not a huge surprise considering the story influences perpetuated in American (and Disney) publishing BUT as more and more animators, story tellers, artists, designers, CG wizards and all round production people making these movies have hailed from places more and more distant and diverse, you would expect the stories being made to reflect that too. Instead it hints largely that the people in charge are making the decisions and what their (narrow) world view is.

Interestingly, the rest of animated cinema reflects the same trend, though not to quite the same extent.

There is a notably heavy concentration of movies in Europe and North America, clearly showing how Western-centric cinema remains. Just four of the most popular animated films of all-time have been set in South America and one of those, Rio 2, is a sequel. 

Only seven are based on African soil and most draw on common perceptions of the continent – The Lion King, Madagascar,Tarzan and The Wild for example. 

Australasia also fares badly, with four films set down under, while Asia boasts a relatively small proportion for its size with eighteen, including Mulan, The Jungle Book, Big Hero 6, Kung Fu Panda and Aladdin.

(FTNH Edit: I don't count Big Hero 6 as taking place in Australasia at all. It's clearly an alternate San Francisco - officially an urban mash-up of Tokyo and San Francisco aka "Japanamerica" - and is discussed that way in the 'making of' interviews as well. The university where key story points are set is likely an alternate MIT as well, so definitely very American).

It's a very telling infographic and should make people sit up and take notice.

Thankfully we are seeing some signs of change recently, and, as with any giant machine, a little change can be the start of a big one. It's just been a long time in coming. For instance: 

Disney is making moves to address the skewed representation of countries in its films, with the first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor announced in January and another, Moana from Oceana revealed last October.

The infographic was created by Slovakian designer, Martin Vargic, known for his Map of the Internet and Map of Stereotypes projects on Halycon Maps. He pinned the 124 most popular animated films onto a world map, color coding each film for the studio that created it (there is a key at the bottom of the map).

Each location mapped was either explicitly stated or shown in the movies, such as in Madagascar, derived from evidence within them, as in Frozen and The Lion King, or taken from the original work in which the movie was based, as in Snow White and Pinocchio. 

Vargic researched the films in detail by reading fan theories and studying where various animal species are geographically distributed. He did not include movies set in radically different worlds such as Treasure Planet and Wreck-It Ralph.

Disney Palaces & Castle Part 2 by M.K. Reddington
(including Elsa's ice castle)

One thing that is very odd to me is to see almost NO animated films set in Russia. I realize this is a "popular animated films" list, and therefore selective, but considering how very many animated films have been made there, (particularly fairy tales! - so very many) with a large percentage of those focusing on Russian tales and literature, it either shows how underexposed the rest of the world is to their animated filmmaking or how insular the industry there is.

Click HERE to read the list of films and their locations. You can also see a huge version of the map there (just click on the link, which will take you to a new page but you will see there's a magnifying glass on that page too. Clicking on that will show you the map at 100% and you will need to move the blue scroll bar at the side AND the bottom of the window to see it all. As I said, it's HUGE.)

There's also this map below with most of the Disney animated movies (ie. just Disney movies) and their locations. Click HERE to read the list of exact locations.

Map by theantilove

Happily Ever After Is Not All That It Seems... (A Handy Infographic)

Just sent to me today as part of a promotion for a book any fairy tale student (or regular reader) should have, is this great infographic, created by the Norton Critical Editions team. We see a lot of infographics floating around these days but one of the best things about this one is I know the team will have done their research properly to create it, so you can trust this summary and use it confidently for reference.

I love the artwork too - very nice, yet easy to quickly reference all the information. Look at that neat list of referenced fairy tales at the bottom to. It's a very neat resource to have on hand. (Can we get a poster please?)

Here's a link to the Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tartar, if you don't already have a copy, or need another to give to a friend.

In case it's not already clear, this book is highly recommended for any fairy tale study library, from the casual student to those more inclined to serious scholarship.

Here's the summary:

Fairy tales shape our cultures and enrich our imaginations; their narrative stability and cultural durability are incontestable. 

This Norton Critical Edition collects forty-four fairy tales, from the fifth century to the present. The Classic Fairy Tales focuses on six tale types: "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Bluebeard," and "Hansel and Gretel," and presents multicultural variants and sophisticated literary rescriptings. Also reprinted are tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde. 

"Criticism" gathers twelve essays that interpret aspects of fairy tales, including their social origins, historical evolution, psychological drama, gender issues, and national identities. 

A Selected Bibliography is included.