The river banks of story - Rowena House

I’ve a memo on my phone with a commercial pitch line for my work-in-progress which I edit regularly, often first thing in the morning or last thing at night, circling around twenty words or so which express the essence of what I think I’m writing.

According to some writing gurus, the pitch line is your lodestone, giving direction to your writing through the twists and turns of the plot. My latest version: ‘A young pamphleteer discovers why tyrants are hunting witches, a truth that threatens his life’ (15 words).

Unfortunately, it’s useless as a lodestone. It’s what happens in the plot, without any sense of the drivers of the narrative, either for me as the author or for my protagonist. If I engraved it on a fancy background and stick it up on a wall above the computer, it would achieve precisely zilch, which may be why this story is taking forever to write. [Another explanation for the slowness is, do I really want to finish it when getting publishing is a soul-suck? But that’s another blog.]

The current academic version of the pitch line – the WIP being the body of a creative writing PhD – is rather more useful in terms of a reminder about what I think I’m up to. That is, ‘The novel is an exploration of self-delusion and societal group-think grounded in the unreliable historical record of a witch trial’ (21 words).

It’s taken nearly three years collecting research material and writing two spiked drafts (neither completed) to get to this point – huzzah – but I now believe this academic pitch to be ‘true’ to my intention. It is an expression of why this subject – witch trials – appealed to my subconscious.

Essentially, I’m looking into the intersection between the psychology and the ‘sociology’ of how and why we lie to ourselves, using the historical record as a particular – and extreme – example.

Thus when I arrived at the latest Break into Act 2 scene, I both am but also am not writing about an impoverished, persecuted, long-dead boy who got beaten up in his cell – even if he is the most dramatically 'alive' character on those pages. Instead, I was (meant to be) writing about the protagonist’s reactions to evidence of torture, including his conformist, religious denial of empathy for someone accused of witchcraft. It is here in the psychology of everyday immorality that I hope to find the universal within the particular, that magical core we’re all meant to be writing about at some level.

Another way I'm trying to articulate the central driver of the story (mine and the protagonist's) is by adapting John Truby's concept of a central, defining, necessary action by the protagonist that unites the story. In Truby’s Anatomy of a Story, this one action - "Luke fighting the enemy" in Star Wars - creates a ‘cause and effect pathway’ that coheres the story. As an idea, it is well worth looking up, imho. 

I’m still coy about sharing my cause and effect pathway as a) it’s the USP of the WIP, and b) because I forgot to finish this post amid a bunch of life stuff this week and I’m writing this last bit on the morning of the 15th and don’t want to share stuff that later I'll wish hadn't. Silly, I know, but...

Anyhow, during last night’s insomnia, when I realised I hadn't posted this blog, I had a mini-epiphany about all this and came up with the following image which sort of explains my current framework for long-form storytelling. It is based on a bunch of stuff gleaned from various gurus over the years and my experience of analysing the writing process during the PhD and previously on the Bath Spa MA. 

This story-in-progress is a river, with the historical record one bank and the structural beats of a contemporary novel the other. The flow between them is the cause-and-effect pathway of the narrative. At the denouement, the protagonist will work out how and why their central action wounds themselves (the psychological self-revelation) and hurts others (the immoral consequences of their wrong behaviour). The final image is the flow of this one life entering the universal sea. That is, bringing their life lesson to humanity. This may be utter tosh, but it’s been a tough week. 

In any event, here’s hoping our stories bring us relief if no one else. 

@HouseRowena on X/Twitter where I can be found bringing reputational risk to something or other (see current ACE advice controversy)

Rowena House Author on Facebook where I blather (aka moan) about writing this C17th witchy WIP.

Groundhog Day – with a machete – by Rowena House

This month I restarted the WIP after an enforced break of three months, so this post will honour the spirit of last month’s about the (happily) narrated self by recounting all the useful things that came out of that creative void, while consigning the bits that sucked to forgetfulness.

Good thing, the first: re-reading the first 10K words with fresh eyes.

After three years researching, planning, and drafting, and many more mulling the possibilities of the story, the opening works. MEGA hurrah. We have a solid launch pad in terms of voice, form, and content which, after seemingly endless tinkering, rewriting, and starting again, is progress – and journalist me can stop that eye rolling right now, thank you very much.

Good thing, the second: the main character ‘exists’ outside the specifics of the plot.

Last year’s intensive planning of scenes and sequences driven by the main character’s neuroses have delivered a sufficiently robust outline that it can withstand change. I.e., the emotional and psychological drivers of the story can take the plot wherever it needs to go. Ta, especially, to Story Geek guru Jeff Lyons for that – though, please, Jeff, drop the enneagrams.

