 Drama: July 20, 2022 Issue [#11456] |
This week: The Concept of "Home" in Your Writing Edited by: Joy  
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“For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.”
Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
Gary Snyder
“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
C.S. Lewis
“Home isn't where you're from, it's where you find light when all grows dark.”
Pierce Brown, Golden Son
“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
William C. Faulkner
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. In this issue, we are discussing the idea of "home" in writing.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
When you write about someone's home, does your characterization of that home sound real or come alive for you, at least sometimes?
Yet, the postmodernist architect Philip Johnson (1906-2005) once said, “All architecture is shelter.” I guess he was referring to the roof-over-the-head reasoning. Otherwise, as most of us must have heard, sometimes, such shelters have been deadly for their inhabitants. On the other hand, we may have become fascinated and awestruck with some huge beautiful buildings. Still, can just any shelter or any beautiful building be considered a home?
If not, then, where is home? In other words, what is home?
I believe such questions are answered best by writers. If so, let’s look at the evolution of the home concept inside the literary arts.
Talking about architects, the architect protagonist Querry--in Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case-- fed up with his fame and surroundings, leaves his life in the modern world to find a home in a Congo Leper Colony, to never leave it.
“He raised his hat, a man of his own age, in the late fifties with a grizzled morning stubble, wearing a crumpled tropical suit. ‘My name is Querry,’ he introduced himself, speaking in an accent which Colin could not quite place as French or Flemish any more than he could immediately identify the nationality of the name. ‘Doctor Colin,’ he said. ‘Are you stopping here?’ ‘The boat goes no farther,’ the man answered, as if that were indeed the only explanation.”
In Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, the search for a real home is expressed as:
"I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn't it. The house on Mango Street isn't it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how those things go."
Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, for the facially disfigured man cared for by a nurse at the end of World War II, “home” becomes their intimacy.
“Maybe this is the way to come out of a war, he thinks. A burned man to care for, some sheets to wash in a fountain, a room painted like a garden…..In my work I sometimes borrow Claire's nature, as well as her careful focus on the world.”
I tend to believe the real home for a human being is in the place and time where and when the human mind faces its own nature, as--the lover of the main character Howard Roark--the controversial Dominique Francon says in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead:
“I wish I had never seen your building. It’s the things we admire or want that enslave us.” And she also says, “If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I’d have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We’re all so tied together.”
A desire for a place to call one’s home, therefore, is not always the sentimental cute cottage with a white picket fence, although many of literary memorable settings are built around a house. The concept of home may rest in other structures, ideas, and people, material or imagined. It may even be the entire world as Dominique Francon feels.
Thus, when we write about home, in addition to the description of a place like an actual house or a building, we might also consider these ideas:
 A haven or refuge: This may be a structure or an idea.
Where we long to be such as a fatherland just like Homer’s Odysseus or Virgil’s Aeneas longed to return to
Where our most loved ones are
Where we don’t fear to think and express controversial thoughts
Where we feel comfortable not just where creature comforts are concerned but also with freely dreaming, pursuing our dreams, and being ourselves
To wrap it up, I think a home can be where a being or a character’s true self shows itself, or begins or ends, in a life true, imagined, or both.
Until next time! 
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Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
This Issue's Tip: There are many techniques and advices on writing anything. You may choose any one of them for practice. But, for your work to sound real and sincere, choose what you'll write on the basis of your very own temperament and skills. Thus, in fleshing out a home idea, you might consider being out of a home or being away from a home, then returning to it or finding it. Here lies your blueprint for a "home" story or poem.
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