Author: Loren Cooper

Introduction

I have a damning confession to make: I am convinced that storytelling and story appreciation is a subjective process.  There's no secret formula.  There's no hidden key.  If you were looking for that, put this book back on the shelf. 

But wait!  On the other hand, I do believe there are powerful aspects of storytelling that lie behind the techniques we learn.  And I believe these things can be observed by their recurrence over time and across cultures, as well as by the frequency with which they crop up in teaching writing.  I believe research into brain function can illuminate the commonalities of the roots of those tropes and techniques.  And I believe some of those things are more difficult to talk about because they link strongly to the subjective aspect, and yet have common roots.  These slippery, subjective, common links offer a less explored insight to storytelling and language as a process.  So while I don't offer a secret formula, I will say that if you read further, you might run the risk of running up against a different way of looking at story.

Language is the water storytellers swim in. We don't think about it as such. When we do, we tend to focus on well known techniques or more explicit aspects of language. Here I'm looking at the less overt aspects of language, for I believe more power can be found in connotation, in metaphor, and in less conscious structures than in grammatical, denotative, consciously planned and mapped techniques.

Chapter I: Approaches to Writing

As a writer, I know my own ways of working.  Talking with other writers, I’ve come to understand that the process of creating a narrative is as different as each individual (as Kipling says, "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays/ And every single one of them is right!") but those differences are like branches growing out from the trunk of a single tree in that the tools used to build successful narratives derive from a common structure, a structure so visible across time and language and culture that psychologists and sociologists and folklorists and storytellers and anyone who looks at the stories we tell in a systematic way find repeating patterns.  

I’m interested in the roots of stories, and why certain techniques and patterns appear again and again.  I’m interested in the common areas between what the storytellers and the sociologists and the folklorists and the psychologists see.  I’m interested in how those common areas can provide insight into why certain things work in a story and certain things don’t.  Why does a story as old as Gilgamesh, written 5000 years ago, follow a structure recognizable today?  Why is it that the major elements of Aristotle’s Poetics, written two thousand years ago, use the same elements as lessons taught in writing classes today?  Why do stories told in so many different cultures and languages across the world use recurring patterns and elements--mapped in different ways by folks in disparate fields like comparative mythology (Campbell), Anthropology (Frazier), and psychology (Jung)--elements still so applicable that they’ve been used to write modern big screen blockbusters?  Moreover, what can familiarity with those things tell us about how to take advantage of those recurrences, sharpen our own techniques as storytellers?  Exploring some of those questions may even allow us as storytellers to begin to talk about some of the available storytelling tools from different perspectives, and wrestle with the things we know instinctively and thus find it so very difficult to talk about.

Many books have been written about recurring patterns in stories, and many of those books are prescriptive in their approach to particular patterns.  This book is not about how to use a pattern to write a better story.  This book is about exploring the spaces behind the patterns.  That’s where resonance comes in.

This book is a journey through some of the patterns people have seen and discussed over the last century or so, how those things came to be, and how they may relate.  Looking at what lies behind these patterns can help not only in our understanding of stories, but in our understanding of ourselves as storytellers, and how we learn and how we teach and how we engage in this unique and so very human art.

I write fiction, and have for the past ten years or so.  A writing friend of mine of prodigious memory and sharp intellect once told me that in her mind she saw the words on the page as and after she had written them—indeed, as she composed them.  This seemed alien to me.  I’ve found that once I have sufficient distance, my own words can surprise me.  

I know my own process of writing.  I should.  No one else is any closer.  But there are many parts of my own process that fail under examination.  Talking to my friend about what came natural to her in her own process stimulated me to think more about my own process, which seemed at first glance to have little in common with hers.  

Once I’ve composed a work, the glow of the words fades from my mind over time, but the images and the thoughts and the forms that gave them birth, that were clothed for a time in a few rags of phrase and clause, continue to burn brightly in the inconstant and dancing shadows of my drifting memory.  And as I return to the words I once chose to fashion into a crude pattern, a poor figure, a shadow image of the idea that burned so brilliantly I could not capture even its reflection, the words pale and fall short and disappoint, though that form returns to comfort me even in my despair at knowing I can never capture it fully. 

