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Verisimilitude of the Author in Fiction
Samuel Coleridge once observed that when writing fiction, the author needed “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” [Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817, Chapter XIV] Once this is accomplished, the reader has the advantage of immersing her/himself in the fictional story that s/he supposed, for the moment, to be the truth. Many successful authors resort to rather extreme artifices to accomplish this. Women historically resorted to pen names as did men at times to add stature to the author’s persona.
But authors have gone much further than this to attain credibility and provide a sense of verisimilitude. In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the author opens her story with an introduction, which consists of a tall tale of a visit in the year 1818 to the Sybil’s Cumaean cavern near Naples on the coast of southern Italy. There she describes locating a forbidden passageway and discovering the Sybil’s hideaway, and even more importantly, an ancient text written on leaves. Her story is then supposed to be a translation of the actual text written by the Sybil concerning events thought through prophecy to occur in the year 2073. She and Percy Shelley did visit the ancient site at the time she noted, but she fictionalized the finding of the ancient text, or so we believe. This mingling of personal experience with crucial fictional elements serves to provide the reader with a means whereby to accomplish Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” Mary’s is an apocalyptic novel detailing the end of the human race.
One might be led to believe that such authorial shenanigans are unethical and wouldn’t be tolerated by major publishing houses today. However, one has but to read the wildly popular Illusions and The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach to realize that publishing suffers from no such moral dilemmas. Many of Richard Bach’s books contain a mingling of personal experience and fictional elements so cleverly disguised that where truth leaves off and fairytale begins is not easily discerned.
Another example is the over-the-top popular The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. This smallish novel starts of with a chapter titled “The Beginning,” which is a fictional account presented as fact of a meeting by the author with the children of a middle-aged couple who supposedly had an affair back in the 1960s. The rest of the novel is an account of the extra-marital indiscretion. The man involved in the illicit affair was supposed to have been a National Geographic photographer. So taken were some readers by the seeming-reality of the story, that many enquired of National Geographic magazine concerning in which issues they might locate this character’s photographs. Of course, the story and its characters are entirely fictional, but the popularity of the novel illustrates how important verisimilitude in fact is.
So then we come to me as an author, and the lengths I’ve gone to creating this poetic faith involved in the suspension of disbelief. I have for the past year or so been involved in an experimental project concerning writing fiction under the influence of the psychologist Carl Jung’s psychic process called Active Imagination. Although Jung envisioned this process to be used for therapeutic purposes, I’ve adapted it to writing fiction. Specifically, I’ve used it almost exclusively to write a vampire novel. [See the Iris of Time.] No, I haven’t pretended that the vampire world I’ve created is a part of this reality; however, I have taken some liberties with the origin of the story. I’ve assumed a persona, what would be called a pen name in some writing circles. But I’ve gone them one or two better. I’ve written a biography for my fictional author, given her a blog, and had her blog about her life in the real world, and I’ve created this fictional author-material also using Active Imagination. It’s another fictional element that separates the reader from the author. I’ve stepped back and removed the appearance of myself totally from the work. This young fictional woman’s life is as much of interest to me as is her novel. I’m assuming no one has an interest in a vampire novel written by an old man of seventy from America, but they just might have an interest in one written by a nineteen-year-old girl from Romania.
But let me add another reality twist to this picture that won’t occur to most people. To practice Jung’s Active Imagination, I first clear off a part of psychic space and wait for images or voices to spontaneously appear. I do this mostly at night, in the dark, writing on a notebook computer with its screen and keyboard light turned off. The practitioner of Active Imagination then engages in conversation the psychic personages who spontaneously come forward. For me, this means that I have my surrogate author come to me and tell the story. I but take dictation. Some professional Jungians will tell you that the personages met in psychic space during Active Imagination are as real in that world as we are in this, that the process involves the complexities of the soul. This then makes the author of the vampire novel a real entity and not a fictional presence. Other Jungians might say that this is no different that what actually happens when any author writes a “fictional” story. It all comes from a place Jung called the Collective Unconscious. Accordingly, terming such a story “fiction” is denigrating and not an accurate portrayal of what takes place during the creative process.
Am I channeling a nineteen-year-old girl from Romania? Absolutely not. Am I channeling a psychic presence that wraps the storytelling material in a cloak that represents such a young psychic presence? Of course.
Conflict with its many ramifications can make or break a story. It should be ever-present, but at the same time, it can destroy the story if it doesn’t fit both the proper mood and the characters it engages.
Walter Isaacson in his biography Steve Jobs talks about Pixar avoiding a potential problem when it allowed Disney to get involved in the evolution of Toy Story. The big problem was Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney’s film division.
