Anatomy of a Fable

A couple of days ago I passed on three great parenting metaphors from others and in the comments tried myself to make them into fables.  The results were good as fables but for the first and third weren’t obviously connected to the metaphors I started with.

The first metaphor was about riders on a rollercoaster testing the lapbar to make sure it held firmly.  In my telling, that became sheep testing the fences on their corral.  I’m more familiar with stock than I am rollercoasters and was probably also influenced by the second metaphor about cattle leaning against their fences.

The second metaphor became a fable unchanged, but the third metaphor went on a far journey as it became a fable.  Elder Holland’s original metaphor was about the church as a camp with some people pitching their tents on the periphery, for which their children paid the price.  To work as a fable, the children paying the price needs to be worked into the fable itself.  I couldn’t think of anything with campsites where the children would be threatened by the adults wouldn’t.  My mind running along the lines of stock and herds, a natural comparison for a camp with some outliers was a herd with some outliers.  The fable of the straying bison developed from there.  But camps also made me think of campfires.  I have some experience with making campfires.  One thing I’ve noticed is that logs will sometimes go out if separated from the main fire.  That fit the camp and peripheries of the camp idea so I wrote up a little fable about a log being moved from the fire.  However, the original metaphor is about consequences to the children.  I noodled around trying to think of what would count as the “child” of a burning log.  I thought about having kindling move with the log, or embers, but nothing made sense, so I finally just wrote something about small flames then gave up.  The log fire idea itself gave me an idea for a fable that I will publish later today, but it didn’t work for Elder Holland’s metaphor.

I kept thinking about the weird question of what would count as a fire’s “children,” though.  Suddenly the idea came to me that a fire starting new fires would count as “children” and I saw an image of a blazing forest fire with the flames leaping from tree to tree.  But Elder Holland’s metaphor involved people getting away from the main group by choice whereas fires don’t usually choose to be started.  That’s where the idea of the sons of the fire god came in.  By this time I had pretty much lost the connection with Elder Holland’s metaphor and wasn’t consciously trying to work with it anymore.  I sat out to write a simple metaphor with one lightning strike hitting an isolated tree and another hitting a tree in the forest where it could start a bigger blaze.  But forest fires also burn themselves out quickly, so hardly had I started writing than it occurred to me that a tended hearthfire could keep going and going and have “children” when some of its embers were carried to start other fires.  OK, cool.  But as I was writing the image of fire falling from heaven along with the scriptural language of the sons of gods “falling as lightning” made me think of Elijah’s contest with the priests of Baal, so of course I had to include that.  And that’s what the fable became—something more like a fairytale, beautiful and meaningful but not entirely obvious what the meaning is, and no one would believe you if you told them that Elder Holland’s camp metaphor was what inspired it.