I feel the words when I write, if you’ll excuse an indulgence in synesthesia.  Words have a taste and a texture and a perfume and an echo and a tone.  Words are the medium for the expression of ideas, clothing for thoughts.  I write with my eyes closed, and the words that hit the page are blind darting things that rise from the gut rather than dropping down from the brain.  When I write, I write as blind man, fumbling my way around this splendid thing, this idea, this image, this form, this naked beauty I must drape in the tattered shreds of inadequate language.  I draw shapes in the sand with unsteady fingers.  My creations are clumsy and blind, lame and halt, distorted outlines of inspiring mystery, and that process continues until I have limited and bound and made mortal a rough bit of clay, a rude offering that tries and fails to capture that which cannot be bound by mortal hands and gross matter.  
If I were a painter, I’d have to paint with my hands, for the tool of the brush would be too distant from the medium.  Perhaps I’d have to be a sculptor, pressing shapes out of wet earth with fingers too thick and blunt for delicate work.  But words are my medium, and they come up from deep places, and I use them like I breathe, without thinking about it, and I don’t remember the words I’ve used any more than I remember the breaths I’ve taken.  Creation comes easy to me, and it is a joy, no matter how inadequate or deeply flawed the product.  The act itself is the reward.  It’s a communion with the ideal.  It’s a kind of giving back to the architect of the universe, a prayer to the Primum Mobile.  It’s following the Great Urge.

So I can’t understand the process my friend uses, and I don’t have the advantage of precise recall or of seeing the words on the page.  I have to read and write by feel.  The things I absorb I remake and refashion, the clumsy hands of my soul impatient even here.  I make things fit for me—I make them comfortable.  Beware telling me a story, for I may squeeze it, twist it, bend it to fit, steal it and make it my own.  Blindness is in my nature.

I’m describing this to illustrate that the process each of us uses to write has a difference in form and function that cannot be seen on surface of the page.  I shape my word into sentences, using prose.  So does my friend.  I write in English.  So does my friend.  Most of the time I obey the foundational rules of grammar and syntax.  Most of the time, perhaps even more often than I, so does my friend.  I have a complex vocabulary.  So does my friend.  Much of our vocabulary overlaps.  Some words we don’t share, or we share but only partially.  

Our process of writing is very different.  We compose, we approach the medium, and we revise in different ways.  We draw on different experiences.  More importantly, we draw on the fundamentally different ways we processed those experiences.  Our lexicons derive from differing reference sets: different books, different authors, different speakers and different teachers.  Our decisions, our choices, our pasts, presents and futures aren’t parallel or divergent; they aren’t even on the same piece of paper.  On the paper, the tone of the usage, the ephemeral and vaunted Voice in pieces each of us creates, has distinctions and preferences that a reader unfamiliar with our works could detect, but those distinctions in the works we produce don’t give the audience any direct insight to the process each of us uses to produce a written piece. 

Does that matter to the quality of the piece we produce?  No.  But the process each of us uses can be refined, and one way to refine that process is to think about words, and what they are, what they mean, and how we use them.  In the course of this book I’ll talk about Archetypes and symbols and the connotations of words, and how there are recurring patterns in story and in language that carry layers of meaning that operate at conscious and unconscious levels.  Certain uses of these patterns can be like pulling a switch in a reader’s mind, or can be the result of those same “switches” tripping in the writer’s mind.  Some of this is biologically present, some of this is culturally established, and some of this is personally established, unique to the individual’s inner space. 

In a story, the storyteller cannot avoid touching these various patterns.  If the reader’s patterns parallel the writer’s closely enough, and the writer’s evocation of those patterns is clean enough, for a moment the “switch” the writer wanted to open does open in the reader’s mind, and the reader reacts on an intellectual and emotional level.  This tenuous connection, this vast and changing circuit between the writer and the audience, is the heart of the power of story.  

There are as many ways to try to make that connection as there are ways to tell a story. One known and potent link seems to run directly between language and story and the human brain, a kind of deep structure in the heart of the human experience that touches and is touches by story, ties archetype and symbol and the feel or connotation of the words together like a golden chain.  That deep structure or function can be described as resonance. 

Very simply, the brain at a low level is a set of electrochemical switches called neurons.  Neurons fire in groups; the chance that each neuron will fire or suppress firing changes in response to the state of neighboring neurons.  When neurons fire, they tend to fire in clusters or groups that can be seen (by monitoring the electrical activity associated with a firing neuron) as brain waves.  So on a very low level, on the level of the neurons and their interaction, the working of the brain itself is relational and resonant. 

What’s happening on a physical level as the brain works is evocative of the way metaphors, symbols, archetypes, connotations and other referential aspects of language and storytelling that depend on references work.  This thing, this word, these letters that stand for this movement of the mouth and lips and throat and lungs, that in turn stands for this object or sensation or perception that in turn may be connected to another thing or  class of things, is an element in a resonant chain right from the beginning.  Braiding that chain through the story to the level of images and language and structure can create deep and powerful resonant effects in readers at levels below conscious thought, and that can in turn evoke a strong response from the audience.  This is one of the most powerful, one of the most fundamental, and one of the most difficult tools to use in storytelling, simply because the more conscious the attempt to exploit these resonances, the less likely it is to succeed.  I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I am saying that in my experience these deep level resonances are best established as a reflection of the deep level resonances already present in the writer and the story.  There are ways to refine the use of these elements, and to prepare as a writer to work on these levels, and that’s one of the main elements I’ll cover in this book. 