The two main characters went through many iterations before they ended up as Buzz Lightyear and Woody. Every couple of weeks, Lasseter and his team would put together their latest set of storyboards or footage to show the folks at Disney. … At each presentation by Pixar, Katzenberg would tear much of it up, barking out his detailed comments and notes. And a cadre of clipboard-carrying flunkies was on hand to make sure every suggestion and whim uttered by Katzenberg received follow-up treatment.
Katzenberg’s big push was to add more edginess to the two main characters. …he kept pushing for what he called “edge,” and that meant making Woody’s character more jealous, mean, and belligerent toward Buzz, the new interloper in the toy box. “It’s a toy-eat-toy world” Woody says at one point, after pushing Buzz out of a window. [page 286]
After many rounds of notes from Katzenberg and other Disney execs, Woody had been stripped of almost all charm. … As Tom Hanks, who had signed up to be Woody’s voice, exclaimed at one point, “This guy’s a real jerk!” [page 287]
The story and characters were in such a mess that Disney stopped production. Lasseter talked Disney into letting him taking Toy Story back to Pixar to be reworked. They took the “edge” off the characters, made them work together, and produced an endearing story, satisfying to both children and adults. Jobs had to use personal funding to keep the project going because of the rework. When it was finally released:
…Toy Story opened to blockbuster commercial and critical success. It recouped it cost the first weekend, with a domestic opening of $30 million, and it went on to becoming the top-grossing film of the year… [page 290]
What I wish to point out is that continuous, mean-spirited conflict is not what sells a story. And yet, the statement that “in fiction, the only thing of interest is conflict ” contains more than a grain of truth. But mean-spirited conflict can destroy characters, as Pixar learned with Woody, and other avenues of developing conflict must be explored to allow bonding between characters. Sometimes characters are in conflict over their concern for each other.
I have discussed this more thoroughly here. I also warned against this in my book Novelsmithing [pages 32/3].
The following excerpt is from this NY Times article, which is a question and answer session with Pixar’s chief creative officer John Lasseter:
Question:
I was curious as to how many movie ideas don’t make it to the big screen and how you know when an idea is movie-worthy. — Ramin K, Mission Viejo, CA
Lasseter:
We do have quite a few ideas that don’t make it to the big screen. Some you hear about, some you don’t. It’s very common in the development of motion pictures.
For me, what I look for early on is first where the heart of the movie is going to come from. The heart comes from the main character and the growth the main character has through the film.
Second is the setting. Where is this movie taking place. Is it someplace I would love to go, and I would love to spend time in this world? We know what computer animation can and can’t do, and we always try to find subject matter that lends itself to our medium.
Those two things. As we develop a story, the plot changes dramatically, characters come and go, but two things you can’t change later are the heart of the film – that’s like the foundation of the building, you’ve got to get that right upfront because everything builds off that. You can’t add that later. You can’t punch up the heart. And then the setting. You can’t just pick the story up and move it to a different world with a different set of characters. So that’s what I look for.
What surprises me is that Lasseter, one of the best storytellers of all time, seems to find this “heart of the movie” by instinct rather that knowing that it is the theme of the movie and comes from the nature of the central conflict. Yes, it does come from the main character, but more specifically, it comes from the conflict between the main character and the antagonist. The nature of this conflict (even if it is internal to the main character) is the premise and, therefore, is the heart of the story. It contains the story’s DNA and is the seed from which the entire story will grow. I believe his stories would stay better focused if he knew more about premise. But then undoubtedly he knows more than he could convey in a quick answer to an online question.
How to Prepare for NaNoWriMo.
You’ve really got to try it once at least, don’t you? Sure. And you’re not going into it cold because that would just be plain silly. So what should you do to prepare? Well, I have some suggestions.
THE IDEA
First of all, you must have an idea for a novel. Something that has been lying around for quite a while, either sketched out on paper or floating around inside your brain is perfect. It could even be a short story that you wanted to expand into a novel.
So let’s say you’ve identified that idea, and now you’re all set to play NaNoWriMo. Here we go!
THE PREMISE
First of all, identify your protagonist and antagonist. Again they must come from the idea you identified above. You know that these two characters are what you novel is about. You also know that they are in conflict with each other. That’s why we call them antagonists. They may or may not want to fight with each other, but they will eventually because their desire to prevail is stronger than the desire to walk away.
