What T-rex Stole

Our brains are amazing propagandists that delude us into thinking our left brains equate to our whole selves.  In the face of dreams, creative projects, scientific breakthroughs and intuition, many of us ignore the right brain chugging on, manufacturing magic.

How can this possibly happen?  The simple answer, language.

Think of your first memory.  How old were you?  Most people cite something from after they learned to talk.  The filing system in your brain puts memory into the language program for easier retrieval.  We think of ourselves as this sequence of verbal memories stashed away in the left brain.

Sometimes, however, a memory doesn’t have time to be connected to language.  You’re at the skating rink and someone veers at you.  Without much thought, you veer out of their way.  You probably remember it and perhaps even in great detail.  But unleash T-rexes in your rink, and things change.  If you’re not eaten, suddenly you’re outside, running in your bare feet and you don’t know how you got there.

That’s because the part of our cognition that we identify as ‘self’ – our left brain – is just too slow in these situations to record the detail.  If you’ve been in an accident or unexpectedly received bad news, chances are there are holes in your memory of it.  The science people have learned that the entire memory is still there, but filed without language.

This is important to everyone’s experience, but if you’re a writer, your craft separates you from vast amounts of your own experience.  That doesn’t shut the right brain up.  Your right brain lives in the ever present, is the wild and savage and gorgeous part of yourself.  It creeps up in the rude thing you said at last week’s party.  It’s dancing around your dreams.  It’s why you don’t like the guy in the orange windbreaker.  It’s painting metaphor and conflict in everything you write.

So I know that the exercises I passed along to you are difficult.  You may even have physical responses to admitting what’s in your core.  The right brain isn’t used to being seen in the daylight.  But it is gold.  Put the work in, know your bits, meet your archetype, explore your core. 

Trust me.  My work in trauma has taken me into the wilds of many a psyche and the core is where your spark of divinity lives.  Let there be magic.

Ellie Mae & Vampires

Has it been a week of intimacy between you and your obvious bits?  There’s more to come but first, I’ve been asked, can these exercises be done by non-writers?  Certainly.  They’re meant to stimulate communication between the left and right sides of the brain which, unfortunately, do not speak the same language.  Next week, I’ll explain in more detail why this cross brain communication is important.

When last we met, you were left dangling an archetype and your psyche’s core.  These should have a combustive interaction, so hopefully you didn’t get into too much trouble.  The energy between your archetype and psyche core reflects the idea of protagonist and antagonist, or the source of conflict and tension, regardless whether expressed in writing or daily life. 

Although symbolic, the archetype usually is the more conscious of the two, thus the protagonist.  This doesn’t necessarily mean the ‘better’ bit, but the one more recognisable and relatable.  Here are the known qualities or factors in your expression of self and in your writing.  Yet as a symbol, an archetype is like an outlined picture waiting to be coloured in by your individual nuances.  Or in Writing Closet terminology, manipulating your obvious bits can take an Ellie Mae archetype, change her genre and come up with True Blood. 

The next step is to extrapolate your archetype.  For instance, my documentary film archetype, Witness http://lorahughes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/witness.html, can be ratcheted up from bystander to supporter, from Witness to Sin Eater to Pariah.  I’ve increased my archetype’s activity level, but not its essence.  Any archetype that can be ratcheted, will accommodate greater risk, elicit more tension and yes, move naturally along a dramatic arc. 

That arc comes into being when your archetype as protagonist interacts with the antagonist, the ‘savage voice’ or psyche’s core, as I termed it.  Typically people describe this core in less traditional words, more usually as a state of being than as an actual entity.  The unconscious or hidden nature of the core makes it more difficult to define in a complete form and allows it to harbour all sorts of forbidden treasures.  It’s not uncommon for our core to have what are typically ‘negative’ characteristics – coldness, savagery, wildness, fire, lust.  It’s a dark bit of magic located in the right side of the brain. 

Coming from the right side of the brain, the core can never be taken at face value, however.  It’s like trying to hold onto a melting ice cube on a summer day.  What looks solid can be the protective layer around something molten; the discordant sound that’s a singer’s voice now silenced; the fleeting spectral that’s actually a stationary person who’s usually ignored.  The best way to see the core clearly, is look for its absence in your archetype. 