Good thing, the third. Darlings to kill? Hand me the machete, mwa-ha-ha. They’re just so 2022. 

Pic: Staples Inn, from C17th witch trial work in progress

Good thing, the fourth. Intuition rules.

For example, certain decisions have been taken without a conscious process. The ‘real’ ghost character, for instance, is gone. Just like that. She’s not my problem any more, just the protagonist’s, and I understand why he believes in her and feel for him. She is as real to him as he is real for me. Like Angelique from The Goose Road is real. Crazy, huh? But true.

Meanwhile, other plot problems have stepped out of the shadows and said, Solve me. Now. Specifically, the kick into Act 2. No matter which way I twisted it, the main character – the person I know – could not step in any self-propelled way into the new world, whatever the rulebook says.

Fair enough, then. Find another route. The antagonist will just have to kick him there instead. And guess what? The story works better for it! Cue more eye rolling, like you didn’t know rules are there to break.

Good thing, the fifth. Some of the stuff that came out of the memory locker makes more sense than what went in last year.

An example. A lot of 2021 (yup, that’s not a typo) was spent – don’t say wasted, this is happy narrative self here – fretting over how to align form, content, and voice. Actually, now I write that I realize it’s not true. I didn’t think of them as a unit. Instead, my experiments with voice were separated conceptually from experiments with form (first person, third, retrospective and framing devices etc) and content (the events to be recounted and the specifics of scenes).

In other words, the what-to-write content, the how-to-put-the-manuscript-together form, and the tone/voice/style of the words had seemed to be different problems.

Now that the opening is finally singing, it’s clear they were harmonies in the same tune. Pieces of a single puzzle. A set of problems only solvable together. [Yeah, yeah. Duh, right? It’s been a tough three months. Anyhow…] Eureka! John Truby’s designing principle pops out of the memory locker as a great planning tool, not just another trick to storytelling I didn’t get.

Here’s what Truby says about the designing principle in The Anatomy of Story: “[it] is abstract; it is the deeper process going on in the story, told in an original way…

“Let’s say you are a writer who wants to show the intimate workings of the Mafia in America, as literally hundreds of screenwriters and novelists have done. If you were really good, you might come up with this designing principle (for The Godfather):

“Use the classic fairy-tale strategy of showing how the youngest of three sons becomes the new ‘king’.”

Yeah, okay, I get it now. Having read the book three times!

To be honest, sifting through all this stuff after a break feels like Groundhog Day, with the half-forgotten only strangely familiar. The slow dawn of recognition is embarrassing. Perhaps our creative selves can get lost in a dark faerie realm where months pass like years. If so, thank goodness for signposts like Truby’s on the route to escape.

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Character Notes on the Self (1) - by Rowena House

Re-reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story the other day, I came across his discussion of ‘the Self Expressed as a Character’ which I’d meant to follow up on before. 

Noting ‘there is no monolithic concept of Self in the history of stories’, Truby identifies four main traditions:

• The mythic Self, where a single personality is searching for their destiny, discovering and enacting their deepest capabilities.

• The Self comprising many, often conflicting needs and desires, where the character exhibits a strong urge to connect to others, perhaps even to subsume another person. He cites Ibsen and Chekhov among the writers who created this type of character.

• The Self that plays a series of roles demanded by society at the time. He gives Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as examples.

• The Self ‘so unstable, porous, malleable, weak, and lacking in integrity that it can shift its shape into something entirely different’, strikingly in Kafka’s Metamorphosis but see also vampires and werewolves.

It seems to me that the ‘many, often conflicting needs and desires’ tradition these days blends with stories that explore how inner drives conflict with the roles demanded by society, now and in the past. Gender expectations versus girls’ and women’s need for self-fulfilment is one obvious example.

 

In this week’s New Scientist, author Caroline Williams’ article Internal Affairs about our inner voices added this to the mix:

‘Early theories of consciousness suggested that we each have one “self”, with distinct likes, dislikes and motivations. Yet while we generally feel like one coherent person, many psychologists now consider the singular self to be an illusion. Instead, they argue that we are made up of many selves, each with a different set of motivations and standards. This means that our inner chatter may be a result of the different roles that form our sense of self.’

So contemporary psychology suggests, like Ibsen and Chekhov, that we are divided into many selves. 

Today’s post, then, is the start of a collection of notes about the Self which I’ll return to when I come across alternative points of view from different times and places, seeking insights and applications for storytelling. At some point, presumably, conclusions will emerge.

To kick things off, here’s a link to Wikipedia with comments on scientific, sociological, philosophic and religious aspects of the Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self . 