Once you have these two characters identified you should look at the nature of their conflict. And by the way, this conflict will be the central conflict and will determine the overall structure of the novel. But the other thing you should know is the nature of the conflict. What is the conflict over? And also, what is the conflict about? They can be two kids fighting over a marble, or two countries fighting over the future of the human race. It can even be an internal conflict raging inside the central character, which means s/he is both the antagonist and protagonist, sort of Raskolnikov if your into Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or a Gollum character if you’re into Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The nature of that conflict is the theme of the story. It is the overall philosophical question posed by the work. Now, don’t get too upset if you can’t state all this in words right up front, but you should have a good shot at the answer to the theme question. If you can’t answer the question of what the conflict is over, then you should take a good hard look at the idea for the novel because it’s still half-baked, and you need to give it some more thought.
Okay. So now you have your idea, identified your protagonist and antagonist, and uncovered the central conflict, what it’s over, and what it’s about. You should also take a first guess at the outcome of the story. I know. I know. I can hear some of you screaming and hollering your lungs out. But theme dictates ending, and you can’t just leave it up to the elements completely. You must know what you’re writing about. So at least give your ending a good first shot, realizing that it’ll probably change by the time you get there. By the way, this is called the Premise. All that we’ve determined up to this point is the premise of the novel.
NARRATION
Before you can write even the first word of your novel, you have to determine what narrative technique you’ll adopt. You have a multitude of choices, but the simplest for first time authors is First Person. This means that the protagonist tells the story as if s/he were in the room talking to you. For other techniques you could see Burroway’s Writing Fiction, or you could visit my website (novelsmtithingblog.com) where I discuss the subject in some detail.
You also should decide on sentence tense. Some stories are told in present tense (I go…), while others are told in past tense (I went…). This is many times decided easily by the novelsmith because s/he has hooked up with a voice that tells the story, and that voice has already decided for itself. If you’re undecided, take a look at a few novels of each and see which you prefer for your particular story.
PLOTTING
All right. We’re finally ready to plot the novel. And yes, you do need to do this, particularly for NaNoWriMo because you can’t afford to stall out wondering where you novel is going. But where to start? With the central conflict, of course. And the first thing you’ll want to know before you can start writing is: How does the conflict get started? Another way of saying this is: How did the protagonist and antagonist get into this mess in the first place? So the first thing the novelsmith has on her/his agenda is to set up the conflict. To do this, the novelsmith must first lock the conflict. This is the point where the conflict starts, and really, the story itself begins. Because the truth is that conflict is what story is all about. That’s the reason in television programs like Law and Order, Bones, or Castle, the writers lock the conflict before the titles roll. They always find a body, or on House, someone gets sick. From then on it’s the cops against the murderer or doctors against the disease, etc. It’s also the reason that at the end of each program they catch the murderer or the doctors cure the disease or possibly the disease kills the patient. Anyway, at the end of the story the conflict is resolved. So there it is: the beginning and the ending of the story. Here’s the summary:
Beginning of story: Conflict Locked
End of story: Conflict Resolved
So that’s it, right? Beginning, End. Story over. Right? Right? Right?
Well, not quite. What throws most beginning novelsmiths is the in-between stuff. And this is where plotting gets difficult unless you’ve had a little experience either analyzing stories or you’ve written a few. This is where we come to things called “plot points.” Plot points are the major changes in the central conflict, and they are amazingly few. Stories do vary, but most contain five plot points. If you can identify these events in the central conflict, you have your story outlined. It’s that simple. Well, yes, it’s also that difficult. Let me first tell you what they are (again almost all stories have them), and then I’ll discuss each separately. The good news is that we’ve already talked about two of them.
Plot Point 1: Lock the Conflict
Plot Point 2: Major Conflict Escalation
Plot Point 3: Mid-Story Reversal
Plot Point 4: Point of Realization
Plot Point 5: Resolve the Conflict
The first thing about plot points is that they divide the novel into four equal sections. By splitting the novel up this way, they provide the pacing for the story. Since we’ve already talked about locking and resolving the conflict, I’ll concentrate on Plot Points 2, 3 & 4.
PP2 is where a major change in the conflict occurs. It can be a dramatic escalation or a revelation that changes the nature of the conflict and exposes it in all its ramifications. Generally, it will expose the seriousness and true nature of the conflict. As an example, in the movie Groundhog Day, this is where Phil wakes up to learn that Groundhog Day is repeating. The movie follows that pattern with Phil’s varying responses to the repetition until the end of the movie.
PP3 is where the central conflict experiences a reversal. This is a plot point that is generally left out of other attempts at story structure based on the three-act play. But trust me, this is at least as important as the other plot points. What this reversal accomplishes is that it keeps the tension building and prevents the mid-novel sag. Generally, if the protagonist is chasing the antagonist, this will be the point where the antagonist starts chasing the protagonist. If we imagine a story where a detective is chasing a serial killer, this would be the point where the serial killer starts chasing the detective. In the movie Jaws, the people chase the fish for the fist half of the movie and the fish chases the people for the second half of the movie. In Cameron’s Titanic, the ship floats during the first half of the movie and the ship sinks during the second half of the movie. Practically all extended narratives have this plot point right smack dab in the middle.
PP4 is where the protagonist learns something that will either make her/him or break her/him. I have called it the “Point of Realization” because many times the protagonist will get what s/he needs at this point to give her/him an edge on the antagonist. It will also probably be the point of what is known as the “anguish of choice,” which is where the protagonist mades the difficult change that will either make her/him or break her/him.
So there you are. You’ve locked the conflict, explored that conflict through the dramatic changes, and then resolved the conflict. The only thing that comes before locking the conflict is a short introduction to set up the story by possibly identifying your principal characters. The only thing that occurs after resolving the conflict is that short period of time during which you show the aftermath of the conflict. This is called the denouement.
CHAPTERS
And there you have it. You have accomplished the first level of plotting. So what’s next? You do certainly have a lot of work left to fully plot your novel. You’ve yet to set up all the scenes and separate them into chapters. Since you have four sections to you novel, you might consider a multiple of four to estimate the number of chapters. You should be able to tell from the nature of your story how long it will be. According to NaNoWriMo you’re writing a novel that you anticipate will be about 50,000 words. At 250 words per page that’s 200 pages, rather short but your publisher will love you. At 10 pages per chapter, that’s 20 chapters, and 5 chapters to each section between plot points.
From here, you should be able to identify what each chapter will be about, and you can start filling in summaries to see how the story progresses. Once you’ve done all of this, you’re ready for NaNoWriMo. Of course, you can still do some of this while you’re writing the initial chapters, and much of it will change as you go along even if you have done all of it, but the more you accomplish up front, the easier it’ll be to keep going.
MORE ADVICE
The only other advice I can give you is to always just tell the story and keep it simple. Yes, you’ll have subplots, (each of them will also result from a peripheral conflict) but keep them to a minimum. You may be able to figure out an intricately plotted storyline, but chances are you’ll confuse your reader. This is particularly true of you because you are writing 50,000 words, coordinated words in clear sentences that tell a coherent story in 30 days. All stories are more complex for the reader than they are for the novelsmith. Remember that your reader has to figure out what you’ve written. You see it all in your mind before you put it into words. The reader sees the words and tries to construct the world you intended.
Well, yes, and one more piece of advice. If you seem to run out of creative energy, take your story to bed with you and think about it just before sleep. Think of it again if you wake during the night, and don’t let any other thoughts intrude. When you wake in the morning, your first thoughts should be about your novel. This just might get the creative juices flowing again. I’ve used this technique for the last thirty years to fight writer’s block, and found it to be foolproof. So there. No excuses.
If you prepare yourself in this way, the really, really good news is that you won’t write 50 pages and stop because you don’t know where your story is going.
If you’re interested in reading more about this “Novelsmithing” technique, go to my website NovelsmithingBlog.com and you’ll find every chapter of my book there for free. If you have to have a paperback, you can find it at Amazon. If you’d like an eBook, you can find it at most online bookstores. But remember, its available in its entirety at NovelsmithingBlog.com for free.
Good luck and don’t give up. I’ll be watching from the bleachers.
David Sheppard
http://dshep.com
High Energy and Full of Surprises *****
This is my first Maureen Johnson novel, and I was thoroughly pleased with it. I’ve been reading more young adult the last few years, and this one I would consider a literary thriller, and the writing quite sophisticated. It’s gratifying that such a large number of young readers are digesting literature of this quality.
The protagonist in the story is a young woman, Aurora (Rory) Deverourx, who is from a small town outside New Orleans, Louisiana. Rory is on her way to London, England for her senior year of high school at Wexford in the East End of London, a two-year boarding school for seventeen and eighteen year olds. The story opens with a sort of “prologue,” a third-person narration of a nurse scurrying along the streets of pre-dawn London. The woman is late to work and in a terrible hurry. She stumbles over something in the dark and soon discovers that it is a body with the throat slit and the head almost severed.
