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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Spiky names and round names – Alex English

Shortly after writing last month's post on naming characters, I stumbled upon a fascinating psychological study looking into how people judge your personality based solely on the sound of your name. It all comes down to whether a name sounds 'round' or 'spiky'.

Kiki the cactus

If your name sounds 'round' you can be seen as adaptable, easy-going, friendly, sensitive and versatile, but also introverted. But if you have a spiky name people are more likely to assume you are aggressive, harsh, mean and sarcastic. On the bright side, you also might be considered to be more determined than somebody with a 'rounder' name.

So what makes a name round or spiky?

Ella the cat

Spiky names contain short, sharp sounds like K and T, technically known as 'voiceless stops', which are the sort of sounds you make by blocking airflow in your vocal cords. Round names have resonant  M or L sounds in them in them. So Kiki is 'spiky' but Ella is 'round'.

Unsurprisingly, the study found that there was no connection between peoples' names and their actual personalities, it’s just a case of names being perceived in a certain way. And in real life, we would thankfully have much more to go on than simply a name. However, this research did get me thinking about how I could apply it to naming characters.

My current heroine is called Echo, which puts her firmly in camp spiky with that hard K sound in the middle. Her gentler sidekick, Horace, is 'round' in both name and character. Chance? Or have I subconsciously named these characters according to the rules of sound?

I’m not sure, but as a spiky Alex I probably wouldn't tell you anyway!

How about you? Is your name rounded or spiky? How about those of your characters?


Alex English is a graduate of Bath Spa University's MA Writing for Young People. Her new middle-grade series SKY PIRATES launches in July 2020 with Simon & Schuster. 

Her picture books Yuck said the Yak, Pirates Don't Drive Diggers and Mine Mine Mine said the Porcupine are published by Maverick Arts Publishing. More of her picture books are forthcoming in 2021/2022.
 
www.alexenglish.co.uk

Writers, can’t afford a holiday? Try awe instead – by Rowena House

Midway through August, and feeling disgruntled about not being able to get away this year, New Scientist came to the rescue with an article about the psychological, emotional and creative value of experiencing awe.

 

Apparently, feeling a sense of awe breaks down our habitual patterns of thinking, reducing the expectations and assumptions which otherwise colour our view of the world, and thus enables us to see better what’s actually going on.

“Feeling awestruck can dissolve our very sense of self, bringing a host of benefits from lowering stress and boosting creativity to making us nicer people,” says Jo Marchant in Awesome Awe (issue No 3136, July 29^th, 2017).

Awe combines amazement, a hint of fear, and a sense of transcendence: that humbling knowledge of things beyond us.

 

Experiencing awe quietens regions of the brain normally occupied with self-interest and self-consciousness, increasing a sense of connection to others, and leading to more charitable thoughts and altruistic actions.

Astronauts are subject to awe so often when they look down on Earth from space that they’ve given it a specific name: the overview effect.

“Researchers have also reported increases in curiosity and creativity. In one study, after viewing images of Earth, volunteers came up with more original examples in tests, found greater interest in abstract painting and persisted longer on difficult puzzles, compared with controls,” Marchant says.

All of which reminds me of a conversation that creative writers often have with each other: what on earth should we do when inspiration dies?

Eating chocolate or cake are popular remedies. Taking hot baths or showers help a lot of us, too, along with walking the dog, meditation etc. etc.

The New Scientist article suggests that we’d be better off taking a daily dose of awe instead. (Controlled doses of psychedelic drugs seem to work as well, but I’ll leave it up to you to check out what the article has to say about that.) To benefit from awe, all we have to do is find out what triggers it in us, and do that as often as possible.

Maybe it’s taking time to absorb a sublime city skyline, or to lose ourselves in some great monument: a ruined temple of the Ancient World, a medieval cathedral or the Sky Tree in Tokyo. Staring into the branches of an ancient oak tree does it for me, or encountering a wild animal unexpectedly, or sitting by the untamed sea or under a starry sky.

 

One thing I miss most about not going on holiday is watching the churning wake of our ferry as we pull away from land, and the crying of gulls, which always leaves me with a liberating sense of surrender to the journey and the wider world.

 

This loss of self, with its accompanying connection to others, may sound like mystical mumbo-jumbo or pseudo-religion, but if awe is hard-wired by evolution into our brains – if it’s a natural, creative, mind-altering buzz – why not harness its power year-round?

Alternatively, we could max out on credit cards and go find some sunshine anyway.

@HouseRowena

 

 

 

The Tale of the Sellotape Snail (& The Power of Story) by Tess Berry-Hart

It’s late summer.  I’m wandering around the garden – I call it a garden, but it’s really more of an enclosed yard, bounded with ancient hedges and whiskery hawthorn where the sun never reaches, and spiders, slugs and other animals lurk in the perennial dusk.  My three-year old son is crouched in a corner like a frog, knees almost level with his ears, talking and gesticulating excitedly to himself. As I pass him, a dull squidgy crunch echoes underfoot.

“NOOO MUMMY!” Benjy’s horrified voice erupts from behind me. “You’ve TRODDEN on the SNAIL!”

I lift my foot.  Underneath my shoe is a greeny-grey globule, peppered with shards of smashed black and brown shell, out of which a colourless ooze trickles dismally.

Benjy peers at it anxiously. “You’ve hurt him, Mummy.  You’ve hurt him really bad.”

Quickly I take a leaf and scrape the snail carcass onto the wall.  Benjy scrambles up to see. The smashed gastropod lies pitifully in the sunlight. Desperately I wish a passing bird would swoop down and carry it off, but no such luck.

