Coming out of the Shell

I enjoy listening to interviews with well known writers, such as the ones conducted on the ABC by Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski   Being storytellers, they provide interviews full of fascinating facts about their writer's life, their history, and their techniques.  Most of the authors will tell how they knew, even at a very young age, that they wanted to write, or, at least, that they had a fascination with the making and telling of stories. Perhaps it is true in many fields of creative endeavour - that the artist to be already has that drive towards, or fascination with, the path that is calling them.

How many authors do you know who can say that they had wanted since childhood to pursue a career as a writer, whether of poetry, prose, or plays?

How many people do you know who are not authors who could say that they, too, once harboured dreams of writing?

How many more held such hopes and do not tell?  What happened to those dreams?  Do they still nurse the flickering candle of creativity, keeping it alive in some dark corner, waiting for some ideal moment to bring it out and show it to the world?  Dig deeper and you will often find that they did write, when they were younger, but something, or someone, happened to them, and the dream was stifled.

I don't have proof at a scientifically acceptable level, but I have, and have heard of, personal experience that says that most people do have that creative drive when they are young - if not for writing, then for visual arts, or music, or some other creative endeavour. 

There are so many ways to wound or damage that early creativity - poor teaching methods can confuse a budding young author and make it all seem much harder than it need be; peers, parents, and partners, can easily, though often accidentally, stamp on the embers of imagination before they properly ignite.  Sometimes it seems that modern society prefers the dull porridge of conformity over the bright fire of creativity. 

That so many famous authors are able to relate their own versions of the many encounters with fans at social events, talks, and book signings - the one where the person says to the author "I want to write a book too, I have a story, but......." - says that the dream doesn't die; at least, not completely. 

How do we lose contact with those early dreams of creativity? 

Do people ever lose contact completely, or do those dreams lurk like a frightened tortoise within its bony shell, waiting for the right moment to pop its head out and recommence its journey.  While the tortoise hides, unique stories remain untold, and could be lost forever to the fabric of the greater human story.

If you know such a tortoise, give it space; gently speak or sing to it of the ways you found to continue your own writing journey - if you are such a tortoise, please come out; your stories are just as valuable as ours, and we are waiting to hear them.  If you know someone, no matter how young or old, who is trying to tell a story, listen to them and encourage them; let them know that you, too, are on such a journey, and that they are not alone.

Lunch in The Piazza - Where the Mind Wanders

Here is another of the products of our little writing group.  I love writing to other people's prompts - they offer a chance to head off in a direction I would not otherwise have chosen.  Generally, I am not sure where I am going when I write the prompt on the blank page, but within a moment or two, some image, or perhaps a first line, will present itself.  That's enough to get the story started, and I can be sure if I begin writing at that point, the rest of the story will appear in good time.  Will it be any good? How can I know if I don't start scribbling?

In this case, I was puzzled for a minute - what sort of wishing well, and where?  At some time in the past I must have read something, or perhaps heard a song, that suggested a Roman setting for the well, and thus, a Roman observer of the well, and the coin-tosser was in the prompt - and so it grew from there. 

Generally we time these sessions - somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes is normal.  That was enough to get most of the story into shape, and another hour at home, polishing and fiddling with it, has brought it to completion.  Is it complete, or should I be using it as the foundation of a larger edifice?

Where do these stories come from?  Now that I look at it, having played with words and sentences for a while, and having read it through several times, I am suddenly hearing in the back of my head a famous old song about Rome and fountains and coins - could that have been it?  I wasn't consciously thinking of that song when my pen first hit the page.

The prompt was – Someone throws a coin in a wishing well, what is their story?

I normally take my lunch in a small piazza behind the Palazzo Grimaldi.  It's quieter, and better sheltered from the hot winds, than the larger, more popular spots.  There is an ancient bougainvillea that reaches out of a tiny garden to cast its shade across an ancient stone bench.

It's comfortable and private, and peaceful, away from my co-workers and clients alike.  Almost no one else ever comes here, which is why I was so surprised to see a young woman from the office adjacent to mine.  She entered the piazza from the narrow lane that once allowed those wishing to remain unseen to gain discrete access to the rear entrance to the Palazzo.

She paused and looked around.  I waited for her to greet me – Suzanna, I remembered her name at last – but the bright sunlight must have dazzled her.  My black robes and weathered face remained un-noticed in my little patch of shadow as she tentatively advanced across the hot stones towards the ancient well.  Her eyes were lowered, and her hands were clasped, as if in prayer.  A tiny gem crawled down her cheek, and I realised that she was crying.

She stopped a pace short of the ancient stonework and its time-worn carvings that might have been satyrs and fauns.  There was a legend associated with that well, I knew – but what was it?  I ransacked my aging memory in search of the story.  The water that trickled from the mouth of what might have been a wolf had been filling that well since before the Emperors usurped the Roman Republic, and filled it still, long after the Popes had taken Imperial rights into their hands.

Healing, that was it – there was some legend of healing.  Very good, I thought, my memory is not yet completely washed away by the tides of the years.  Though I felt that did not fully answer my query, and so I dipped deeper into the well of memory.  Suzanna took two short steps and stopped again at the lip of the well.  Her lips were moving, as if in speech.  She unclasped her hands, reached into the  purse that hung from her shoulder, and, with a small gesture, cast three gold coins into the well.

They were gold, most certainly, and large.  I have seen gold sparkle in the sunlight, more than once, and the splashes as they entered the water were heavy – far heavier than any of those shoddy, modern, aluminium coins would have made.  Not just healing, I remembered, but childbirth in particular – that was the story around this well.  Speak a wish, offer a gift, and the boon would be granted.  But not by any god known to modern man – this font was truly ancient.  Even the Roman historians spoke of it as old beyond measure, and claimed that its waters flowed from the hands of the nymph Egeria.

Suzanna straightened, so I lowered my head to hide my face with the brim of my hat, and sat still, as if dozing.  Her shoes pointed at me for a moment, as her skirt swirled around her ankles, and then she marched briskly out of sight.  I kept my head down until the tapping of her shoes had faded from the piazza, and thought about the young woman and her three gold coins.  She had made a sincere offering, and deserved her benefit, but from where had she obtained such wealth?

I recalled her now – plainly pretty, the sort of girl I might have flirted with, thirty or fifty years ago.  She was always quiet and reserved, dressed in clothes of quality that showed both careful maintenance and long use.  Her shoes, too, were always polished, but never replaced – she was poor, I was sure of it, and did not wear a ring of any sort on her left hand, nor any other jewellery for that matter.   

This would be mystery far worthier of my talents than the venal mundanities that trickled across my desk each day, and those three coins would be the first clue in the process of its solution.  I looked up and scanned the piazza; it was empty. I rose and walked across the cobble stones to the fountain; the water was not deep - the coins were cold and heavy.

What Do You Know?

Write What You Know - that is one of the more commonly proffered pieces of writing advice that would-be authors encounter.  What does it mean?  Is it the truly profound advice that some claim it to be?  Is it a trite aphorism tossed off to hold more difficult questions at bay?

What do you "know"?  What is that I "know" that I can write about?  For those aspiring writers who feel, as so many people do, that the story of their own life is too ordinary to be worth writing about or from, that advice can feel like a door slamming in their face.  Many people take it to mean that they should be writing about the experiences of their own life; they look at the amazing stories already on the bookshelves and think "I can't compare to that"

The chances of that thought being correct are actually miniscule - you have lived, and loved, and feared, and had moments of courage and ecstasy - the thread of your life is woven with the lives of you friends, family, colleagues, teachers, schoolmates, and neighbours, into the larger tapestry of life.  Think "Six Degrees of Separation"  - it is likely that you have had a unique view of events and places and people that others would like to hear about, but you have failed to realize it because it seemed somehow commonplace or ordinary to you.

You may not know what you "know" but there are ways to discover that "knowing" - an exercise that I found interesting might also work for you. 

While trying to recall the name of someone I had known in a rural valley in which I had lived for a couple of decades or so, I realised that there were other names I had forgotten.  It was distressing - that community had been a big part of my life for a long time, and though I left there eighteen years ago, I felt I should still be able to remember those people.

So I started writing down the names of those I did recall, expecting, perhaps, to fill a foolscap page, but each easily recalled name evoked memories of incidents and occasions, which called up the names of others who had been in that particular story but whose names had, until then, escaped me. 

Those names had their own stories and memories, and the list grew, spreading onto the next page, and another, and another.  Before long, a threadbare list had begun to grow into a rich tapestry of memory - and I realised that a couple of hours had flown by, and there was still more to write down. 

Events and people I had quite forgotten turned out to be patiently waiting for their moment to rise to the surface, and thus remind me of other events and people who had faded into the mists of time. Try it - you might find the results quite interesting, and find all sorts of stories worth writing.  Even if you feel the real facts do not contain the makings of a famous biography, they might easily be embroidered into an interesting piece of fiction.

Another way to broaden your understanding of your own "knowing" is to listen to podcasts like the ones from Richard Fidler, on the ABC.  He and Sarah Kanowski present, each week-day, an interview with someone whose life has been deemed by others to be "interesting".  Many of those interviewees do not see their own life as interesting - but they are.  Some are quite amazing, and many will contain commonalities and congruences with your own life and the lives of your family and others you know.  They will give you a better sense of where your thread fits into the tapestry of human life, and where it might yet go.

Another source of encouragement and knowing can be in reading the history of particular periods in which you, your parents, or grandparents, have lived.  Again it is possible to discover that you were on the fringe of great events, and saw things that could add to the larger story if you were to write about them.  I have been reading a book called Radical Sydney and it is quite an eye-opener. 

Covering many crucial moments in Australian history, and relating them to specific locations within Sydney, it brings back to the surface many stories that officialdom would sooner we forget.  Some of those stories were about moments that I had been on the fringe of, or, sometimes, involved in, and showed me aspects that had not been visible from my viewpoint.  The seventies and eighties in Sydney were often lively times, populated by some wild characters - good and bad - and what made it into the papers or onto the evening TV screens was never the whole story.

Perhaps you are far to young to have experienced those times - but it is likely that you know people (parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles) who did experience it.  Have a look at the list of people you have been making - what do you know about them?  What do they know, and might they still be waiting for someone to listen to their story, to write it down and offer it to the world?  Think about your own times - you have a role in what is happening now, a point of view worth hearing about, and even if you don't think so now, down the track there will be questions asked that you might already have answered.

Stand back and look at your own life - it will be more interesting than you realised, and will be inter-linked with many other interesting lives, events, and places.  All you need to do is stand back far enough to be able to get a proper look at it and you will discover that your "knowing" is far greater than you realised.  Take out your pen - once the ink starts to flow onto the page, the memories and ideas will follow.

Caught

You might, as you peruse the new arrivals at your library or bookshop, walk past The Catch, thinking it is a coffee table book for anglers - and that would be a mistake.

Anna Clark is a historian who grew up in a family of fisher-folk and is a passionate and accomplished fisher in her own right.  Invited by the National Library of Australia to produce a history of fishing in Australia, she went as far back in time as she could, showing the depth and richness of the fishing cultures of the First Peoples, and then worked forward through first encounters between them and the outside world to the current state of play in both the commercial and recreational fishing worlds.  She shows how the stories we need to hear were preserved and carried forward in time, and tells us why it is important for us to preserve our own stories for the benefit of those who follow after us.

I called the author a historian, and she is, but The Catch is not a dry work of facts and figures, though it is full of important information - it is a collection of stories woven into the greater story of the lives of those who live in this country, and those who came before.  Read it in conjunction with Dark Emu, by Dr Bruce Pascoe, and you will gain a much more comprehensive picture of what resources were available to the First Peoples, and how well and carefully they were used and managed. 

Even if fishing isn't your bag, the first few chapters are important to every Australian, as they set out in detail the amazing skills and technology the locals were using when the First Fleet arrived.  Nets woven by local people were described by the newcomers as being "better than the finest European lace" and, some years later, one of the inland explorers encountered a net fully 90 metres in length.

Those new arrivals noted the fleets of bark canoes - all occupied by women, often with a baby or small child, and with a fire on a small clay hearth, ready for the immediate cooking of the catch - that were all around Port Jackson and Botany Bay.  They were seen to travel across the open water between North Head and South Head, and the observers were amazed at the quality of fishing lines and hooks being used, and at the quantity of fish being caught.