At the beginning of Chapter One, which is told in Rory’s first-person narration, we learn that she will attend Wexford, while her parents, both lawyers, are on sabbatical from Tulane to teach law at the University of Bristol, east of London two hours by train. Rory arrives at the airport, where an old man picks her up and drives her to Wexford. On the way, she learns of the murder that same morning, which is characterized in the media as a Jack the Ripper copycat. Back in 1888, Jack had brutally mutilated five women prostitutes, the first on Friday 31 August and the last on Friday 9 November. This then locks the story’s central conflict. It doesn’t take a very astute reader to realize that this young woman will eventually become embroiled in the hunt for the killer who is repeating all of Jack the Ripper’s murders, after all, Wexford is in “Jack the Ripper territory.”
All this is good stuff, and initially the reader becomes engrossed in Rory’s trials and tribulations as she meets new friends and adversaries and struggles with her classes at Wexford, what is for her, an exotic and demanding educational environment. At this point, it is sort of a fish-out-of-water story. New murders occur on Jack the Ripper schedule, and it becomes certain that the girls at Wexford are particularly at risk. The tension is palpable, and teenagers do crazy things, are inherently risk-takers, and fuel is really on the fire. But right in the middle of the novel, the story changes. I won’t give away the plotline, but what happens, for me, really lets the air out of the tension balloon.
In the beginning of the second half of the novel, we experience a twist in the storyline that produces new secondary characters, and the old ones at Wexford sink in the background and are not, although peripherally present, developed further. The story quickly falls back to earth where it languishes for a couple of chapters. With a lessor author, this turn of events could be catastrophic, but Maureen Johnson is an amazing storyteller with writing talent to burn, and this twist soon recaptures the reader’s interest, and we’re off on an even more exciting ride.
The ending of the novel is thrilling, exceeds all of our expectations, and the reader comes away satisfied with having read a well-told story. And just when you think it’s all over, the last scene in the novel will set you to thinking again, and make you quickly turn to twitter to urge Maureen Johnson to write faster, faster, faster, because obviously this story has a sequel. I checked it out, and I believe that this is Volume One of a new series titled Shades of London. Can’t wait.
Review of the eBook format:
I actually hate to go into this, but it seems that publishers should get credit where credit is due, and when not, well… If this eBook is any indication, G. P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Group Inc. has a ways to go before they can put out a good one. This one looks more like something a self-published author without much technical savvy would put together. First of all, I read this by jumping back and forth between my second-generation Kindle and apps on my iMac, MacBook Air, and iPhone, all nicely synced by Amazon. The cover used in the eBook is actually the black-and-white frontispiece of the hardcover edition. Granted on my second-generation Kindle (no color) that didn’t matter much, but on the other devices, it did. All the devices I used besides the Kindle have color, so why not have that beautiful cover image? Once you’ve bought the book, all you get is a tiny color thumbnail in your list of eBooks, in which the title isn’t even discernible. Once inside the book, you never see the real cover. Even if you click on the contents link titled “Cover,” you don’t get it. The cover is the symbol of a book, even sells the book in many cases, so why not have it available? Even self-published authors do this.
Secondly, the eBook’s navigation has its own problems. The novel doesn’t start with Chapter One. As I mentioned above, it has a “prologue” of sorts (titled DURWARD STREET, EAST LONDON AUGUST 31 4:17 A.M.) that actually kicks it off, which is fine. But that “prologue” isn’t listed in the Table of Contents, so if you ever return there, you can’t get to the beginning of the story without backtracking several pages. Also, it’s becoming standard for each chapter heading to be a link back to the Table of Contents, but not in The Name of the Star. The eBook also has a few formatting errors (e.g. at the beginnings of Chapters 22, 24, and 31), but these are small annoyances. One bizarre error concerns a reference within the text to a website called “RipperFiles.com,” which is highlighted and an active link provided to… nowhere. All in all, a rather amateurish eBook for a major publishing house, especially when you consider that it sells on Amazon for only a few pennies less than the hardcover, the price set by the publisher. I downloaded the free sample on Apple’s iBooks and found the navigation situation with the “prologue” even worse.
The title, The Name of the Star, is still confusing to me. The words come up in the text, but the connection never quite makes sense, in my opinion. Publisher marketing generally reserves the right to specify the title.
Still, an excellent novel by Maureen Johnson. She is truly a marvelous writer. Too bad her publisher, one of the best in the business, can’t keep up with the times.
Being by T.R. Mousner
In Being, T. R. Mousner’s imaginative and well-written science fiction novel, a highly advanced civilization on another planet in a far-away star system is, and has been for some time, watching and studying Earthlings. Young elite extraterrestrial pilot EBN-Reyoz-X, a Guardian of the Sky, is on what should be a routine reconnaissance mission from her home planet, Pharallax, that ends in catastrophe. Marooned on planet Earth, EBN’s biggest problem is that she has injured herself following the crash of her spaceship, the Protectorate’s Surety. She must get first aid, hide the damaged Suretyfrom military patrols, and request rescue while trying to conceal her identity, all tasks that grow increasingly difficult as her health deteriorates and her very presence signals that she’s not from this world. Wildflowers spring up in her footsteps, and she, being telepathic, has the bad habit of responding to people’s thoughts rather than their actual speech.