The core of a Witness archetype could be a cave dweller, a hermit, someone removed from discourse with others.  The hermit could be religious, misanthropic, a prisoner, or pushed out of the lime light so often that she’s retreated from all hope of starring in her own story.  Cores typically are a drama inside themselves, a contradiction of desires and talents thwarted or rejected.  They get their expression through the arc of the archetype, add depth to the protagonist’s character by zeroing in on their personal flaws, such as instigating a crisis of faith in an exorcist.  While the archetype and core may not be perfect opposites or ‘shadows’, there should be a tension between them.  It’s in that tension that your narrative lies.

You can take any archetype and create a story from it, but by knowing your own, you first give your writing authenticity.  Secondly, you learn to recognise both archetype and core when they sneak into your writing under other guises, so prevent them from sabotaging what you want to say.  I hasten to say, I doubt you can silence them when they show up under cover, but at least you recognise their voices.

All your bits, obvious and secretive are what make your contribution unique & irreplaceable.  They only have voice through yourself, so get to know them.  They’re going to be around for a while.

Pixilization Not Allowed

In my early twenties, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a travel article of mine about Australia.  It wasn’t the first thing I'd published, but it was the first noticed by my social circle.  They phoned me at work, waved congratulations across the Boulevard of the Allies.  I didn’t write for five years after that.  Not – I didn’t submit.  I didn’t write.

Few writers can hope to be anonymous.  Words expose us, even when they’re disguised in fiction.  When we commit words to page, we bare a shoulder, undo a button, slide down a zip without the modesty of a well placed fan or a dob of pixilization.  Not too scary a proposition until the What-Happens-Next.

The What-Happens-Next is the friend of a friend at a party who’s read your story and has an opinion.  The interview, the comment at the end of the blog, the tweet, the email that says you aren’t an invisible voice or an omniscient narrator but a human expressing imperfection. 

I see you.

Jon Walker, the author of Five Wounds and Pistols! Treason! Murder! recently said that we collect readers the way that we do friends.  If you’ve seen a copy of Five Wounds, you could believe Jon had each book individually printed for a friend.  There’s something decadently reader-gifting about his book.

                               Website:  www.jonathanwalkervenice.com

                               Blog:  www.jonathanwalkersblog.com

Although your writing begins expression in a solitary space, it’s ultimately about relationship.  Our readers want to hear our voice and respond, sometimes not kindly, but sometimes with such clarity, they make us better writers.  While it takes courage to toss parts of ourselves out there, do resist the temptation to either micro-manage the trajectory or to turn your back on reader response altogether.  Wait for your words to land; wait to see what comes of them.

Whatever comes next, it isn’t personal.  It isn’t about your worth as a human being.  It’s about your identity as a writer.  Laura Fish, author of Strange Music and Flight of the Black Swans, once said that each writer is a layer in the growing structure of their literary genre.  Without your layer, the genre goes in a different direction.  You’re an important member of the literary tribe.

                                                http://laurafish.wordpress.com/

I say you're on a quest.  It's called being a writer.  Like any good quest, the crucial journey is the internal one.  Who you are seeps into your writing and exposes itself to random scrutiny.  The less you know about your identity, the more it flaunts itself.  Chances are, what you're not seeing is exactly what your reader will hone in on and speak about.

Do three things for me.  First, make a list of what type writer you are.  The obvious bits.  Nationality, region, gender, genre, topic.  Next, look for an archetype that identifies yourself.  Hero, wise old woman, fool, sin eater, monster.  Lastly, sit with your archetype surrounded by the weapons of nationality, region, gender, genre and topic.  Listen to the savage little voice you usually ignore.  Feel that singular emotion you don't want to express.  Discover what object lies at the core of your psyche – a stone, molten lava, ancient oak, wounded deer.

If you get that far, drop me an email and we'll see what happens next.  Come on.  Risk it.

                                          bistoury56@gmail.com
                                          Monster by Diana Afanador