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.