Today I found an epigraph for my new novel. It is a quotation from Arundhati Roy’s, The God of Small Things: “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.” If that is a true epigraph, you should be able to deduce from it that my novel is at least partly about the way we make stories out of people and events we experience and observe: we take a character from one place, place her in a scene from another place, add some assumptions we make about both, and thread them together to make a (we hope) coherent narrative. Human beings have always done that. We observed that the Sun travelled across the sky at the same time and in the same direction every day, and we made up a story about how that could be. We may have got the facts wrong, but it is the story that matters, not the facts. For centuries we told the story of Helios hauling the Sun across the sky in his chariot, and lived quite happily in a universe run by an absentee group of enigmatic divinities.
Wonderful, Wayne. I am wondering, if we write them ourselves, as headers and footers, are they still epigraphs? jmbridgeman, onelonelywriter.substack.com RECONCILE THIS!
Wonderful, Wayne. I am wondering, if we write them ourselves, as headers and footers, are they still epigraphs? jmbridgeman, onelonelywriter.substack.com RECONCILE THIS!