The Secret of the Happy Storyteller - by Rowena House

Writing’s a tough gig, January a tough month, and 2023 isn’t looking like it’s going to be a bed of roses, so I decided to write this month about a skill writers have that psychologists suggest can make us happier people.

It’s the idea that if we see ourselves as the flawed hero of our own stories, the sense of agency we get from narrating our lives becomes a source of well-being.

The prompt was an article in New Scientist called Be Your Own Hero by David Robson in the 7 January 2023 issue. In it he says, ‘The principles of a good story offer much more than entertainment. Recent research shows that the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives can powerfully shape our resilience to stress.’

And don’t we all need as much resilience as we can get? 

I heard loud echoes of this concept in Prince Harry’s interviews promoting his book Spare. He told ITV interviewer Tom Bradbury that at 38 he was sick of others telling his story. He wanted to tell it himself.

Later, it occurred to me that the narrated Self also related to the types of fictional protagonists which John Truby discussed in The Anatomy of Story and which I touched on last July. 

Truby’s analysis is based on different concepts of ‘Self’ – basically, the perception we have of ourselves – which overlaps with the idea of identity. Here’s the link:

https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2022/07/character-notes-on-self-1-by-rowena.html

According to Truby, in some stories, the fictional Self mirrors our multiple and often conflicting needs and desires, with the tale exploring how internal conflicts can be overcome.

Another type of Self in fiction is the protagonist forced to play a series of roles demanded by society, whether they like it or not.

Finally, the mythic Self – the familiar hero of much commercial fiction and Western cinema – is a single personality in search of their destiny, discovering and enacting their deepest capabilities.

A narrated Self can combine all three.

As we weave together memories of significant events in our lives, and what they meant in terms of our values, beliefs, goals, duties, achievements, and failures, these events either become stepping stones on a meaningful journey or acts of Fate tossing us about in time, depending on the gloss we put on them.

‘The primary function of [this type of] narrative is that it brings order to disorder,’ Michael Murry writes in his 2015 article on narrative psychology which I found via Wikipedia and Research Gate. 

Our autobiographical narratives begin in our teens and some of us are better at it than others. As always, our adult Self is strongly influenced by childhood experiences and the life stories we tell as a result fall under three broad headings: regressive, progressive, or stable.

Regressive tales are tragedies about Fate being in charge and us at their mercy. These are pessimistic  stories and can be markers of anxiety, even depression.

Progressive stories are the optimistic versions of ourselves, where, despite obstacles, we are mostly in charge of our own lives and things are heading in roughly the right direction. We rationalise what we learned from adversity, how it made us stronger, how we were redeemed.

Stable stories include those that contemplate the absurdities of life, so I guess these can be a bummer, too, but I didn’t get that far in my research as the dog needs her walk and I should be deep in paid editing. Anyhow...

According to narrative psychologists, thererfore, a sense of agency is central to a healthy, self-healing Self: the more you think you’ve got it, the happier you’ll be.

[Frankly, I couldn’t reconcile this agency aspect of narrative identity to a case study showing how a deeply religious woman found recovering from breast cancer a positive experience because in her version of events it proved God’s goodness, but I did read that bit of research on my phone, so maybe I missed the point.]

The opposite of agency in our lives is oppression, as pointed out by philosopher Paul Ricoeur among others, which brings my voyage of (self) discovery back to the work-in-progress.

My A-plot protagonist, a court clerk, is ‘assimilated into the oppressor’, in his case the early Stuart English legal system. During his story, he is forced to confront its evils and leave his place of safety within it. Ultimately, because I want to sell the book, he finds redemption.

The B-plot female protagonist, Beth, has a more complex journey. In her fight with the patriarchy, she goes too far. So, perhaps the life story she tells herself is a self-comforting lie and she is more deeply flawed than she (or I) will admit. 

Which seems plausible. 

In New Scientist, David Robson quotes Kate McLean of Western Washington University, USA, warning of the dangers of always putting a redemptive spin on negative life lessons. 

For starters, that can pressure people who’ve suffered trauma to find a silver lining in their hellish experiences or feel like a failure, which, as she notes, ‘can be really problematic’. For eternal optimists (aka self-deluded so-and-sos), being too keen to bounce back from life’s lessons can falsely boost self-esteem when really what they/we need to do is admit our faults and do something about them.