And therein lies the other important aspect of the stories in this book; the enourmous abundance of fish and shellfish that were present when the new settlers arrived - and the rapidity with which commercial operations were able to wipe out much of that abundance. For those among us who complain about the regulation of fishing today, the stories show us how all the controls imposed on modern fisher folk derive from a time, not so long ago, when the fisheries around our major cities had been almost completely wiped out by unfettered, unthinking exploitation.

Dr Clark has woven together the stories of past and present to show us what was, and what could be again, if only we can learn how to manage ourselves and our interactions with the environment we are so fortunate to live within.  Marcus Garvey said that "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots"

How Can You Tell?

How often have you read in a book review a comment on the use of, or presence of, an "Unreliable Narrator"?  Whenever I have encountered a reviewer commenting on the presence of an unreliable narrator, I feel that the implication is that most narrators are reliable - or, at least, the reader is entitled to expect the narrator to be reliable. 

We as readers seem to expect the fiction we read to make sense - to have a logically connected beginnning, middle, and end.  Indeed, most readers would be disappointed if there were not some sort of moral to the story.  How often have you seen criticism heaped upon the head of an author who has left the reader too far "up in the air" with no promise of a sequel to tidy up the loose ends?  We only tend to suspect unreliability in the narrator if the author drops some clues into the story that point us in that direction.  But, in real life, how reliable is any narrator?

There is an abundance of scientific research that explains why this is so; our minds actively seek patterns, relationships, and causation in the world around us, including our leisure reading activities.  The willing suspension of disbelief can be shattered when too much of the story just does not make sense to us.

There is also, however, a plethora of research that shows just how unreliable any narrator - including ourselves - can be.  Memory is plastic, our minds can never cope with all the data coming in at any given moment, and must selectively filter and focus on a part of that data, excluding or pushing to one side the rest of it.

Police, for example know this, and understand that different witnesses to an event will give different accounts - and will often feel quite certain of the accuracy of their account.  Lawyers know it too, and take advantage of it in court by pretending that the jury should believe that any conflict in the evidence is proof that it is false and misleading - yet those same lawyers, if they detect too high a level of consistency between the evidence, say, of two police, will immediately pounce with accusations of collusion in, and fabrication of, said evidence.  In both instances, the lawyers may or may not be right, but how is the poor jury to know?

In real life, we know, or should know, that someone telling us a story may or may not be reliable, and that we may need to draw on extra resources to assess the accuracy of facts or opinions offered to us.

Do we have a rational way of determining the reliability of that narrator? Probably not - most humans seem to rely on a mix of prejudices, learned experiences, and ancient instincts to judge the reliability of a narrator, and we often, to our cost, get it wrong.

We, individually, and in groups, build our own story on the stories we have seen and heard and - to some degree or another - believed.  Are all those story building-blocks reliable?  Is our input into the story reliable?  Are our memories reliable?  Confused?

Good - when we are writing fiction, we need to keep this in mind; it is highly unlikely that any of our characters are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  It is equally likely that other characters will be listening through their own set of filters, interpreting the protagonist's words and actions differently than the protagonist intended. 

A good example of this would be Muriel Barbery's book Gourmet Rhapsody.  Each chapter is short; most are narrated by the main character - the famous food critic - while the rest are narrated by various people (and animals) who were, to a greater or lesser extent, part of his life.  There is overlap, and there are contradiction - each narrator seems to be sincere; so who does the reader believe?

I could not say how many times I have worked behind a bar, filling glasses, wiping spilt beer, and observing as a story is told and re-told over a space of hours; watching it grow and change with each repeating, until the gap between the first edition and the last is so great that it would be hard to believe that they were about the same incident - only the names of the people and places involved are the same - mostly. 

And yet, if challenged, the teller at the end would usually be as certain of the accuracy of that account as he or she had been about the first version.  And as for the version I hear the next day, after the story has been taken home to new audiences, re-told, embellished, polished, and re-presented, even the names have started to change by then.

So, let your characters lie, exaggerate, conceal, contradict, omit, forget, mis-speak, mis-interpret, and misunderstand; after all, they are only human.

