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.

Mind Your Bits

Last week I asked you to give me three parts of yourself.  Your responses blew me away.  If I’ve not answered your email, I’m working my way toward it.  It’s not too late to give me one if you haven’t yet.  It would be lovely to read it.

                                    bistoury56@gmail.com

Now.  If we collect readers as we do friends, then we must acquaint them to us in the same way.  How would you introduce yourself to someone who isn’t you?  A writer must know herself before she can be authentic with others. 

To know yourself better, begin with the obvious bits, as I called them.  While I suggested nationality, region, gender, genre, and topic, don’t confine yourself to those.  Think of aspects that you relegate to tick boxes on application forms, but generally take for granted.  When you have that list, which one would be the first word you use to describe yourself as a writer?  To illustrate, let’s start with nationality. 

Hello.  I am an American writer.

You know your nationality, but what type of nationality is it?  You could always have lived in your country of origin, currently be exiled from it, have returned home after living abroad or have never lived in your own country.  You could be well travelled inside and outside your country or have stayed in a thirty mile radius.  You could be seventh generation or the child of immigrants.  Any of these possibilities affects your relationship with your country and your expression of nationality. 

In the Writing Closet, we consider things outside our door to be equally important.  Staying with nationality, a writer from South America, for instance, faces different challenges in forming a relationship with a European reader than a North American writer does.  To know your specific challenges, investigate how the world looks at your obvious bits.  Don’t ‘imagine’ how the world sees you; research it.  Listen to the misconceptions, biases, negative and positive opinions.  Look into the murky pool dividing who you think you are from what the world considers you to be.  Identify what’s living in there.

Something as simple as nationality turns out to not be so simple after all. 

Add another bit to your first one.  If we use regional attachment or ethnicity, is your subgroup in conflict with your country’s dominant culture or are you part of the hegemony?  When you’re living at home, which outweighs the other in your identity – nationality or region?  When you’re living away, be it inside your country or overseas, which do you present to the other culture?

Now that we have two bits, let’s use myself as an example of what a writer can do with this self information.  Although I’m American, I see myself primarily as Appalachian.  This subculture is not well understood inside the US, even less so in the UK where I now live.  My regional identification is probably why non-Americans see me as atypically American.  Being a minority makes me not-what-they-expect and I should never forget that.

If I go all Appalachian on my reader, there’s an immediate distance between us which creates tone.  The exotic, dark, bizarre, menacing (Deliverance) or farcical, homespun, foolish, naive (Beverly Hillbillies) or traditional, steady, secure, moral (The Waltons).  So same writer, same bits but starkly different tones.

‘Going all Appalachian’ doesn’t mean I only write regional fiction.  In fact, I rarely set my work in Appalachia, yet inevitably Deliverance, the Beverly Hillbillies and The Waltons make an appearance whether I want them there or not.  My rewrites never fully eradicate any of them.  What never shows up in my writing is Sex in the City, no matter how hard I try.  I can write about New York, but it will always be as an Appalachian writer. 

The obvious bits add depth and colour to your writing.  And you’re not just nationality.  Are you sure of your gender or your genre?  How well do they fit you?  Do you want to be confined to either?  Do you express them in traditional, experimental or totally idiosyncratic ways?  Or do you suppress them?  How do they fare in your country of origin? 

As a writer, it’s best to be forewarned about these aspects of your writer’s voice because your reader always hears them.  You can put on any costume you choose, but you cannot become a coloratura soprano when you’re a contralto.  It’s rumoured that all God’s chillen got a place in the choir, so be a goddam contralto and proud.

Write if you have questions.  Next time, archetype and hopefully, the core of your psyche.  Go forth and know your bits, hon.

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

Deadlines & Diazepam

Deadlines.  Time management.  Self sacrifice.  Giving 110%.  At home with your 2 bar heater and a stinking coffee pot on New Year’s Eve, pulling the last drop of creativity from the reserve of reserves.  We all do it.  But sometimes, you shouldn’t.

Most writers I know fall into two camps.  The ones who procrastinate and the ones who have to be pulled away from the desk because their unwashed bodies smell up the house.  I fall into the latter group; those are the people I address today.  Please sit down, because my next sentence is going to upset you.

Sometimes, you need to miss the deadline.  Heresy, I know, but let’s get a little crazy. 

Let me tell you about my week.  (I’m an Appalachian writer, so I can’t make my point without a digression.)  Ten days or so ago, my husband filled the fridge with ready meals and went to London to see the Queen.  Well, it turned out to be Charlie, but the impact on myself was the same. 