And here’s an edited opening snippet from that webpage: ‘The Self is an individual as the object of its own reflective consciousness … (it) is necessarily subjective.’

By this definition, the Self is ‘I’ looking at ‘me’ non-objectively while feeling as if the two are the same.

Wikipedia continues, ‘Psychiatric conditions where such "sameness" may become broken include depersonalization, which sometimes occurs in schizophrenia: the self appears different from the subject.’

So, some people who feel ‘I am not me’* have a psychiatric condition. Yet Caroline Williams says many psychologists ‘consider the singular self to be an illusion’. Which begs the question: how can ‘I’ feel like different versions of ‘me’ at the same time, or is there an inherent conflict here?

Yes! Shouts an inner voice. Or voices. No wonder being human is stressful.

Another nugget from Wikipedia, which is likely to be familiar to fiction writers: ‘The Self in Jungian psychology is the “archetype of wholeness”’ not seen directly but observed through ‘cohesive wholeness-making’ actions.

Just think of all those protagonists overcoming conflicting desires and needs in order to fight a Final Battle, then acting out their newly won ‘wholeness’ in the Resolution, without a nagging inner voice to be heard. 

It would seem that Jungian-style storytelling is a rather skewed form of wish-fulfilment if the many selves theory is right.

Less familiar territory, for me at least, is the concept of a ‘spiritual Self’, the individual searching for meaning in the sacred. Since the work-in-progress explores religion and witchcraft in the seventeenth century as well as notions of us and them, AKA the Self and the Other, spirituality isn’t something I can avoid.

Here is one definition of spiritual identity: ‘A persistent sense of Self that addresses ultimate questions about the nature, purpose, and meaning of life, resulting in behaviours that are consonant with the individual’s core values.’

It’s from an article by Chris Kiesling, Marylin Montgomery, Gwendolyn Sorell and Ronald Colwell called Identity and Spirituality: A Psychosocial Exploration of the Sense of Spiritual Self, published in Developmental Psychology in 2006 (42(6) pp 1269-1277). 

So now we’re talking about life, the universe and everything. 

Sometimes you know you’ve just opened a can of worms, but also that you can’t keep the lid on it any longer. Why now? I blame Truby, and not just because of his discussion about the Self in literature.

Elsewhere in The Anatomy of Story he suggests we only write stories that may change our lives. It’s a high bar, but if we clear it, we’ll never waste time on nonsense or dross. Researching the Self, the Other, and humankind’s historic search for the meaning of life kinda fits that bill.

Enjoy the sunshine. 

* Apologies for journalistic short-hand. I expect there’ll be quite a lot of it in these notes. Soz.

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John Truby's The Anatomy of Story - by Rowena House

With a month to go before the PhD deadline to complete a detailed outline for the work-in-progress, I got side-tracked by a storytelling craft guide I’d meant to read for ages, only to discover it is a goldmine of great plotting advice, and the timing of its arrival proved perfect.

John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story was recommended to me years ago by author friend Lucy Van Smit of The Hurting fame, and now her very successful A Writer's Journal for the Writers & Artists Yearbook. She said I’d like it and she was right. 

Among its many excellent features is a recommendation that rather than developing the main character arc from its beginning, better to plot backwards from the protagonist’s psychological self-revelation near the end.

Intuitively, I wanted this to be ‘right’, partly because I’ve conspicuously failed to make progress by starting the current seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress with Chapter 1, and partly in homage to all the still-born mauscripts mouldering in an old laptop which also began at the beginning.

On the other hand, I’d just spent $325 and five weeks of my life delving into the pre-story of my protagonist’s life, working out an ‘origin wound’ that is poisoning his life when the story opens and causing his immoral behaviour.

Why, then, start again by plotting the main character arc backwards if I already have a beginning? Isn’t that redundant or procrastination?

The answer, I think, is a need to stress test all the plotting decisions made so far before the next big step of scene weaving (to use Truby’s term). To explain...

If you’ve been reading my recent ABBA posts, you’ll know that for most of this year I’ve been using template synopses to outline the WIP, including (at last) a full Story Grid for the protagonist’s A-plot, plus the detailed backstory of his wound and its implications, thrashed out during Jeff Lyons’ intensive Anatomy of a Premise Line online course.

Truby, then, is the third leg of this stool: a way to check my workings before moving on.

Truby and Lyons are a good fit even though they seem to start the story development process from opposite ends of the end-product – Lyons from before the action starts, Truby from near the finale. But they both rely on the same foundation: a psychological and emotional ‘weakness’ (Truby) or a ‘moral blind spot’ (Lyons) which restricts the protagonist’s personal growth at the outset and creates their need to overcome their flaw by the end.

