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!

@HouseRowena on Twitter

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Lots about The Goose Road at rowenahouse.wordpress.com

A Child's view of the Woods - Clémentine Beauvais

Recently I read, one after the other, the two debut novels on the Booker shortlist:

Both Fiona Mozley's Elmet and Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves are (#imho), absolutely stunning novels and especially impressive for debuts - preciseness, delicateness and evocative power of the style, impeccable characterisation, a fabulous eye for detail, lively dialogues, etc. I won't go into that too much as most reviews concur on the matter. 

What fascinated me and is more relevant to our purposes here on ABBA is just how similar these two books are and how much they hover in an uncertain zone between 'adult' and 'young adult'. One is American, the other British - Yorkshire, to be precise; did I mention Fiona Mozley is a PhD student at my university? - but both are focused through a young person - no older than 14. 

They show us a child's view of the woods, and of traumatic events therein. We hear of grooming, sexual assault, psychological manipulation, health problems, fights, physical and mental decay, cults, the occult, nature versus industry, and pharmaceuticals lost and found among plants. I wouldn't be able to attribute any of those things to one or the other book - they strangely overlap in that way. 

And the whole time, reading them, I was wondering - what is it that makes them 'for adults'? Why are they not 'young adult'? I know we can have endless debates on the matter - and at the end of the day everything is decided by publishers anyway.

 But I think it might be down, narratively speaking, to the size and shape of what I'd call an 'air bubble' between narrator and events. 

The events are focalised through a young person, and none of the themes are out of the reach of contemporary YA fiction. But there is constantly time, space, and lots of other little things, pushing apart the narrative voice from the events. A slightly different, more distant voice, sometimes, commenting on the events from the perspective of the narrator become adult (or older). A more categorical judgment on the self that was then, and is no longer the same. 

In other words, moments where the first-person narrator considers her/himself as a character. I don't mean at all that YA fiction doesn't do this - nor, in fact, am I arguing that it's qualitatively superior to do so. There are of course narrative voices in YA with a lot of 'air bubbles' between narrator and events. Unreliable narrators are common. But I would argue that perhaps that tenuous line with something that 'feels like a YA book' and something that 'feels like an adult novel' might be set somewhere on that sliding scale of narrative detachment from the events.

Again, this is not at all (of course!) a value judgment. What they might gain in perspectival 'distance', adult novels might lose in intensity, sincerity, or even beauty. There is a kind of rawness, of honesty, in a perfectly crafted YA voice - a seriousness, one could say - which is pretty much unrivalled in literature for adults. 'Adult narrators' , even when they are children, tend to be apologetic about their feelings or about the gravity of what they are experiencing. Irony opens spaces in-between, but any such 'air bubble' is always also a cushioning: it protects and insulates the reader. In that view, perhaps adult novels, paradoxically, are more protective of their readers; less skin-to-skin in their contact.

This is of course an ongoing discussion, with very many parameters. But reading and analysing books like Mozley's or Fridlund's is particularly useful for working out those little nuances in our readerly and writerly experiences. I really recommend both, if you haven't tried them yet. And if you have, tell me what you think...

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Clémentine Beauvais is a children's and young adult author in French and English, as well as a literary translator. Her latest YA novel, Piglettes, is out with Pushkin Press.

Words, ideas and the EU referendum... by Cecilia Busby

It's a mere two weeks to the EU referendum, and although you have probably had enough of discussing it, and might wonder what it has to do with a blog on writing anyway, I'm uncomfortably aware that by the time I write my next blog, we may already be committed to leaving the EU. Which, for myself, I would be very sad about, but which I am increasingly beginning to think might be the outcome of the vote.  And my reasons for thinking that are reasons that relate to being a writer. They are about words. Specifically, the words available to each side of this increasingly toxic debate. Consider the following two sets of words and phrases:

Set One: independent, great, standing on our own two feet, making our own decisions, standing alone, standing tall, forging our own way, getting rid of bureaucracy, taking control, not being bossed about by others, not having to do what other people say, freedom, self-respect, adventure

Set Two: caution, fear, economic crash, need for alliances in a larger world, being able to argue our points from within, protecting ourselves, keeping jobs, not losing trade, listening to people who know better, being sensible, having more of a voice as part of a bigger group

If these two sets of words were associated with characters in a children's book, the first set would be the hero. The second set would be the parent trying to hold the hero back from his foolhardy assault on the dystopian system - or the Mayor of the village, trying to persuade him not to disturb the dragon up in its mountain lair.

Set Two haven't really managed to rewrite the story; all they are doing is wringing their hands and saying, No - don't go and fight that dragon! For the sake of the village! And that means Set One have all the good lines.

This matters, because in this referendum, facts have lost all traction, and narrative is going to be paramount. The reason for this is that both sides bandy about 'facts' which almost always turn out not to be facts, or to be distorted facts - and while Set One's 'facts' are considerably more distorted and untrue than Set Two's 'facts', this generally gets lost in the shouting match. Set Two, the establishment side, as a result of selective fiddling of facts and progressively greater amounts of spin over the last ten to twenty years has only themselves to blame for the way the public now wearily discounts anything they say. They decided that facts didn't matter, that words could be twisted to their purposes, and ended up with a kind of Orwellian doublespeak which, far from fooling everyone, means people mostly consider the word of the Bank of England Governor as worth no more respect than the latest Facebook meme doing the rounds.

They should have got an author to run the campaign. Then maybe we'd have seen a different set of words. Maybe Set Two would have read something like;

solidarity, cooperation, kindness, openness, loyalty, leadership, hospitality, friendship, diversity, working together, aspiration, being part of something bigger, freedom to travel, freedom to engage, hope, aspiration, idealism, looking forward, togetherness

Now that sounds more like a complex, interesting character, and one I'd figure as a more likeable hero than the independent go-it-alone Boy's Own adventure hero of Set One. It's a shame we haven't heard more of those words in the campaign.



Cecilia Busby writes humorous fantasy adventures for ages 7-12 as C.J. Busby. Her latest book, The Amber Crown, was published last year by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

"Great fun - made me chortle!" (Diana Wynne Jones on Frogspell)

"A rift-hoping romp with great wit, charm and pace" (Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber)