Taking another break this week from thinking about conspiracy theories to talk a little bit about storytelling. If you enjoy the post, I hope you’ll consider giving it a like or a share, or even:
Written language is an inherently left-hemispheric pursuit. The left hemisphere, again, thrives on preconceived categories; without fixed meaning, there is no alphabet, nor are there words to turn those letters into. When I’m typing these little squiggles, I’m trying to distill something dynamic and subjective—my experience of reality—into something concrete and objective, in order for it to be accessible to other people. For us to meet in this virtual space, you (the reader) and I (the writer) have made a two-sided Faustian bargain with language itself.
I’m feeling the truth of this right now as I write analytical and sometimes satirical essays exploring the background of my two novels, Ada’s Children and Ship of Fools. It’s so easy to fall into one track of thinking and ignore everything outside of that. For instance, Ship of Fools satirizes outlandish conspiracy theories and anti-science beliefs, so I’ve been writing essays looking at different theories and the mode of thinking behind them. But it’s easy to get so focused on the outlandish ones that I forget to include the caveat that actual conspiracies do happen.
I think this has to do with how easy it is to fall into black-and-white thinking. But even then, if you’re exploring one side of an issue or phenomenon, its opposite is always looming over it like a shadow, even as the linear nature of prose is pushing you toward one side or the other. (I think this was also true with my earlier posts on good vs. bad solar, and the tiny eye of the needle we’re trying to thread between overpopulation and climate change.)
But then it hit me: in Ship of Fools, all these ideas and ways of thinking and views of the world bounce off each other in a three- (actually four-) dimensional space, not in a linear track. (At least that’s what they should do if the novel is any good — which, of course, I think it is!) And that got me thinking about the difference between expository prose and story, whether in fiction or in memoir and creative nonfiction. It seems to me that the two are quite different experiences, especially for the reader.
Your brain on stories
When I read an expository or persuasive essay or article, it feels like I have to be very single-minded to follow the logic in an argument, the facts in an exposition, or the dissection in an analysis. It takes a certain kind of concentration, but as R.G. says, it’s very linear, like a laser beam focused on a single point. It seems impossible for any kind of magic to happen, or even much emotion.
But what happens when I read narrative? It’s as if I’m co-creating a fleshed-out world with the writer. And this world is multidimensional: not just the three standard dimensions plus the fourth dimension of time, but further dimensions of the senses: tastes, sounds, smells, textures. And then the inner life of the characters and their interactions with each other. How many dimensions is that now? Nine? Ten?
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Of course the prose itself has to be linear, one word after the other, and fiction writers have a huge bag of tricks for turning the line of prose into something multi-dimensional1. But something different is going on in my head as I read a story. Sense impressions open up a space I can envision (or better, inhabit). I can hold that multidimensional space in my mind as the characters move around in it, their feelings or ideas (and sometimes their bodies, in one way or another) bouncing off each other. Nothing is stuck in a single track. All sides of a conflict, whether of emotions or needs or ideas, can come into play. Surprises and even magic can happen. And crucially, nothing needs to be resolved definitively.
I want to say that I can feel the difference in my brain as I’m reading. I feel like more neurons are firing, and across different regions. It feels like there’s more space in my brain2. Is this feeling just an illusion? Maybe neuroscientists could conduct research on fiction readers the way they did with Buddhist meditators. (Paging
! But oh, look! Someone already has [warning: PDF].)That reading fiction promotes empathy is one of those “well known facts” that could simply be self-aggrandizement among the literary community. But research seems to back up the idea.3 Reading fiction changes your brain and makes you a better human. Not a bad return on an investment of as little as $4.99 a book, or free if it’s from your local library. (I’m sure some folks will want to jump in at this point and claim that only certain types of fiction can have this salutary effect, but I’m not going there.)
Narrative happens in nonfiction too
Back when I was studying creative nonfiction, the professors emphasized this empathy effect. No matter what argument you might be trying to make, or what point you’re trying to prove, it will stick with the reader far longer if it can be conveyed through an empathetic experience rather than a logical argument or a mountain of facts. “Keep your bullshit to ten percent or less” was Bill Kittredge’s dictum. And of course, the best personal essays wouldn’t try to deliver any overt point at all, but just the experience.
I was reminded of this advice on re-reading Joan Didion’s piece of reportage on Haight-Ashbury in 1967, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” It’s pretty much indistinguishable from a short story, with maybe just one paragraph delivering Didion’s take on the impending Summer of Love (beyond her tone giving the whole milieu an ironic side-eye). She managed to re-create that world in just a few sentences, pulling the reader immediately into the scene (in both senses!). This piece has lived with me since I first read it back in the ’80s.
Multidimensionality in Ship of Fools
Writers are always encouraged to discover their unique, personal voice. This may be more important for essayists and memoirists, but it seems important for fiction writers as well. But after thirty or forty years of writing in various genres and capacities, have I found my voice? Hardly!
It’s more like I’m learning to let all the voices inside my head out into the world. So Ship of Fools is a pastiche of points of view, voices, and narrative styles. There’s zany, pie-in-the-face humor and lectures on orbital mechanics. There’s philosophy, cosmology, Creationism (both Young Earth and Old Earth varieties), and New Agey Gaianism. There are gun battles on both Earth and the moon. There are portals to other worlds. There’s a lot of stuff bouncing around in there.
Does it work? Does it all come together? Is it what R.G. in another essay describes as the “Hold the line and keep the faith” response to the epistemological crisis? That’s certainly what I set out to do, at least with regard to flat-earthers and moon-landing deniers. Or is it more like the “ontological flooding” he describes, in which many competing claims about reality can be valid? I guess you’ll have to let me know!
If you enjoyed this post, maybe you’ll:
Come back on Friday for a new chapter from Ship of Fools. Traveling to NASA headquarters to follow up on Ben Himmelstein’s bizarre moon-landing hoax theory, Liz comes across a coincidence too strange to be coincidental. Then on Sunday, we’ll meet Reverend Paul Lee, a Young Earth Creationist who just wants the Nazis to leave him alone.
It’s something like juggling, with each ball a different aspect of story. The writer has to keep all of them in the air, only touching one or two at a time. Some writers manage to get all these balls going on a first draft. Others work more like painters, adding layers on subsequent drafts. I’ll often get stuck in long stretches of nothing but dialogue, or else a lot of action that advances the plot, with no pauses to paint the scene or give characters’ reactions. So then I have to go back and work those elements in.
Does this make me sound empty-headed?
“Lifetime fiction reading has for example been correlated with stronger affective empathy and helping tendencies (Stansfield and Bunce), with a significantly larger correlation measure than nonfiction reading (Mumper and Gerrig).” —from the study linked above
I know exactly what you mean by the feeling of more neurons firing off in your brain while you read. I've noticed my brain activity stays very high even hours after reading a novel. I usually end up jotting down lots of new writing ideas in that time.
This is so interesting. I love fiction, both reading it and writing it. Humans need these stories. To me its almost as essential as food or water. I haven't found my "voice" either, but I'm trying and enjoying the process.