Passover (Caturday Questions)

It’s Passover, and Human-Mom is praying to God that how some day she will be set free from the tyranny of her feline tormentors always sitting on her forearms and swishing her face with their tails while she’s trying to write. They’re cute, though, so she has mixed feelings.

Passover as Twice-Told Tale

Little Cat was reading from a book of Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories that Human Mom had open. Twice-Told Tales. It’s an excellent book. And it got Little Cat thinking about how to keep a story fresh when you know it’s been told before.

This idea applies especially to genre-fiction-writers. Everyone knows that romance novelists recycle plots. But the writers of other genres are just as guilty of this supposed crime. Their efforts are just not as frowned-upon.

And yet literary fiction is hardy immune from ripping off plots. You could easily argue that “literary fiction” just means “fiction that is better written.” So it still has elements of genre. Pride and Prejudice has almost exactly the same plot as Much Ado about Nothing, for example. And for that matter, a lot of great novels, poems, etc., are based on established methods. The satirical novel about political science existed for hundreds of years before Orwell took a crack at it (okay 2 cracks at it). And the fish-out-of-water story existed or ages before Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote “Yentl.”

The only real question facing any writer is: how to make it new?

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Two cats, a large orange and a small grey, are reclining on a cushion. No doubt there is a fully laden seder table somewhere conveniently out of the frame. The large orange is all enthusiasm: “I just think this passage is so interesting! Did you know that the ‘four sons’ is based on the four times the Torah mentions the mitzvah of teaching about Passover? So the rabbis extrapolated…”

Meanwhile the small grey digs deep into his heart and yowls forth perhaps the most important question of all: WHEN DO WE EAT?