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The importance of stories – fictional stories

Posted in books, creativity, education, from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, psychology, writing on September 11, 2011| 1 Comment »

I’m a great fan of stories. In fact, I think we understand ourselves and others by using narrative, and the central way in which I work as a doctor is to hear people’s stories, and help them to change them from stories of being stuck or in chaos, to stories of flow, and flourishing and growth.

I’m also a great fan of fiction and the importance of the imagination. I vividly remember Ian McEwan writing this, about this day, ten years ago…

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

So, this recent article in the Guardian caught my eye, “Reading fiction improves empathy, study finds”. There are a number of studies described in this article, and it’s introduced me to something called “the pyschology of fiction”, and, specifically to the work of Keith Oatley. If I wasn’t so insatiably curious I wouldn’t keep finding these amazing new worlds to explore! One of the studies described in the article compared the effects of reading Harry Potter with the effects of reading Twighlight. They used a new measure – “Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale”! Don’t you love that? Look at this conclusion from that research –

“The current research suggests that books give readers more than an opportunity to tune out and submerge themselves in fantasy worlds. Books provide the opportunity for social connection and the blissful calm that comes from becoming a part of something larger than oneself for a precious, fleeting moment,” Gabriel and Young write. “My study definitely points to reading fulfilling a fundamental need – the need for social connection,”

and read this fascinating comment by Keith Oatley

“I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world,” said Oatley. “The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that’s too limited.”

Spot on. He really nails the importance and value of fiction as a tool for building empathy. We reduce the place of the Humanities in our education system at our peril!

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The shapes of stories

Posted in creativity, from the viewing room, video, writing on April 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Here’s a very entertaining four minutes or so of Kurt Vonnegurt explaining the shapes of stories, using a blackboard……

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The World is made of Stories

Posted in from the reading room, writing, tagged , on March 5, 2011| 4 Comments »

The World is made of Stories, by David R Loy [ISBN 978-086171-615-9] is a wonderful little book, full of memorable quotes about the place of stories in our lives. I read a lot about stories, as well as reading, and hearing, stories every day, but this book is a bit different because it’s written from a Buddhist perspective. I’m not a Buddhist, but it’s refreshing to read a different take on stories. Here are some quotes to give you a flavour of the book.

Like the proverbial fish that cannot see the water they swim in, we do not notice the medium we dwell within. Unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world. But we can change the water. When our accounts of the world become different, the world becomes different.

and

The world is not composed of facts, because what counts as a fact is determined by the theory – the story – it is related to. Science is not primarily about discovering facts. It is about accounting for the relationships that make them meaningful.

I especially liked his references to the relationship between story and landscape, which is such a core characteristic of Celtic culture.

To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension. In traditional bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced: every place had its legend and its own identity…..What endured was the mythic landscape, providing escape and inspiration. (R.F. Foster)

and

Landscape is a palimpsest: a manuscript on which more than one text has been written, with the earlier writing incompletely erased.

Let me leave you with one more, perhaps the most appropriate one for this blog –

In the long run, whatever it may be, every man must become the hero of his own story; his own fairy tale, if you like, a real fairy tale. (P.L. Travers)

 

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nanowrimo – or where I’ve been for the last month!

Posted in creativity, writing, tagged on November 30, 2010| 1 Comment »

If you’re a more regular reader of this blog, you might be wondering why my posting rate has plummeted this month……well, the answer lies in that little winner’s badge here.

nanowrimo is National Novel Writing Month. It happens every November and the deal is you sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days….that works out at a steady 1,677 words a day. Of course, you’re not expected to produce a fully crafted novel by day 30, just to have the raw text of a novel to spend the next few weeks or months, editing, revising and developing.

I signed up on November 1st, and completed my 50,000 words on November 27th and it’s been one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. I write a lot. This blog is part of my writing output, but I’ve written almost exclusively non-fiction so far (I have a collection of about 80 or so small fictional clinical cases entitled Dr Cannyman’s Casebook to accompany my course in Patient Centred Homeopathy). I’ve had a dream to write fiction as long as I’ve had a dream to be a doctor and I’ve been doctoring some 32 years now, but a novelist for none of them! After all this time, I’ve wondered, could I actually do it? Do I have it in me? I’ve read a few books about creative writing and the one thing they pretty much all say is you have to actually turn up and write. I know. Sounds obvious, huh? But it just isn’t easy. And one of the things that always stopped me from getting started was I might have the germ of an idea, but I sure as hell didn’t have characters or a plot. Surely, I reasoned, you need ALL of that AT LEAST before you start.