Beth, are you listening? Probably not. Happy storytelling!

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Lots about The Goose Road at rowenahouse.wordpress.com

Writing Exercises I Have Loved: Part 1 – by Ruth Hatfield

I’ve just had a 3 month break from blogging (many thanks again to Rachel Mcintyre, Claire Fayers and Jenny Alexander who stepped in with brilliant guest posts). In those three months I did no writing AT ALL. I really missed it, and the break made me stop dwelling on the things I find hard about writing and remember the things I absolutely love. I began to think about some of the writing exercises I’ve done in workshops over the past few years, and how they’ve helped me get to the heart of the things I want to write about. I’ll share a few here over the next few posts, for anyone who’s looking for a bit of creative stimulus.

The first exercise I can remember was one on a Children’s fiction course run by Julia Green and Lucy Christopher at Ty Newydd, the Writers’ Centre for Wales. I can’t remember which one of them did this exercise (they’re both brilliant at running workshops), but it took me back to a place I purposefully don’t try to remember or write about – the age slap bang in the middle of my teens. I can’t replicate the exact original exercise here because I can’t remember all the questions that were asked, but I’ve suggested a few of my own, and you can add more as you think of them.

It starts with a pair of shoes. We were asked to imagine a pair of shoes that we’d had as a child. Then we were asked a series of question about the shoes, to get a fuller description of them. What colour were they? What were they made of? What shape were they? Open or closed? What did they feel like under your fingertips?

Once we had a full description of the shoes, we were asked to widen the view a little. What clothes did you wear with them? Were those clothes for a specific purpose? What colour were they?

After the rest of the body was clothed, the emphasis moved to placing it in space and time. How old were you when you wore the shoes? Where did you wear them? What did you do when you wore them? What did you see around you when you wore them? What did you hear? What did you smell?

And the last stage of description brought the remembered person alive: What did you feel about the shoes? What emotions did you feel when you wore them? Were you warm or cold? What did you say when you wore them?

The exercises ended with a short time to remember an instance when you wore the shoes, and write your thoughts as the person inside those shoes, at that time.

For me, this exercise was very effective at delving into a bit of memory that I’d grown used to describing from the outside but preferred not to explore – I’d be surprised if that many fourteen-year-olds are really sunny people inside, but the angry whining and railing against the unfairness of the world that came back to me as I spoke from the heart of my fourteen-year-old self was a gentle reminder that I can’t always remember as well as I think I can what it was actually like to be a child, sometimes because I’ve purposefully hidden it away. This exercise was a brilliant way to excavating some of those hidden thoughts and feelings! I’ve tried it with various characters of mine, and it seems to work well with invented characters too (and is sometimes just as surprising).

A note about this one, if you want to try it – when you’re answering the questions, in order to get into the heart of whichever person you’re trying to dig up, you need to answer quickly and not give yourself time to think too much. I usually just write them out very clearly in a list, but recording yourself reading them out would probably work better.

Finding Heart – by Ruth Hatfield

I met a relation by marriage recently at a family gathering – the prolific Mills and Boon author Kate Walker. She’s written over 65 books, which is the kind of number that makes me blink a few times and rub my eyes to be sure I’m typing right. In my mind, anyone who’s managed to even write 65 books, never mind have them all published and develop a cult following, probably has quite a lot to tell me that I’d really like to hear. We had a fascinating chat in which I learnt a lot, but it also had the effect of dropping something neatly into place for me – a pretty simple answer to a thorny issue that’s been troubling me for some time. 

When writing becomes a more long-term, practical endeavour, rather than just a passion or hobby for spare moments, it sometimes goes well and it sometimes doesn’t. At the moment, for me, it isn’t going all that well, for which there are many reasons – a young family, the shrieking demands of life in general, exhaustion, confusion, pessimism, lack of confidence – you name it, it’s probably swimming around there somewhere. But there is still a small amount of time available for me to write, so I can do it. The problem is that writing is very low on my internal priority list and continues to linger there, i.e. I really never particularly want to work on the book I’ve currently got in progress, although I do it, of course. I’m still hugely into making up stories and reading, but I just can’t raise any enthusiasm for my WIP, and I’m aware that’s not a good thing.

