#am-writing

Keeping Score: September 10, 2021

Steady progress on the novel this week, even though the plot of this section is getting away from me. I had an outline for this part, I swear. But that outline’s nearly a year old now. The characters have shifted, both in my head and on the page. As a result, they’re doing and saying things that are blowing holes in my outline large enough for the Ever Given to sail through. A single…

Keeping Score: July 9, 2021

This week has been a bad one for writing. It started out well enough, mind you. Got a blog post written and some plotting done on Monday, and actual words down on Tuesday. But the rest of the week has been a wash. Wednesday was a blur, between work, getting the dogs to the boarding people, and prepping the house for having the power shut off on Thursday. Yesterday I got up early, packed, drove…

Keeping Score: June 11, 2021

Got another short story rejection today. This one was personal, at least; not a form letter, but a description of an historical error that threw the editor out of the story. It hurts a little less, I guess? To know I got close enough to being accepted that the magazine’s editor read the story, and rejected it themselves. But it’s also frustrating, to have such high hopes for a story, only to see…

Keeping Score: June 4, 2021

I finished the eternal section! Finally laid down all the connective text it needed. Final word count: 34,089 words, for just that one part of the book (!). It’s a huge milestone. Means not only that I can move on to the next part of the book, a shorter interlude before the next large chunk, but I’m about 1/3 of the way through the book as a whole: 49,594 words. I said this was going to be a…

Keeping Score: January 22, 2021

It feels good to have a competent President again. A President with some dignity, who doesn’t spend his time tweeting out misinformation. Whose Press Secretary thanked reporters after her first press briefing, who doesn’t see journalists as the enemy. A President who made news this week because of the raft of actions he took to kick off a national response to the coronavirus pandemic, not the…

I’ve finally finished my latest Clone Wars fic! It’s a bit of a change of pace, in that it’s much longer, multi-chaptered, and... Cobitine! It’s a mirror!verse where Satine is as extremely traditionally Mandalorian as she is pacifistic in the canon. I hope you enjoy it!

It is human to tell stories, and it is telling stories that make us human.

Telling (and listening to or reading) stories is one way for human to make sense of the world around us. We tend to derive meanings and making up stories from cues surrounding a happening, creating a narrative unique to our own understanding. It is hard for us to see things as it is because our brain, our imagination, constantly tell ourselves stories after stories, of what has happened and what could happened. Besides, isn't it our brain to whom we listen to the most? After all, just like a character from Kara no Kyoukai says:

“Vision is not what your eyes see, but an image that your brain comprehends.”

We always imagine. This tendency to derive meanings and create stories despite the lack of immediately available cues was scientifically demonstrated in a 1944 study conducted by Heider and Simmel. In this study, a total of 104 participant were asked to interpret a short animated film consisted of two triangles of different sizes, a rectangle with an openable side, and a circle. The study notes only one participant sees the film as it is, a geometric figures moving around the screen, the rest of the participant sees the figure as an animated object despite the absence of organic form in each of the 'characters'. The study notes that the interpretation of character including roles and personality were derived from the interaction between the elements and not the geometric form itself.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTNmLt7QX8E?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

This is somewhat in line with an argument by comic scholars; instead of the panel in which characters were drawn, the most active part of the comic is the gutter, the empty space between panels. It is exactly in this space readers imagine an invisible sequence of events which allows logical and smooth connection between scenes. If, for example, the first panel shows a zoomed in plate in which a fork was stabbing through a piece of steak, then a character was shown chewing next, we automatically imagine that in between, he or she must have had eaten the food shown in the previous panel. All of these were happening in the gutter space.

This tendency of constructing some sort of narrative from the empty spaces has been demonstrated in various psychology-related study as well. (example: Sevilla and Townsend, 2016; Kwan, Dai, Wyer, 2017).

This is why we love stories and gossips. Gossips are stories, after all. In real life, Stories allows us to construct our own ideal narrative, to imagine ourself in a certain situation, predict what may come next while drawing from past experiences. In fiction, it is the experience of getting transported into a different world that allows us to momentarily escape from reality. We may find fiction interesting because we have no memories of it at all, just like how everything looks different when we go on travelling, everything is so strange. Adam Gopnik in his article for the New Yorker noted that a good story is startling. Good stories are strange. It is the pleasant surprise of discovering new thing as we navigate through the fictional world of a book that makes a good story, good.