“Mummy, you need to Sellotape him. He’s got a hurt on his shell.”

I turn and look at Benjy. Huge blue eyes look back at me trustingly. He’s on safe ground here. Mummy knows how to patch a book together with Sellotape, stitch buttons back on shirts and Velcro onto trainers. For him this is just another adventure but frankly, kid, this is beyond me, and even the most experienced surgeon.

“Mumm-MEE!”  Benjy sees the look on my face, and realises the situation’s serious.  He’s starting to escalate.  Then I see – joy of joys – another speckled shell nestling in the shadowy crevice of a brick wall.

“Sellotape! That’s a really good idea, sweetheart.  Why don’t you go into the house and get me a roll?”

Benjy turns and bolts into the house for the craft box – he knows where it’s kept – and quickly I flick Snail 1 into the bushes and switch it for its mightily surprised body-double Snail 2. Moments later Benjy arrives, waving the Sellotape roll, and I bite off a large piece and stick it ostentatiously onto the new snail.

“There we are, sweetie.”

Benjy peers at it suspiciously – the substituted snail is darker in colour and even to his three-year-old eyes the transformation from shattered road accident to gleaming new model is, frankly, excessive – but as two little horns start to emerge from its shell and wave around reprovingly, a smile lights up his face. “Well done, Mummy, he’s all better now!”

Later I’m putting him to bed when a little voice emerges from the shadows.

“Mummy?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Can you tell me the story of the Sellotape Snail?”

I can see the questions forming in his little brain. What had happened to the snail? Had he done the right thing? Would the snail be all right? If the snail was – or was not – all right, what were the implications for him as a little boy in a huge wide world filled with random and sometimes incomprehensible events? The idea of a story simply finishing – to a child who simply exists in the moment and has only the loosest understanding of time – is inconceivable.

The power of story to modify expectations of behaviour or help children through transition periods and outline for them what to expect has developed rapidly over the last twenty years since Carol Grey developed the concept of social stories. Social stories – simple written stories, illustrated with pictures or in comic strip form – are often written for children with autism or behavioural issues so that they can learn about events, reactions and the emotions of other people as well as themselves. According to primary school reading specialist Tiffany Jean-Baptiste: “As adults, it’s very easy for us to understand why things happen, but for children it’s not so clear. Social stories explain, in a very supportive way, what the situation is, why the situation is the way it is, what the child is expected to do, and how people will feel if they do the right thing or the wrong thing.” So for example, Lydia, who is having trouble sitting down in class, would read: “My name is Lydia. I have trouble sitting down in class. All my friends come to school to learn. If I don’t sit down then they can’t learn and they will get upset with me. If I sit down then they will be happy with me and I will be happy too.”

In the traditional sense of stories then, children also learn empathy towards others and details about experiences that they have never had; it’s a safe way of rehearsing events in case a similar situation should ever happen. Deep inside us we all have a psychological need for story – for our own narratives and sense of meaning in life; the literary devices of sympathetic hero, the challenge, the struggle and resolution/ return are all part of our deep innate need to empathise and learn.  According to Peter Guber, writer and producer (The Kids Are All Right, Bernie, Rain Man, The Color Purple), "stories are not just a form of entertainment, they’re the highest form of consciousness." Stories are the reason that we have survived as a species, because they make us understand ourselves in a way that pure information and logic cannot. Stories are easier to remember than facts, and give us the framework to understand our world. Stories aren’t an accessory to real life, they ARE real life. The power of story is “unlocked by our [brain’s] ability to form mental representations of our experiences. Mental representations allow us to simulate events, to enjoy the experiences of others, and to learn from them, without having to endure all experiences ourselves.”

Amazingly, according to Guber’s informative article, it appears that storytelling is not even simply a social or a literary device, it’s actually the way our brains function. In general, the brain is packed with small localised processors – governing motor control, different emotions, cognitive representation, vision, etc – but with no “central command post”. Instead, events are experienced at the neural level as discrete segmented pieces of information. A processor in the left hemisphere of the brain interprets all these millions of pieces of sensory data and is our “built-in-storyteller”, forming rationalisations on external events based on interpreting the information and synthesising it into a story. It generates explanations using actions, perceptions and memories, resulting in the sense of psychological unity and a subjective sense of oneself as a person. We create ourselves through stories – we literally become our own stories using our brain’s own narrative.

So, with sufficient prompting from Benjy, a tale emerges.

“AJ the snail – (yes, I know) – was on his way to visit his three cousins behind the Terrible Trees. He was very tired and he sat down for a rest. Then one of the Big People came, whose name was Mummy The Snail Smasher, and trod on him.  AJ’s shell was broken and he was very sad and cried because it hurt. But Benjy the little boy had seen his accident and wanted to help him get better. So Benjy ran all the way to get some Sellotape and put it on AJ’s shell to mend it. AJ was very happy because he could go and visit his cousins, and Benjy was very happy too because he had made a new friend.”

So it is that the Tale of the Sellotape Snail, along with The Day I Got Lost At The Supermarket For Five Minutes and My Little Brother Daniel (Breaks My Jigsaws) are still favourite bedtime stories for Benjy, just as much as The Gruffalo and The Way Back Home.

And the next time someone asks me why I make up stories for a living, I shall tell them that making up stories is in fact the highest form of consciousness!

Have you ever used the power of story with your little ones? (or indeed, your not-so-little-ones?) Let me know how!