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Create a collection of material that is connected to the topic you choose for your Urgen Publication. Collect text-sources, visuals, and any other type off material connected to the topic.

Continue working on your collection of sources and pin down at least one source that will be part of your final collection. You can use this source as your ‘base’ and from there see what you need to add more.

Read and analyse Ursula le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. (Reading questions: What insights does it give you on how you can structure or build a narrative? How does this relate to your topic and ideas for your publication?)

Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things.

Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, "Glossary"; she had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as "botulism." And hero, in Woolf's dictionary, is "bottle."

Bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you--even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat.

A holder. A recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient .... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.

We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained.

With or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.

Ursula K. Le Guin 1986
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Insights/
Relation to my chosen topic/theme

Stories are formed based on an already existing archetype/idea of how things are done.

The way these ideas have been created/established as legitimate may differ from the natural/organic ways humans are supposed to think/function.

Conflict Vs Empathy

We must understand that not always the dynamic/representation of power/success is fairly depicted/sustainably addressed.

Humanity began with gathering/non-aggressive ways of survival.

("What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman's lack of loyalty to civilization," Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing.

What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people.

It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.

The trouble is, we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

The central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict.

I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd.

The fact that this narrative quickly evolved into the story of the Man as the Hero and the conflict that needs to be conquered for him to thrive speaks that we have significantly diverged from this gathering/caring mindset into a more egoist/self-centered approach - my survival/ego above all.

Through regarding our tools as carriers we massively change the established dynamic that tools serve us and our needs.

A very interesting case for social media where we consider the platforms as tools for amusement/communication/information, where as, in fact, it is a two way street. SM, indeed, is a tool within our daily routines; however, we are forgetting that us, humans, are also a tool for social media to grow and influence.

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Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things.

Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, "Glossary"; she had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as "botulism." And hero, in Woolf's dictionary, is "bottle."

Bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you--even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat.

A holder. A recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient .... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.

We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained.

With or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.

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