Here I am in a house with all the amenities and no other human.  I don’t get dressed until a break in the creative flow for fear the dog will want a walk.  When we do go out, I confuse poor Big Nose by reciting dialogue as I hoist him over stiles.  I eat standing up.  I go to bed with the computer and reams of manuscript.  I wake up and write notes.  I’ve got the energy of a spaniel on No Doze.

When my husband comes home, I press through the world of my mind into the world I share with him.  The next morning I wake to someone panting at the side of the bed.  My husband’s back has gone out.

If you’ve had to take care of someone with a bad back, you’ll know how ridiculous I was to think my life could go on as normal.  Once the central heating went out, it became a week long picnic in the living room interrupted by house calls from the GP and trips to Neurosciences made possible by my husband crawling down the front steps on all fours.  In the middle of this, I had a deadline.  With a week to go, piece of cake, right?  If I wrote like my son does, probably.

                               He's writing, I swear.

My son has a wonderful creative process.  On the outside, he does everything but write.  At some moment inspired by the gods, he commits his work to paper in nearly completed form.  He makes it look easy but while watching telly, braiding a rug, cooking Thanksgiving dinner, he’s diligently at work.  My process includes a kinaesthetic aspect which is clearly visible.  Without that process, there’s plenty of words, but little creativity. 

Which didn’t stop me.  However, my husband (or the diazepam) decided he could walk.  What he did was fall into the dog’s bed while Big Nose was in it.  When the laughing stopped and I got them both in their respective beds, I realised that just because you can walk, doesn’t mean you’re going to reach your destination.  I could send 300 pages in, but I owed the characters in my novel better than that.

Deadlines are good.  They give us an end stop but they aren’t the goal.  Forgive yourself for being slower than some editor or competition wants you to be.  Let your writing mature in its own time.  Let your process be about the writing, not the deadline.

                                     Big Nose gets his revenge.

Ditch the Snake Oil

In order to be accepted as the creative genius that we are, we have to prove ourselves a top notch snake oil salesperson first.  Marketing, on the other hand, silences the writing demons.  It’s counter-intuitive to the work, yet, if a writer has a problem with using all her fingers and toes to create, network, market and have a personal life, there’s something wrong with her.  

For fecksake, of course there’s something wrong with me.  I spend nine hours a day writing to an invisible ‘friend’.  Disparagement isn’t much of a deterrent to me pointing out that the emperor is in the buff and his butt cheeks sag. 

Ever go to one of those Meet the Agent gigs?  A group of us were taken to London but before we went, our sponsor gave us a type of Writer’s Deportment Class.  I dutifully learned the Elevator Pitch, kept my doubts to myself.

We go to London, are crushed into an historic but down-in-the-heel pub with unlimited drinks and no food.  I stood helplessly by while one of my colleagues marched up to an agent, introduced herself and gave her pitch.  The agent’s smile took on a bit of rigor mortis, eyes rolled back in her head.  As soon as my colleague paused for breath, the agent turned to me.  I hadn’t a clue what to say but I certainly wasn’t going to give my pitch.  The agent wandered off to join a clutch of other agents with their backs to the writers in the room.

The evening progressed with agents in retreat, writers getting drunk.  When I did manage to talk with an agent, I went into therapist mode, asked how they got into their field, what it was like, what they were looking for in a book.  If they mentioned a genre that one of my colleagues wrote in, I introduced them.  I ended the evening with ten queries and never once had to expose a bit of my dramatic arc.

I suppose my problem with this system is that I used to have a normal job.  I went to uni, got several degrees, passed the licensing exam, did my CPD’s, developed a specialty, took home a pay cheque.  Nobody waited until I had an internet following before they took a chance with me.  When I was still green, they threw me into the deep end.  Sink or swim, off you go, the psyches of the traumatised in my care.  If I screwed up, a client’s suicide could be a very real consequence.

If a writer screws up, it’s bad reviews, poor audience turn out, low book sales.  Pft!  As if that were on a par with a client’s death.  But as a writer, I have to prove myself a hundred times more than I did as a trauma therapist because we’ve put the money people in charge of the creativity. 

When I worked in mental health, my boss was someone with a degree in mental health.  The finance people were kept in an office with a bar across the outside of the door.  They didn’t make the big decisions.  They balanced the books and moaned a lot.