The good news is, this experience is not a mere time-waste. A 2013 study by Kidd and Castano demonstrated In their study of the Theory of Mind: reading literary fiction could improve one's theory of mind, in other words, those who read literary fictions, in comparison to popular fictions and non-fictions, has more capacity to understand that other people hold belief and desires and that these may be entirely different from their (the reader's) own. This is probably because when we read, we process fiction as reality. As we delve into the narrative, our brain register them as something that is happening here and now, immediately and we were in it. Paul Ricoeur noted in his work, The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality: "Fictions are merely complex ideas whose components are derived from previous experience." (1979; p.125) As a result, we carry anything we learn in the story and put them into practice in the real world, as if we have had experienced it firsthand ourselves. We often learn through fictions that we could turn our dream into reality despite the struggles and obstacles, other times we learn about life lessons, moral consequences, just like our heroes in the stories do.

Fiction allows us to enter that safe space called imagination in which we can be free (if we want to). Frank Rose has wonderfully written about our desire of escaping reality in his article on the Art of Immersion: the Fear of Fiction. There he suggested the attention to the minute details of a world building is the key to immersion. It is the strange familiarity of fictional worlds’ that makes us to want to be come back to it and to be part of it again and again. In other words, It is not the story of the boy who lived that hooked us to Hogwarts, it is the desire to be a part of that seemingly real fictional world that makes us keep on wanting to return there.

There is comfort in not only reading fiction but also in creating it. Stuckey and Nobel in their paper on Connection between Art, Health and Public Health reviewed 7 studies in relation to writing therapy, in which all describes the benefit of writing therapy in both physical and psychological improvements in patients with HIV, survivor of child sexual abuse, and patients with chronic pain. Specifically one male survivor of a child sexual abuse describes writing fictions as crucial to survival. He described that he would write both non-fiction and fiction “to ‘‘go inside’’ and ‘‘be characters. Create characters. Fantasize. That was the safe space.’’” (2010, p.260).

Writing fictions allow us to articulate our thoughts, feelings and belief in a way no other medium could. Just as reading fiction helps us to cultivate our empathy, writing out our pain as an imagined story gives us chance to derive meaning and understanding from otherwise a private and sometimes lonely experiences. Characters and stories don’t pop up from nowhere; instead, we always derive them from our experiences, whether it is a real life experiences or an experience we get from immersing in a fictional world. "The components are old," Ricoeur noted, "but the combinations are new." (1979, p.126). Some stories serve as a harmless method of exacting vengeance; stories in which writers pour their anger on characters they perceive as abusive or evil, some writers uses fiction as a desire release, some others uses it to teach, some others uses it as a way to understand their pain and happiness. As fiction writers often have to parade and put themselves in the shoes of several different characters to figure out how the story would, could, and should progress, the experiences they get in the writing process allow them to empathise with different people they met in real life, just like how they empathise with characters they groom in their stories.

In cases of writing out painful experiences, writing it as a fiction could help the writer to step back and see the event unfolds from spectator seat, giving them a chance to see the circumstances surrounding the pain in another perspective. This way they, the writer, can start to develop understanding with both themselves and the people surrounding them during the experiences as they consider other people’s motivation in the writing process. After all, accepting, understanding and forgiving the painful experiences can pave the first road to healing. (I am forever indebted to the lady who taught me this during my visit for a psychological counselling). This is as writer Jessica Lourey wrote in an interesting article on Psychology today; writing fiction can help one shift their perspective on their experiences. Turning unpleasant and/or painful experiences into fiction also allows you to control the version you show to the world and in return, to yourself. It helps shapes and changes how you perceive your experiences.

By the way there have been several studies that demonstrate the positive relationship between creativity and mood. Creativity is intrinsically rewarding and producing a creative works triggers dopamine-the happy hormone-release, elevating our mood. In turns, an elevated mood, or a higher presence (just not too high) of dopamine pushes for an even higher creativity, especially in divergent thinking (Hommel and Chermahini, 2010). Divergent thinking is a process that resembles brainstorming or finding ideas, a type of thinking that freely branches out of one point meant to explore possibilities instead of finding solutions.