I was wrong.

The nanowrimo experience is an experience in motivationally supported daily writing. Yes, I’ve done daily writing for long periods, but never daily fiction writing. Nanowrimo is about daily fiction writing. You sign up online, get your own user page, a box to enter your daily word count and a graph to show you your progress along with stats encouraging you to write a little more by telling you how much more you need to write today to get the 1667 daily target, and what date you’ll finish if you keep on at the rate you’re going. In addition to that you get regular emails encouraging you and they are just brilliant. Liberating messages from other participants and writers saying things like “OK, you’re several days into this now and you’ve probably no plot and no idea where it’s going. Welcome to writing fiction! This is how it is. Keep going. You’ll find your characters and your plot emerging as the month progresses”. Well that was news to me. I had no idea that an approach like that could work.

So here’s what I learned. First of all I learned it really took a LOT of discipline to write those 1667 words a day, but I was more determined the more I progressed. Second I learned that although on the vast majority of days I would have no idea what I was going to write, an idea would emerge, I’d start with that, and before I knew it these characters appeared, this dialogue occurred, these events happened. I found things coming together in ways I hadn’t planned (because I hadn’t planned anything!) and I found little remnants of stories of my life and of people I’ve met turning into brand new elements of other stories under my fingers as I typed. It was a total revelation. Thirdly, this comment from one of the emails “It’s so strange how our mind knows more than we are aware of it knowing.” hit me right between the eyes. That is exactly what I’ve discovered in doing this writing exercise. It’s all in there. Even when you don’t consciously know it.

So here I am. The proud owner of a nanowrimo 2010 winner badge. A writer with a new habit. The owner of 50,000 words to work on, words I feel which have a good chance of turning into a proper novel. I’ve only shared with others some of what I’ve written so far, but the feedback has been so positive I am thoroughly encouraged.

I think that’s what nanowrimo is all about – enabling you to get to the place where you can say to yourself “I believe I can do this”.

It’s been quite a month!

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playing with words

Posted in from the dark room, photography, writing on January 2, 2010| 5 Comments »

I do enjoy word play…..finding other meanings in phrases, or words which sound similar, for example. One thing I really notice about French is how they often love to find the words within words, breaking down a word into separate sounding parts and revealing a relevant meaning within. Here’s a simple example I spotted the other day

masseur

You get the idea? This one works because the French don’t pronounce “th” except as a “t”, so for them “therapy” is “terapy”. This is a key part of their word play which is based on what the words sound like.
This was a holistic massage office, by the way.

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definition: humanaut

Posted in life, writing, tagged , , on December 10, 2009| 2 Comments »

Humanaut: someone who explores what it is to be human. Just like an astronaut explores the universe beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, or a cosmonaut explores the cosmos, so a humanaut explores the world of the human.

What does it mean to be human? How can we discover what it is to be human and, enticingly, what potential such exploration can reveal?

The more you think about it, the more ways there are to explore what it is to be human.

Human beings are animals, animals which live on Planet Earth. We can explore human life from the scientific perspectives of biology, ecology, anthropology, the human health sciences of anatomy, physiology, pathology and so on. This scientific perspective considers human beings as objects. In the most up to date thinking, human beings can be understood as “complex adaptive systems“.

Human beings are animals with consciousness. This opens up the path to exploring humans as subjects. What do we think, feel and do? How do we experience ourselves and our lives?

Human beings are storytellers. We create a sense of self through the stories we tell ourselves and others. We convey our subjective experience through stories. We seek and create meaning by weaving narratives.

Human beings interact with the world through a fascinating set of tools which we call symbols, signs and metaphors. Indeed human beings have been described as metaphoric creatures because metaphor is so important to how we understand and interact with the world.

Human beings think and feel. Philosophy and Art are ways of exploring thoughts and feelings. Giles Deleuze described three ways of thinking – philosophy to think about concepts, art to think about affects and percepts, and science to think about how things function. These are all paths which can be explored.

Human beings are connected. We love and are loved. We are embedded in complex webs of relationships.

Human beings love, desire and enthuse. We live lives of passion, of longing and and desire. We can explore our dreams, our goals and our motivations.

Human beings are creators. We are the co-creators of our reality. We are expressive, problem-solvers, providers and performers.

Human beings not only belong, and feel connected, gaining a sense of identity from being a part of the communities to which we belong, but every single human being is unique.

Human beings are individuals. What makes each individual unique?

I’m sure you can add some more ways to explore what it is to be human.

Interested? Being a humanaut is a whole way of living. If you’re curious, if you love stories, people, Life……become a humanaut!

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Resilience

Posted in from the living room, personal growth, writing on May 18, 2009| 1 Comment »

If control is a delusion, and it’s pursuit is ultimately futile, what would be a better strategy? Given the complexity of human, social and global life, accurate predictions are not feasible. The grander the scale of the prediction, the more likely it will turn out to be wrong.
However, at a personal level, we need some degree of predictability in life, some sense that not all of life is random or chaotic. Maybe a better strategy is to expect the typical but be prepared to cope with the atypical. You can apply this idea at any level – personal, political, economic, or environmental.
What we need in order to cope better with the unpredictability of reality is resilience.

But what is resilience?
Resilience involves a number of different factors and characteristics. Let’s examine some of them briefly, just to lay out a map for further exploration.
Take a look at these photos of bamboo.

bamboo

bamboo shadow leaves

Bamboo has two essential qualities which make it so resilient. Strength and flexibility.
At first glance, these can seem like two mutually opposite qualities. How can something be  both flexible and strong? How can something bend and resist? How can you change and not change?
Resilience involves many factors but let’s first examine these two apparently contradictory ones. Both are needed, and neither can be considered either superior to the other, or more essential than the other.

The ability change or adapt.
Flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances or environments. We may have to change our behaviour if we find ourselves in changed situations. If we can only behave in one particular way, then that lack of flexibility, that inability to change what we do, reduces our capacity to adapt, and therefore our resilience. We are less able to cope with change when we ourselves are unable to change.
Along with flexibility, we need spontaneity. An inability to be spontaneous will restrict our options, reduce our choices and our strategies for successful coping. Spontaneity involves not only a change in behaviour, but new behaviour. In biological and physical terms such new behaviour has been termed “emergence”. Emergence is the capacity of a system to exhibit previously unseen behaviours. This is a core creative process. Creativity is the ability to make, or see, things anew. It’s the ability to make changes, to make a difference. Creativity, of course, is highly dependent on imagination. Without imagination, how can we move to somewhere we’ve never been before? A change of behaviour is not, of course, always about brand new actions. It can be a change to a previously learned strategy, one which worked before in similar circumstances. In other words, the flexible aspect of resilience also involves the ability to learn, and that entails both memory and communication (after all one of our greatest strengths as a species is our ability to learn from others – our ability to communicate over space and time)
The other side of resilience is the ability to resist change. There’s something about the coherence and integrity of a system that requires strength, stamina and the determination to pursue a particular path. If I try to change to fit in with every change of everyone around me, I’ll begin to lose my sense of self. To be resilient I need energy, strength, the ability to persist in the face of adversity. I need the capacity to conserve my life, my health, the capacity to sustain and to persist to a significant degree.
So there’s the paradox at the heart of resilience – flexibility and sustainability. The ability to change and the ability to persist.
I think this is our agenda for the future at all levels. Changing our focus from control to resilience. We need a new politics, a new economics and a new way of living based on resilience, not illusory control.