Before I began this experiment with template synopses, I was suspicious of this sort of predetermined basis for all stories; if you’re a writer, no doubt you’ve come across it endlessly, too, as the ‘want’ versus the ‘need’. But I’d paid my money for Jeff’s course, and gave it a really good try, and found myself happily surprised. Not only did this 'healing-a-wound' method create a workable outline, one that got my A-plot the commercial thumbs up from Jeff, but it also unlocked the workings of Story Grid and now Truby, too.  

Proof that it’s helpful for subplots as well came this morning when I was reviewing my preliminary notes about Truby for this post, and suddenly found myself in the middle of the spontaneous creation of the best working outline of Beth's B-plot I’ve managed in two long years!

Yes, I had a ton of research about Beth under my belt. Yes, I had fixed her Story Grid internal and external genres. But Truby cut away years of agonising over her root motivation and how that could get her from the story's A to Z. Now I can see the wood for the trees.

So how does Truby’s system work? Natch, I can’t summarize the whole thing here, so I’ll describe a couple of its key features instead. 

Despite its subtitle, “22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller”, The Anatomy of Story is less prescriptive than, say, Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid and its outgrowths (all useful), as Truby applies his character-led plotting process to all stories, rather than being genre-specific.

Within his twenty two steps, Truby says seven form the core of all plots, including subplots; if these steps aren’t on the page, the reader will feel cheated.

The seven are: i) the protagonist’s psychological and moral weaknesses, which together determine their inner, long-term need; ii) their object of desire AKA their concrete, short-term story goal; iii) a strong and ‘necessary’ opponent (see below); iv) the plans drawn up by the protagonist and opponent to achieve their mutually exclusive desires; v) the climactic battle between protagonist and opponent; vi) for positive endings, a self-revelation where the protagonist (and the opponent in better stories) “strip away the façade” they have been hiding behind, and an acknowledge how they must change to thrive/survive; and vii) the new equilibrium in which they enact their new better selves for a happy, prescriptive ending. In cautionary tales like The Godfather, the protagonist fails to see themselves for who they truly are (and, in Michael Corleone’s case, ends up a monster).

For fans of story structure this is familiar stuff, as are many of the other fifteen steps (7+15=22). But that is by no means a criticism. This book is clear, thorough and persuasive.

For example, his advice on the opponent includes the following: “the single most important element of a great opponent is that he [sic] be necessary to the hero. This has a very specific structural meaning. The main opponent is the one person in the world best able to attack the great weakness of the hero.”

This definition caught me by surprise. Hitherto, I’d thought about opponents in plot terms: how they would stop the hero from getting what he wanted in some direct confrontation or by a devious route. But of course it doesn’t have to be that way!

She (my main opponent is female, thank you, Mr Truby) doesn’t have to attack Tom, the protagonist, head on. Other characters can do that, including those who will credibly spend time with him through the middle build. But by undermining his confidence early on, by exacerbating his emotional and psychological weaknesses, she could render him incapable of action over a long time period and across distances, paralyzing him with his own inner toxins. Ye-ha.

Even as I write this, part of my brain is saying, duh. Yeah? And seeing this technique at work in every movie on Netflix. But that’s the thing about passive and active knowledge: there’s a point at which you internalize it properly, and then apply it.

Reading Truby and applying his principles is like that overall. It's as if I've been given a fresh pair of eyes to check over my every planning decision. One last example...

This month I finally managed to complete the full Story Grid foolscap outline for the A-plot, thanks largely to the confidence boost received last month when Jeff Lyons signed off its underlying premise and short synopsis as commercially viable.

It turned out that having confidence in these foundational elements was key to unlocking the Story Grid’s worldview (revelation) internal genre, which in turn resolved many of the plotting issues with the external genre, now designated as historical crime.

Jeff Lyons’ Anatomy of a Premise Line also gave me a specific neurosis for Tom, worked through from his childhood to the story’s present. It is a highly exploitable neurosis, making him vulnerable to a wily opponent, and one that complicates his other main weakness, ignorance, which is the negative value provided by his internal Story Grid genre. So Tom’s opponents have two targets to attack – his neurosis and his ignorance – as well as his plan to disrupt, and their own strategies to achieve. It all adds up. Tom’s plot looks good to go.

With the subplot getting more focused, too, it’s possible I’ll even meet my mid-June deadline to have them both finished. Wouldn’t that be a turn up? Meanwhile, time for a dog walk in the May sunshine. Enjoy the longer days if you’re getting them where you are.

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