The planet Pharallax is in the star system Xionin, which turns out to be Bernard’s Star and some six light years from Earth. Pharallax has short, rapidly changing seasons and several species of human-like and not so human-like extraterrestrials. Although Pharallax is in many ways an ideal world, it has its share of problems, and EBN and her aristocratic, politically powerful family end up right in the middle of them. Mousner’s descriptions of this exotic world are vivid and yet the detail doesn’t get in the way of the narrative.
Being is necessarily told from three points of view, two in first-person, the other in third-person, in alternating chapters. The first is that of the young female extraterrestrial astronaut, EBN (Eee-ben). The second point of view is that of a thirteen-year-old adolescent Earthling, Shale, who stumbles upon on EBN, not knowing she’s from another planet. The third point of view is that of EBN’s younger brother, Aix, who is back on Pharallax, where he gradually uncovers evidence of the highly unusual and disturbing circumstances surrounding EBN’s mission to Earth. Mousner further distinguishes the first-person narrations of the two aliens through the use of tense. EBN’s narration is in past tense, and that of her brother in present tense. This provides a subtle difference in narration for each point of view and enables the reader to intuitively and easily negotiate what could otherwise be a confusing narrative. The reader never misses a beat.
On a personal note, in a pervious life I was an aerospace engineer with forty years experience in the profession and also taught astronomy at a university. I’ve been reading science fiction for fifty years. I appreciate that fact that Mousner understands the science of space travel, solar system planetary dynamics, and presents plausible, though fictional, technology. She demonstrates an uncommon understanding of technical subjects and is able to project this into the possibilities of an advanced alien world. All this, and she is also adept of delving deeply into the psychological states of her human and alien characters. Some of the themes that run through Being are: family, compassion, betrayal, love, jealousy, loss, political intrigue, species-species prejudice, and environmental pollution.
By the end of Being, we find that TR Mousner’s storytelling is just beginning to gather steam. She is a terrific new author, and I can’t wait for her next novel.
[Might want to reference my chapter in Novelsmithing titled "The Psychology of Creativity" before reading the following.]
I’ve been reading Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, and last night I ran into the following quote:
The “personal unconscious” must be dealt with first, that is, made conscious otherwise the gateway to the collective unconscious cannot be opened. [page 62]
I found this to be a startling statement. A little further on, Jung discusses a dream where reaching “the seventh” references climbing a stairs. Jung says,
“If this interpretation–that the “seventh” represents the highest state of illumination–is correct, it would mean in principle that the process of integrating the personal unconscious was at an end. Thereafter the collective unconscious would begin to open up…” [page 63]
A well known phenomenon in publishing is that an author’s first work is generally a coming-of-age novel and autobiographical. This is certainly true of me. My first complete novel was The Escape of Bobby Ray Hammer. It is set in my hometown and during my high school years. It’s a first person narration. The main character is much different from me, and yet, also very much me. I wrote this novel during my five years of psychotherapy. I had started the novel as an exercise for a creative writing class taught by the poet Renate Wood who had suggested that we write a short piece about someone as different from ourselves as possible. Of course, that immediately opened me up to my personal unconscious, my shadow. I was in a really “hot” psychological state while writing that assignment, and I expanded it into the novel I recently published. I’m rather certain that writing that novel is what threw me into psychotherapy.
Shortly after completing therapy, I lost my job and instead of finding another, I elected to stay unemployed and immediately began planning a trip of several weeks to Greece. I’d felt that my therapy was somehow incomplete. I had been introduced to Carl Jung’s writings (again by Renate Wood), and I thought that constructing a personal mythology might bring it all to a close. At the end of three years from the time I got laid off, I complete my travel journal that I titled Oedipus on a Pale Horse.
I then set to work on another novel titled The Mysteries, A Novel of Ancient Eleusis. But the point I want to get across is that this new novel was not about me. It was a historical novel set in Ancient Greece. I believe that, just as Jung stated, I had integrated my personal unconscious, and that my collective unconscious had begun to open up. I believe all novelsmiths go through this process in one form or another. Our first works deal mainly with leftover stuff from childhood, and our later works deal more with archetypal phenomena. My belief is that we are always dealing with a mixture of both the personal and collective unconscious, but that we deal more with the personal in our early works and the collective more so in our later ones.