Knowing your world

It is said that many hunter-gatherer peoples offered thanks to the spirits of the animals and plants that they took for food, giving gratitude and respect for the gift of life.  And straight away, I must digress - I used that term "hunter-gatherer" because it is what I learned in school, over 50 years ago, and yet books like Dark Emu, by Dr. Bruce Pascoe, show just how intensively and intentionally those supposed "gatherers" intervened to increase the productivity of their territory.  Back to the story.

At some point in human history, before cities formed and empires grew, deities were named and thanked as being the directors or providers of weather, fertility, and food.  Stories of creation were told, genealogies handed down, and sagas and epics were chanted to remind us of the deeds and misdeeds of our ancestors and their enemies.  People could identify a story within which they lived, and picture their own place in it, as well as locating all the life and landscape around them.

The cities appeared, and kings, and emperors, who took to themselves the title of divine, and exercised control - they claimed - over all the resources the people needed.  As king fought king, and empires rose and fell, many people sheltered in the cities, while beyond the walls, the slaves and peasants continued to fish, farm, and hunt.

Is that when humans began to look less closely at, as well as appreciate less, the plants, animals, and things that we use for nourishment, medicine, comfort, and clothing?  When their gratitude shifted to the kings and emperors?

Those hunter-gatherers were living in, and respecting, the world that gave them being, nurtured them, and took them at their end - sometimes even brought about their end.  Their civilized cousins had walled themselves in, putting the natural world at a greater distance, though the enemy that had inspired the wall was actually other people.

We live in that same world - it is still the source of all, excepting sunlight, that we need for life and comfort.  In the case of sunlight, the atmosphere that filters that light, and protects us from its excesses, exists only because of life.

Yet every year it seems that more and more humans reach adulthood with no real knowledge or understanding of the world we rely on.  How can we have respect for our home if we do not understand it?

Baba Dioum wrote: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught"

The world we live in is complex beyond our ability to fully understand. Our brains, facing a flood of data, have developed mechanisms to filter and sort through all that information.  We seek patterns in the data, and try to develop a sense of cause and effect for every thing we see, hear, feel, taste, and sense. We seek a sense of certainty and safety, and tailor our stories accordingly.

Yet, when we have made for ourselves a story that is comforting in its certainties, we have placed ourselves at risk of real harm. We know our world only partially - it is rare that we can be absolutely certain of our future, even that which is only seconds away.  As for next week, month, or year, certainty is a dangerous illusion.

A story that takes into account such uncertainty, and helps us reach for the skills and resilience we might use when the unexpected arrives, is a better story - and, who knows, the unexpected might be more wonderful than we have imagined?

A comfortable story is a risky story because it can lead us into a sense of false security, so that we do not pay such careful attention to the world around us - its inhabitants and their behaviour.  It is when you stop paying attention that the nasty surprises can sneak up on you, and the serendipitous opportunities slip by unnoticed.  But attentiveness and alertness use energy, and we humans have another useful habit - we like to conserve energy.  Some might call it laziness, some might call it sensible, but our ancestors learned not to burn energy unnecessarily, especially when their next meal might not eventuate as soon as hoped for.  Like all human traits, it has its up sides and its down sides.

To survive and flourish, we need a story that makes sense of the world we live in, and gives us purpose, hope, and direction. With the aid of our ancestors, we learn and develop a story by which we live.  Each of us has our own unique story - though it may contain many elements in common with the stories of those around us, it also is built from moments of personal experience and thought that no one else can fully share.

Our story is also influenced by the stories we hear and see - and many of the stories we encounter in the media or online are not honest tales.  In many cases they are created, constructed, designed, and polished so as to distort our personal story in ways that benefit the makers of those stories.  Yes, you can think "advertisers" or "politicians" when you read those words, and you would be partly right, but there are others creating and foisting dodgy stories on the world, and doing so for reasons not always explicable or reputable.

Many of the stories that wash over us every day have very narrow interests at their heart, and if we are to create an honest and useful story for our own life we need to be able to discern which of those  stories should be discarded, and which ones kept. To do that, I think we need to spend time with other people that is not filtered or mediated by technology, and when we have had our fill of people, we need time in nature - real nature, not pictures and sounds on the screen or page. 

Real people and real nature enter our story by way of all our senses, not just the visual and auditory - perhaps that is why the poetry and writing that most moves us contains cues for all our senses, too.