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The End of Control

Posted in from the living room, life, writing, tagged on May 12, 2009| 7 Comments »

One of the most amazing capabilities of the human mind is the imagination. However, this great ability brings certain difficulties, not least of which is being able to imagine our own mortality. It’s this existential fear which underlies most, if not all, other specific fears. Whilst very few people actually believe it’s possible to escape death, most of us find it difficult to face the reality of our own mortality. We seem to have no control over such significant events as our own birth or death. The apparent randomness and chaos of the universe has driven human beings to pursue ways of living which enable them to cope with all the daily uncertainties which arise. Over the course of several hundred years we have moved from strategies based on beliefs in supernatural forces which are in control of everything to ones based on beliefs that human beings can be in control of everything. In effect, we’ve seen the decline of religion’s power to give a sense of things being in control and a rise in the belief that science endows humans with such power.
In many cultures the supernatural forces in control of everything are not necessarily benevolent, and even when they are considered to be benevolent their actions are still not predictable. In attempts to assuage the feelings of fear and uncertainty rituals and sacrifices were created to try to influence the actions of the gods. Even with the emergence of monotheistic religions based on a belief in a loving Creator God, human beings were still not able to predict His actions. At best, a Christian, Jew or Muslim, finds peace of mind by letting go of the pursuit of predictability and certainty by trusting that God is benevolent and all will not only be well, but all that happens is, as God wishes, the best for us. Fundamentalists of all flavours, however, do not seem comfortable to leave Life and the World to God, but instead feel driven to impose strict behaviours and even thought patterns on believers and non-believers alike.
With the Renaissance and the developments of rationalism and the “scientific method”, human beings began to believe they could develop deep understandings of life and the universe. We began to use observations, logic and experiment to create “laws” based on highly predictable patterns. We have pursued this path relentlessly for the last 400 years. This shift in focus from the supernatural to the natural has, however, been focused on the same goal – the minimisation of uncertainty, and the parallel maximisation of feelings of control. Physicists still pursue the “theory of everything” in an attempt to use that understanding to control everything.
But control is still beyond our grasp. We are still mortal. None of us can know the exact span of our lives in advance and we find we can neither control ourselves nor others. We can neither predict nor determine the future, at any level – individual, communal or global. At an individual level we drive away the fear of chaos and unpredictability by settling into routines and rituals. One of my favourite novels of all time is “Rituals”, by Cees Nooteboom, (ISBN 1-86046-048-8), a story of a father and son who each have their powerful (and constraining) ways of imposing their personal power on their own lives through ritual, in the father’s case, through a strict set of time set routines which establish the value of punctuality as the highest of all his values, and in the son, through his fascination with Japanese pottery, and the tea ceremony. We all need routines and rhythms to our lives but when the need for control dominates these routines can become obsessions and compulsions, limiting our lives instead of stimulating growth.
At the communal level we seem to be moving fast towards George Orwell’s nightmare “1984” vision of increasing surveillance and attempts to control “unhealthy behaviours” whilst experiencing increasing levels of chronic disease and crime. A day or two after I started to write this post I read a review of Jim Jarmusch’s new movie “Limits of Control” where the author cited an essay by William Burroughs as the source of the movie’s title.  (see “how to make a zombie” )
In recent years governments have acted as if they have the power to control global phenomena when all they have is actually the power to make an impact. The consequences of each action, of each impact, turn out to be both unpredictable and uncontrollable. We see this in War (Iraq, Afghanistan etc); we see it in the economy (credit crunch, “boom and bust” cycles, the fall of the “Masters of the Universe”); we see it in climate change; we see it in rising levels of crime, drug abuse, and chronic disease.
Control is a delusion.
It was a delusion when human beings thought they could influence supernatural forces and it remains a delusion when human beings think they can control individual, social or global phenomena.
It’s frightening to be “out of control”. Yet, the relentless pursuit of more control just creates more and more anxiety as at our deepest levels we realise control continuously escapes our grasp. A greater risk from this control agenda is that we create ever more zombies, and lose our chance to become ever more human.
It’s time for a new direction. We have to replace the pursuit of control with something else. Something more real, and, therefore, something more to likely support human life, and to encourage development.
What might the new direction be?  A shift from increasing control to increasing resilience. Letting go of the pursuit of certainty and relishing the experience of the present, the wonder of life and the excitement of creation. Moving towards an agenda of adaptability and sustainability, of quality over quantity. Pursuing diversity instead of standardisation and valuing continual, dynamic experience over goals and outcomes.

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Myths which improve life

Posted in from the living room, life, narrative, philosophy, writing, tagged on February 3, 2009| 6 Comments »

People often use the word myth as if it is the opposite of the word truth. It’s juxtaposed to reality. You hear that a lot. An explanation about something is dismissed as a myth, meaning that it’s not true, not a fact, that’s it’s unreal. It’s quite strange how we’ve developed this way of using the word myth, because that was never the original meaning of the word. In Karen Armstrong’s “A Short History of Myth” (ISBN 978-1841957036) she says

Human beings have always been mythmakers [because] we are meaning seeking creatures.