So what is a symbol?  A symbol is a thing which stands for another thing.  It may stand for many other things.  The resonance in symbolism is that the thing the writer wants to evoke by a symbolic usage is the thing evoked for the reader by that symbolic usage in the writing, whether consciously or half-consciously or unconsciously.  The deeper the recognition goes the more direct the connection, and the more powerful the resonance.  In the twentieth century, the swastika changed from an obscure mystical figure to the emblem (and symbolic representation) of one of the most feared and hated regimes in the modern world.  That figure became more widely known, more powerful, and specifically associated with a particular group and ideology after its adoption by the Nazis.  Use of the swastika as a symbol now cannot avoid that tainted association in the modern mind.  An attempt to evoke any other association of that symbol than the Nazis becomes much more difficult for the majority of modern readers.  A new symbolic baseline has been established for a particular twisted cross.
What is Archetype?  Archtypes can be thought of as the ur-thing, the ultimate thing, the First Thing, the Platonic ideal of which all representatives within that class of things are but shadows cast by the original.  Archtypes in fiction usually refer to or draw from a set described by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung that he believed were common to the human experience, and he in turn drew these things from scholars like Frazier who observed and began to detail out the surprising parallels in the myths and legends of people all around the globe.  An example of an archetypal figure is Mentor, the advisor of Telemechus, Odysseus’ son in the Odyssey.  The advisory role Mentor played was sufficiently archetypal that his name has come to define his function in modern English.

What is connotation?  Words have two kinds of meaning: denotative and connotative.  Denotative meanings can be thought of as the definitions within the dictionary.  Connotative meanings are the baggage the word carries with it, the impressions, thoughts, experiences, associations hooked to a word.  Connotations are slippery, often personal things with fuzzy boundaries.  That makes them exceedingly difficult to use, and exceedingly powerful when used effectively.  Think of December 7^th (“A day which will live in infamy”) or September 11^th.  US, both of these dates are now loaded with meaning.  But the strength of the association is fading in the minds of the popular culture for the first as the population ages.  Ask someone who was a teenager in 1941 about December 7^th…the association,  the connotation, and the resonance of that date will be much greater for that same date than for the person who was a teenager in 2001.  

So then what do I mean by resonance?  You can see the link in the descriptions above.  Archetypes are closely related to symbols, though they are not strictly symbols.  All those reflections of the archetypes evoke the original archetype, even as connotative meanings can be evoked by a word.  Symbols, archetypes, and connotation are all connective, representative, and operate best on levels below the surface of the conscious mind, the linear connection, or the literal meaning.  The connections and their potential for evocation, that potential for activating referential or associative chains, I call resonance. 
Because personal experience can play a significant part in the power of the use of any of these tools, usage is tricky and complicated by the same fuzziness that gives them their power and scope.  Frazier, Jung, Campbell, and others have made a compelling case that the roots of these associative representations have a broad presence and reach into the deep levels of the mind, present at some of the most powerful and formative human experiences.  Chomsky and Pinker, in describing the linkages between human development, human biology, and human language, seem to reinforce this linkage between how we as humans think on a deep level and how we communicate, and it’s a natural extension that as story operates in the medium of language, in story and in language lie the linkage to those deep level responses that have developed over time.  

Rousseau thought language developed as a way to express emotion; Darwin thought it developed as a successful strategy for survival.  On the one hand you have story as a reaching out, a drive for connection, and on the other you have story as a means of passing information, which leads to ordering events.  We continue to use story to do both of those things: order events and communicate experience.  Things haven’t changed so much over time.  Language and the structure of story can provide powerful tools to invoke deep responses in the audience.  Tapping into these tools might be difficult and unpredictable, but resonance can be powerful magic.  

So what about my friend and me?  We both work with archetypes and symbolism and connotation.  We’re human, and we tell stories.  We can’t escape working with archetypes and symbolism and connotation.  If you tell stories, you work with these things as well, whether you recognize it or not.  Despite our different approaches to the medium in which we work, and the different ways we use the tools, at the lowest and most powerful levels, the tools are all links in a single chain that stretches back to the earliest stories that have survived to come down to us now.  

  	This book tries to follow the chain to explore a bit about why the tools work, rather than what tools to use; and where the tools come from, rather than where they should go.  The approach is heuristic, rather than prescriptive.  And if we raise some ghosts in the process of exploration, then please fancy them guides and friendly powers, and don’t let go of the chain that binds us to them.