[A word of warning: This review contains all manner of spoilers.]
I read Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End many years ago. I also read it to my son when he was eight. So why did I come back to a book that was originally published in 1953, read it yet again, and feel it necessary to write a review?
What got me thinking about Childhood’s End again is the emergence of the Internet as force for change within the Global Community. Also, my limited experience teaching university students impressed upon me the impact that the Internet is having on the minds of our young people.
As a novelist myself and an author of a book on how to write a novel, I first must say that Childhood’s End is marvelously plotted. It starts off with a startling revelation: Earth is not only being visited by extraterrestrials, called Overlords, but they have come to take over the world, prevent our annihilation, and impose restrictions on human activities that will insure not only our survival but also that we prosper. This then locks the conflict (first plot point) between humans and ET, and as with so much of Clarke’s fiction, the conflict is at a relatively low level. ET, or the Overlords in this case, is here to help.
When one group, the Freedom League, wishes to oppose the Overlords more forcefully, they are soon subdued, non-violently. The one thing the Overlords will not do is show themselves. Humans make an attempt at seeing one of them, but don’t get away with it. As a result, the Overlords agree to let them see them, but not for another fifty years, two generations. This then is the second plot point, which occurs 20% of the way through the story, a little short of where you’d expect it.
As time drags on, humanity loses its edge. We are no longer as creative as we once were, and culturally we have stagnated. Utopia is never all it’s cracked up to be. And the time finally comes when the Overlords reveal their physical selves, and a strange sight they are, and yet immediately recognizable. They are the very image of Satan, red skin, horns, and pointed tail, leathery wings. No wonder they’d been so secretive. However, since they had shown their goodwill through the years, little was made of their “coincidental” resemblance to an ancient symbol of evil. This revelation comes at the 1/3 point and a little beyond what we’d think of as the second plot point and well short of 1/2 point that we’d think of as the third plot point.
At the mid-point of the novel, we get a true reversal. At a party, guests play a game similar to a Ouija Board. One of the participants asks, “Which star is the Overlords’ home?” And the answer they get back is “NGS 549672.” Only one of the guests realizes that this is a database entry for a star forty lightyears away in the constellation Carina. This person then starts making plans to stowaway on the next Overlord spaceship to their home. The Overlords have subdued the humans up until this point, but now one of them is on the hunt to find out more than the Overlords wish them to know. This is plot point three.
Just before the three-quarters point, one of the earthlings stows away on the Overlords’ spaceship and leaves earth with them. His journey there and back will take eighty years, Earth time, but just a few months in relativistic time above the rocket traveling at close to the speed of light. Just a little later, at the three-quarters point in the novel, a strange event occurs. An Overlord saves one of the human children. For some reason the Overlords believe he is special. And then children all over the world start having strange dreams and developing telekinetic powers. This is what the Overlords have waited for all this time.
At the end of the novel, we learn that what the story has been about all along is the children. The human race is entering a new phase, one that will only manifest in our children. They are becoming something other than human beings and metamorphosing into something that transcends human existence. It’s as if the worm finally becames a butterfly. And we learn that those who have been known as the Overlords are actually only caretakers of the human race while it undergoes the transformation into something spiritually superior to human beings. The children no longer relate to their parents, and the parents have no knowledge of their children. It’s a clean break.
As it turns out, the Overlords are a tragic species. They cannot and never will make the transformation to this higher plane. And they take their orders from yet a higher power, the power that then comes for the children of mankind. The Overlords are a dead-end species from another world and can only witness the process, foster it, but never undergo it themselves.
The denouement comes with the man who had hitched a ride on the Overlords spaceship and gone to their home planet. He returns after eighty years, having seen the home of the Overloads and what a magnificent species they are. But he is the only human being left on earth, and he witnesses the end of the human race.
One other interesting facet of Clarke’s novel is that, since the story is spread over 150 years or so, he uses a series of third-person limited narrations. He skips from character to character as his story dictates. He even uses a couple of the Overlords as point-of-view characters. This he does with skill, so it never seems artificial or lacking knowledge of craft. Always professionally executed.
Perhaps you can now see why I was so interested in taking another look at this story. Our children of today are growing up in the presence of the Internet, something no science fiction writer saw coming. And yet, it seems to me that Arthur C. Clarke did, in a sense, see it coming in this story. Our texting, blogging, FaceBooking neophytes to the human race are a strange species with unusual powers developed by virtue of the Internet. They are leaving us behind, and heaven knows what they’ll become in the future. It does appear that they are making a clean break from what the human race has been. Let’s just hope that they can store away a little of our humanity for future reference.