I asked Kate Walker how she kept it up – writing and writing, despite all the pressure. How did she remain enthusiastic and interested, book after book. Her answer was straightforward: she’s interested in character, and her books are all largely about a particular character/s (the romantic hero and heroine). They are vessels in which she can explore how she thinks a particular character might respond to a particular scenario. Even if the scenario is suggested to her by the demands of the genre, she still gets to explore the character’s journey within those confines, and so retains the element that is personally interesting to her.

It’s kind of an obvious point, I guess, but I’d completely forgotten to qualify it to myself recently. A readable book stems from an author’s interest in a particular aspect of that book, whether it be character, plot, setting or message (or a combination of these). And in terms of writing, the aspect you’re interested in is the fun part, and the rest is often hard work.

I’ve had to work so hard on plotting in recent years that it’s taken over the creative and constructive part of my brain, which used to begin with much more personal things – character and (if it doesn’t sound too pretentious) a desire to explore moral philosophy. I think that my lack of enthusiasm now derives from having written a story in which I leant too hard on the plot button before I’d had a chance to create those more personal elements. My characters don’t yet sit down with me as I write, and yet the ‘story’ is finished. They don’t talk to me, either – I have to invent words for them, which is blooming hard work. No wonder I never really want to face the great effort it takes to whip these shadowy figures into some sort of colourful, three-dimensional life. I didn’t stop to look at them properly in the first place, and I don’t know who they are.

It seems so silly to have forgotten what makes a story live and breathe, but I guess it’s all part of the great learning experience that is any creative art. There are no universal rules – you have to discover what the rules and parameters are for you, personally, as you go along, and you have to be prepared to learn that you’re doing the wrong thing, albeit with the best intentions.

So back I come to it, for definitely not the first time: I’m working in the wrong way. The right way for me is to actually focus on the things that are easy, first, and make something I’ve enjoyed. Then I can turn to the hard part, and it’s worth doing, because I’m working on something that does, occasionally, make me smile. A happier me, a better book. Which is, after all, the point of it all.

Inspirational chance encounters. Now there’s an interesting subject. Sounds like another good springboard for a story…

A Reluctant Blog Post by Tracy Alexander

So, it’s less than twelve hours until my blog on ABBA is due and I’ve given it no thought because:

It’s sunny.

It’s the holidays.

I only have until 31^st October to finish my book.

It’s my niece’s birthday and I had to buy her a present.

My mum needs a cataract operation and I spent ages on the phone sorting it out.

There were blackberries begging to be picked.

It took 45 minutes to cycle to where the blackberries were waiting to be picked.

My son is in Bangkok, trying to get to Sydney but the flight has been delayed 26 hours and counting.

It’s still sunny.

My daughter has just come home from a day’s shopping in Bath with her friend.

She bought a camera.

I have annoyed her by saying she should have bought it from a ‘proper’ shop in case it goes wrong.

I’m hungry.

I have no insights worth sharing.

But, I have a commitment so please find below a brain dump of all the things that I’m finding difficult, writing wise:

In a sequel, how much of the earlier story do you need to put in? It’s hard to judge. Too much will bore the reader who already knows the background, too little and it won’t make sense to the disobedient reader approaching them in the wrong order.

How do I refer to my character given that she has several pseudonyms? I keep putting in aka and annoying myself.

I have chosen a structure that alternates between current day and several years ago. Do I need to give the chapters headings to help the reader or shall I assume they are capable of keeping up with me?

I set the first book in Bristol, where I live. The second is set in Leeds. It seemed a good idea as I went to university there, but when I looked at a street map I realised my memory is unreliable. Does it matter?

In between fretting about the plot, I am conscious that I should be thinking about publicity for the first book, out in November. Even the word makes me feel like watching Breaking Bad and eating dark chocolate with dried cranberries. Does the fact that it’s the holidays mean I can shelve those thoughts until September? (Do any writers relish the idea of ‘selling’ their books?)

My character has a trip to Yemen. I have read relevant blogs and spent far too much time on trip advisor. As the work is fiction, how authentic must it be? Do I need to find someone who has been there to check what I’ve written?

(I am enjoying asking all these questions. It’s like having an imaginary friend.)

I have endlessly googled bomb-making, and similar, will there be a knock on my door one day? Do other authors erase their search history?

Would you mind if I stopped now, and went to fry the turkey strips? (I know, what possessed me to buy them?)

www.tmalexander.com