Myths then, are a kind of story, a particular kind of story which has the potential to cast light on some aspect of life, some potential to make something clearer, to improve our understanding.

Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.

Mythology is about enabling us to live more intensely……it expresses our innate sense that there is more to human beings and to the material world than meets the eye.

I think this a key problem for us now at this stage in human development. How do understand both objective and subjective reality? How do we find meaning and purpose in our lives? The great advances of materialistic naturalism (as Havi Carel) would call it, has advanced through a reductionist approach to reality. It’s based on the belief that everything can best be understood by considering the parts, the components, from which it is made. That’s brought great advances in our ways of being able to understand and interact with the physical world, but when pushed to an extreme it creates a world view which denies the importance, even the reality of anything which cannot be measured, counted, or described objectively. That’s created a sense that the life itself has no meaning, that individual lives have no purpose, and that the priorities of living are about accumulation and consumption of material objects. Now the whole system is in crisis. Prime Minister Gordon Brown says we have never been here before and nobody really knows how to progress.

Karen Armstrong says, “Mythology and Science both extend the scope of human beings.” She’s right. these different ways of grasping reality complement each other.

A myth is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed. If it works, that is, if it forces us to change our minds and hearts, gives us new hope, and compels us to live more fully it is a valid myth.

Wouldn’t you like to read myths which did that?

She concludes –

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow beings

We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion

We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude to see beyond our immediate requirements

We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again.

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The stories that emerge from little observations

Posted in books, from the living room, life, narrative, writing, tagged on February 1, 2009| 3 Comments »

Let me tell you a story.

Last week, when visiting my parents, my mum said she was looking for her collection of Robert Burns poetry (it was Burns Day), and she came across her aunt Wilhelmina’s “Burns Birthday Record”. Here it is
Burns Birthday Book

I’ve never seen a book like this before. You can see it was owned by my great aunt. Here’s her name and the date she got the book
Burns Birthday Book

25th February 1907. Wilhelmina Rosie was my mum’s father’s sister. Here she is with my gran and grandpa and their first born (my mum). This is taken in Orkney in front of Evie Primary School where Aunt Mina was schoolmistress all her working life.

mum, gran and grandpa and great aunt mina

I started to browse through her Burns Birthday Record
Burns Birthday Book
entries in the Burns Birthday Book

You’ll see that the idea of the book is to enter someone’s name at the date of their birthday, opposite the little quote from Burns. The first thing that struck me was the surnames. There are lots of names here I’ve never come across in all my life. Apparently that’s because many of the names were typically Orcadian but I’m still a little surprised. My grandfather was, for example, Orcadian but moved south to Stirling. Did a lot of these families never move out of Orkney?

entries in the Burns Birthday Book

The next thing I noticed was that they weren’t all written by the same person. Maybe she wrote most of them herself but sometimes her friends would write in their own names? I browsed the entire book, wondering about all these people and their strange names. Several had the same surname so there were clearly a few families represented. Then I came across this entry in December.

entries in the Burns Birthday Book

This entry stands right out.

It’s the only entry in the whole book which gives the person’s full date of birth and the date they died. And it’s the only entry with a quote from the Bible added. Here’s why. George Folsetter was Wilhelmina’s love. They were engaged to be married but he fell from his horse, aged 26, and died. She never married. You’ll see the date of George’s death was 1903, but Aunt Wilhelmina only got her book in 1907.

Look up the quote from Numbers Chapter 18. I had trouble finding it. I assumed that in her day, she’d have a “King James” version of the Bible but in fact the quote comes from the “Revised Standard Version” which was only published for the first time in 1901, six years before she got her Birthday book. I’m not terribly clear why she picked this particular verse, but the chapter as a whole is about tithes and giving the first of the best of all you have to God.

I heard Eddie Reader, in an introduction to Burns’ song, “Ae Fond Kiss”, that the Nancy for whom he wrote the song, lived to her 80s and every year wrote in her diary on December 14th “This day I’ll never forget for this was the last day I saw Robert”

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