[guest post] Judith Tarr on Story

Writer Brain: The Power of Story

by Judith Tarr

Story helps us process trauma and understand the world. I've been thinking more about what Story is, and what it does. And how as far as we can know, it's unique to humans.

We may find out that other animals tell each other stories, too. For now, we seem to be the only species that tells itself things that aren't true, but that contain a deeper truth. It may be a factor of the way our brains are constructed. We can think in layers. We can know what is, but also what might be or could be--and what couldn't possibly be except in our imagination.

It can be hard to tell what's true and what's not. We have a powerful capacity for self-deception, which can be dangerous. Consider the Big Lie. It's a deliberate falsehood that's told to serve a purpose, usually political or financial; that's repeated over and over until the people who are lied to believe it's true.

Which, yes, has something to do with the events of this month.

But I'm talking about Story here. About the lie that is, in its essence, true. It creates worlds and characters. It invents histories. It fabricates languages that can take on lives of their own.

People are out there speaking Klingon and more than one dialect of Elvish. They're living in our world but speaking words that came from the mind or minds of humans who imagined how alien beings would think and talk. It's a strange thing, but it's beautiful. It's a lie but it's true.

The image I chose for this post exists in multiple worlds. In this one it's a piece of jet contrail that caught the wind and attached itself to wisps of cloud. The light of the setting sun struck the ice crystals and give them the illusion of color, even while the wind made it seem to be moving steadily westward.

In another world, the world of Story, it's a dragon. Can you see the shape of it? The long neck. The snaky tail. The wings. It comes from the west and it's flying east over the mountains.

I don't know where it started or where it's aiming to go. But because I have the power of Story, I can imagine. I can invent a world for it to come from and a reason for it to be flying over this land, on this evening. I can make up a destination for it, and tell the story of what happens to it when it gets there.

Maybe it's a happy story. It's bringing good news to people who are waiting eagerly for it. Or maybe it's a tragedy. Something terrible happened, and it's warning the people in the east. Or it's a monster story, and it's hunting, and its prey is running away in front of it.

Personally I like the more optimistic kinds of stories. I understand and appreciate the need for the darker ones, for the way they shed light on our own darker impulses. But I lean more toward good news than bad. There will pretty definitely be darker moments, crises and reversals, but my mind wants them to end more happily than they began.

I know that every story can't and won't have a happy ending. Real life can hit hard. But one function of Story is to make it possible to withstand the hits. To find a way through. To face problems and, if at all possible, solve them.

Even if they can't be solved, at least we can try. We can imagine alternatives. We can hope.

Story helps us do that. That's its power.

That's why I'm writing fiction again. So that I can process what's happening. Deal with the hard parts. Find ways to make them less hard. And share those ways with other people, many of whom will share their own ways with me. And maybe, among all of us, we'll end up in a better place than we began.

Judith Tarr is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. She has a Patreon, where she shares fiction, nonfiction (like this blog), and (of course) cute cat pictures.

https://www.patreon.com/dancinghorse . 

She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzan horses, a small clowder of cats, and two Very Good Dogs.

Reprinted by permission

Short Book Reviews: Imagination Takes on Faerie

The Fantastical Exploits of Gwendolyn Gray (Book 2), by B. A. Williamson (Jolly Fish Press)

I first had the pleasure of meeting Gwendolyn Gray in her Marvelous Adventures (of GG). I write and mostly read YA and adult fantasy and science fiction, but I had recently delved into reading Middle Grade. To my delight I found that literature for this age group has all the adventure and self-discovery I love, plus a simplicity and directness that adds depth and honesty. Yep, honesty. Kids this age are hard, if not impossible, to fool when it comes to emotional truth. They’re old enough to have attained a considerable degree of agency in their own lives, which connects them with characters, but young enough to not yet be smothered in hormonal angst. The best Middle Grade books trust their young readers to figure out what’s going on and how they feel about it. I love that! I should also add that no matter what the target audience, the most powerful ideas are best communicated in simple, direct language. Nowhere is that more true than in Middle Grade.

So, to Gwendolyn. When I first met her, she was a flame of color and imagination in a city of unrelenting conformity. Specifically, she lived in a City – the one and only City – where everything is gray and monotonous, literally as well as chromatically, and where children and adults alike spend the better part of their lives under the control of soporific lights called “lambents.” What distinguishes Gwendolyn, besides her delicious name, is her imagination, which is so vivid as to constitute a superpower. In that first book, she battled the Faceless Mister Men, traveled across worlds with her maybe-not-imaginary friends, Sparrow and Starling, rescues a snarky teenage pirate king, saved the City from the vile Abscess, and destroyed the lambents.

Of course, the resulting good times cannot last,

Clear Vision

Recently I’ve been having trouble with my contact lenses. I’ve worn them so long – over 50 years –

that most of the time I don’t even think about how different the world looks when my vision isn’t corrected. Like many people, I’m extremely near-sighted, and I also have astigmatism. So what I see before I put my lenses in is not only generally blurred, but consists of overlapping images of different sharpness. My hard contact lenses (Rigid Gas Permeable) deal nicely with these problems. For decades, I waltzed through life without having to wrestle with how clearly I can see.

I’d heard about the importance of looking away, blinking, or even using lubricant eye drops while working for long hours at the computer. Apparently we don’t blink as often as we normally do when we’re staring that the screen. That “tired eyes” sensation is not due to fatigue but to dryness. In my case, this was made worse by the natural drying-out of eyes with age (and the hormonal changes of menopause), and made even more worse by the number of hours I normally wear my lenses. Wearing them daily – washing my hands and putting them in every morning; washing my hands, cleaning them, and leaving them to soak every night – had become so much a part of each routine, I never thought about it. That’s one of the good things about habit – I reliably got my teeth flossed and brushed, my night time medications taken, and all the other daily self-care things. The down side of such habits is that they’re hard to break or to modify. So when my optometrist advised me to take them out for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, I blithely and optimistically agreed. I set out to do so with all the good intentions in the world. The problem was that there was no time in my daily routine that I could easily and automatically add this contacts-lens-break.

The other problem, perhaps even more of an obstacle, was that although I do have a pair of back-up spectacles (I’m wearing them now), the prescription is old and my vision has changed, so they don’t give me good correction. In addition, the lenses are so thick, they distort objects, the most disorienting being the keyboard of my piano, which appears to be bowl-shaped! So, naturally, all my good intentions went by the wayside.

Reading As A Subversive Activity

This is not a new idea. We often talk about reading as subversive -- at least, I hope we do, because  encouraging subversive thoughts is practically a job requirement for writers. Mostly what we mean is that what's being read -- books, broadsides, newsletters, blogposts -- contains provocative ideas, notions that challenge the established order and society's comfortable assumptions. But it may be that reading itself is subversive.

Here's a quote from Sven Birkerts in Lapham's Quarterly (Spring 2011): "How familiar is this feeling, this impulse to hide the self away when reading, both because hiding not only intensifies the focus, but keeps the reader out of the the sightlines of those who anoint themselves the guardians and legislators of our moral well-being."