This is one of those rare books that is not only a joy to read, but also immensely helpful. It can help all of us with something that is at once troublesome and worrisome: our memory. It does this with ease, not teaching us some grueling rote memory technique, but one that is easy, natural and intuitive. Yet Moonwalking with Einstein turns out to not be exclusively a how-to book on memory. So what is it?
Well, yes, it is about memory and how to improve it, but it is at once a history of techniques, a description of what memory is and what can go wrong with it, and also a running narrative of how the author, a journalist himself with no special memory skills, becomes one of the most proficient memory athletes in America.
I’d learned a mnemonic device to aid memorization decades ago while in college, and found it to be helpful, but for some reason I’d abandoned the technique once I graduated. But Moonwalking with Einstein expands the mnemonic technique I learned back then by use of something of which I’d never heard: the “Memory Palace.” The Memory Palace exploits our inherent skill for remembering images and spatial locations, harnesses these two abilities we all posses in abundance, and relates them to the memorization of numbers, lists and assortments of other difficult to remember items. The amazing thing is that the Memory Palace not only makes memorization easy, it also makes it fun.
What makes the book so interesting is that it is narrative non-fiction and reads like a novel. The author locks his conflict with his own memory early on, gives a sense of rising tension as he accumulates the forces to overcome its limitations, and resolves this internal conflict at the end when he participates in the US Memory Championship. I didn’t read it as urgently as I did today’s number one bestseller, Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, but still, I couldn’t put it down.
In Chapter Five, I scanned the “to-do” list of fifteen items on pages 92/3 that the author had to memorize in his initial attempt, and developed the technique for myself as I read about the author memorizing it. As my Memory Palace, I used an old home of a high school friend with which I was still familiar, constructing useful details as I went. When I had finished reading about the author memorizing the list (took me about five minutes), I had memorized it myself, and I found that the items were not only immediately memorable, but that the list of items and their sequence was still with me days later, and so imbedded in my memory that I’m sure I’ll ever forget it. All this, I accomplished effortlessly. This is a truly remarkable feat for me because I’m almost seventy years old and have chronic fatigue syndrome, which adversely affects all aspects of my memory.
It has also given me hope that I might finally learn ancient Greek. I tried to learn it several years ago, but found building a vocabulary so difficult that I abandoned the project. Rote memory was just too much trouble. I am interested in all things Greek, and as it turns out, the Memory Palace technique was invented in the fifth century BC by Simonides following his narrow escape from the collapse of a building. This in itself is a story you’ll be interested in reading about. The author says that since the time of this ancient Greek, “the art of memory has been about creating architectural spaces in the imagination.” Having been to Greece twice and written a 480 page travel journal on the subject, (Oedipus on a Pale Horse) I have all the makings of a superb Greek Memory Palace. While traveling around Greece and the western coast of Turkey for ten weeks, I visited many cities and islands: Athens, Thebes, Delphi, Ithaca, Mykonos, Delos, Santorini, etc. I can’t count all the sites I visited. What I’m creating isn’t just any old Memory Palace but actually a Memory Country. Within each location, I can identify as many locations for storing words and meanings as I need. But not only that, I can also use characters from Greek mythology to create actions and images to reinforce the material, as the author suggests. All this constitutes my Greek Memory Palace: the location where I will store ancient Greek words and meanings as I learn the language, in accordance with the instructions learned in Moonwalking with Einstein. None of it was difficult. I picked it up as I read the book.
The author describes how in the past people viewed their minds as something to perfect by loading it with all sorts of intellectual material. “People used to labor to furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things.” [page 134] Some even believed that “the art of memory was a secret key to unlocking the occult structure of the universe.” [page 151] This has given me an entirely new view of how to perceive my own mind and nourish it in the future.
The author also discusses how we came to lose touch with our ability to remember with the invention of the printed word. The history of that estrangement and how inventions like Wikipedia and the Internet foster that estrangement is a very interesting story. The author makes the reader aware of what is happening to us and provides a way to project ourselves into the future without suffering so much of technology’s debilitating effects.
Perhaps the reason this book is so successful is that the reader never loses sight of the practical use of the information the author is providing because the author is discovering it himself and actively making use of it in his quest to make it into the US Memory Championship.
This is an important book. Everyone can benefit from reading it.
Volume II: The Eternal Return: Oedipus, The Tempest, Forbidden Planet. Myth is the foundation of life, and at times the great myths of civilization resurface through the human psyche to play out once again in the lives of mankind. This is the story of one such myth that has come to us at least three times during the last 2500 years.