However, until our creative people take charge of the money or our society values the creative arts as much as we do paying the expenses of our politicians, this is the system we operate in.  So, here’s my advice:

•           Do what we do best.  Communicate with honesty.  Someone once asked what I wrote and I said, in the Nobody-Wants-To-Publish-It genre.  I was the eighth person in the group to be asked that question; my publishing credits wouldn’t have been remembered.  My honesty was.
•  
•            Be a huckster with people skills.  Not manipulation.  People skills.  You’ve been observing people all your life.  Writing about them, creating them, putting them in tight spots, getting them out.  You know how people want to be treated.  Treat them that way. 
•  
•           Expect to be treated with respect yourself.  Evaluate your rejections.  Don’t interact with people who don’t respect you.  I once had a  session with an agent whom I found so rude, I wondered why he’d been allowed to live.  At the end of our meeting, he asked me to submit something.  When I did, he wrote the most scathing rejection of my thirty year writing experience. 
•  
•           Surround yourself with writers who support you.  Writers, mentors, tutors who read your work only so you’ll read theirs (or worse, never read yours), tell you that what you write is too mad to be in print, are intimidated by your work, steal your ideas, who have no sense of humour, are not going to help you no matter how much prestige they have in your literary community.  Dump their sorry asses.

When I was a trauma therapist, my most important tool was myself.  The writer’s most important tool is the same.  You’re not selling snake oil.  You’re a creative genius with an honest core.  Hold it as precious.

A Dearth of Magic

When the yellow knobs of aconite show themselves in February, they usually bring that feeling of, I’ve made it!  Well, my aconite are sunny of face, the snowdrops are huddled in gossipy clumps around the garden and Sir Lawrence Olivier keeps muttering about my winter of discontent not being over yet, toots.  It feels like a reality overload, to be honest.  Never a good thing for a writer.

I’m quite happy that civilisation evolves but we as a race do seem to be detoxing ourselves of magic.  Did you see Channel 4’s special on Richard III?  Whatever the truth is, the story as presented by Channel 4 is that a woman named Philippa Langley runs an international organisation to study and promote the history of Richard III as a benevolent king.  In this country, that seems a bit looney, which unfortunately is how Langley is presented.  The show is moderated by a comedian and has several clips of Philippa becoming emotional when scientific information is given to her.  By the end of the program, the scientists themselves aren’t making eye contact with Philippa and deliver their findings to the comedian instead.

What is said early in the program, but glossed over is that the Ricardian organisation did legitimate research to locate Richard’s grave, raised substantial money to fund the dig.  Philippa stands in the parking lot and points out where she thinks the grave is, which causes titters, not least because the spot coincidentally has a large R over it.  When the skeleton is subsequently uncovered there, Philippa says, without evidence, That’s him.  And she’s right.

I don’t know Philippa Langley, but the therapist in me has seen too much magic in the most unexpected places, when it comes to anything human.  What I am somewhat versed in is Carl Jung’s theory of personality.  Most theories in the behavioural sciences get their share of the poo-poo, but Jung’s theory has an interdisciplinary acceptance in business and education as well as in psychology.  A personality test based on Jung’s theories, the Myers-Briggs, is used by HR departments for screening perspective employees and team building.  There’s even a TED talk on Jung’s concept of introvert/extravert in terms of learning styles.

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html

What we don’t hear about much is Jung’s idea of the intuitive.  This is someone who knows, let’s say, that an English king is buried under the parking lot over at Social Services without geophys or DNA results.  A bit mad, you say?  Not so, says the Myers-Briggs, but a measurable human function for processing information.  Philippa Langley didn’t walk out her door and get a message from God.  She did years of well grounded research and reached a conclusion using a roadmap the archaeologists don’t believe in.

Einstein said that, ‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.’  In my interpretation of Einstein, science is here to prove that intuition is right.  The two need work together to find a king’s burial spot, to write, to make magic, to live.

As writers (or artists, actors, musicians) in a time when money is tight, culture of low status, we are asked more and more to count beans, to promote and market, to enter the world of commerce and sell our magic to the unbelieving.  We are given less and less time to play, to ponder, to dance in fire pits and listen to owls.  No one in the vast wasteland outside our offices, studios, attic garrets is going to give our magic a priority.  We have to stake our claim, hold onto it as the life’s blood that it is.

In the frenzy which is the writer’s life, give yourself some calm.  Resist interrupting your staring-in-space work with the pressures of housework.  Give yourself suggestions before you go to bed to hash out that difficult scene or put some order to your blog on magic.  Write a journal to the right side of your brain about what you’d like it to communicate to the left side of the brain.  Face your demons and let them scare you.  Remember to laugh.  Congregate with other writers.

Our society needs magic.  Don’t let anyone wrest it from your hands.  Do your research.  Hug a scientist.  Balance your bank statement.  Cite Carl Jung and TED talks to support your position.  Then make your magic.  No one else’s.  Your magic.  The rest of us need you.