Stories and Tellers

As I write, I am sitting in my parents’ living room, working from my mother’s laptop computer (upon which I will lay the blame for any typos, being as I’m unused to the keyboard, and all); I owe this pleasure to my husband, who suggested we take a trip to my hometown to celebrate the fact that he’s on leave from work for a few days. So, we made the trip, and here we are. It’s only a flying visit, but it’s been wonderful. I haven’t been home in ages, and I’ve really missed it.

However, coming home, as well as being a fantastic chance to catch up with my family, has also taught me a very useful lesson. Sit back, get comfortable, and I’ll tell you all about it.

On Saturday evening, my family and I spent some time in my local pub, whereupon a certain amount of alcohol was, I have to admit, imbibed; as well as this, though, something else happened – something which I believe is rather special, and important, and worthy of sharing. As well as the laughter, and the companionship, and the happiness, there was something which is connected to all these things, but also a separate wonder, all of itself – there was Storytelling.

Image: theabundantartist.com

Storytelling is an important part of Irish culture – we still value the storyteller and the act of storytelling in Ireland, something which has its roots in our earliest history – but from the point of view of my family, it has a hugely important personal significance. My parents have told my brother and I stories as long as we can remember – stories about their lives when they were young, long before we were born; stories about local ‘characters’ and people famed in our hometown for their abilities (or, sometimes, lack of ability) to do certain things, and stories from their own parents’ time, from far back into the history of our town and its foundation. My brother and I were raised on stories of my father’s friend Wilf, for instance, a man who took on heroic proportions in our eyes because of all the tales Dad spun about him, and we were regaled with sagas of the deeds of our grandfathers and other men of their generation, all of whom seemed to have immense intelligence and wit. This weekend was no different. We revisited some of the old favourites, and some new tales were added to the treasury, particularly those told in memory of a few friends who have recently passed away; they may not be with us any more, but their stories and their memory will live on. As I listened to the tale-telling, however, something struck me – something so important, it’s amazing that it never really occurred to me before.

I love to write – it’s what I want to do, and it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. My brother is similar to me in many ways, especially in his love for words. Sometimes, I’ve wondered why this is – why my brother and I are so similar, on such a profound level, despite the fact that we’ve chosen to do different things with our lives. Writing, and reading, and tale-telling, are among our favourite things, and something which we both treasure. Listening to my father telling tales on Saturday, and keeping me as rapt as ever, despite the fact that I’ve heard most of them before, made me finally realise something.

My parents are storytellers. They may not be writers, but they are tellers and creators and repositories of stories, local history, cultural history and family history. My brother and I have been raised with these stories, we’ve been fed them and nourished on them all our lives. It’s no wonder, really, that we both want to create stories, and we both love words and the power they possess. We’ve learned it all our lives.

The stories my parents tell are more than just a way to pass the time; they’re a way to bond, to create links between people, to unite communities, to store memories, and to honour those who’ve passed from our sight. They’re the most important thing we have. Most of my favourite family recollections from my childhood involve storytelling of some sort, whether my parents or grandparents or our family friends were the ones doing the regaling; all my parents have to do is mention a favourite story, and we’re all primed to listen, not only to a treasured tale but to all the layers of memory, all the happy recollections of all the times that story has already been told and enjoyed. I’ve had this wonderful trove of story all my life, and I never fully appreciated it until this weekend.

My parents gave my brother and I the best gift anyone could give. They gave us the history of our family in a series of stories, memories crystallised into tales we can treasure and keep safe to pass on to a new generation, and – as if that wasn’t enough – a love of sharing and telling and creating stories that both of us have used to enrich our lives in ways our parents probably couldn’t have imagined. If ever a parent wondered whether it was ‘worthwhile’ to spend time making up silly or funny stories with their child, or whether it was a good thing to encourage imagination by telling tales, or whether encouraging a child to enjoy language and the feeling of accomplishment gifted by the creation and retention of a treasured story was something to be aimed for, then I hope this post will answer those questions for them.

Yes. Yes, it is. Yes, it certainly is.

Happy Monday. Happy new week. Go and create some stories, and make sure to tell them, and retell them, and turn them into treasures.

Clutching at Socks

So, it’s the first day back to normality after a long Bank Holiday weekend, and I feel like my brain has turned to dust. I guess that’s normal. Isn’t it?

It’s a funny thing. When I’m really busy, and I have a hugely full schedule, and I have so many things to do that I’d actually need to clone myself to get to it all, I start to go into a catatonic state. I’m not sure if it happens to other people, but I know it happens to me. It’s sort of like a computer overloading when you give it too many tasks to perform all at once, I suppose.

Image: windows.fyicenter.com

I remember once ‘coming to’, sitting on the side of my bed, one sock on and one sock off, having frozen mid-thought for an unspecified length of time, on the morning of one of the busiest days I’ve ever had. It was in the midst of my PhD studies, and I was also helping to organise a major international conference, and teaching, and writing papers, and planning my own presentation at said conference (in front of several major big-wigs in the field), and I guess it all got too much for me. Putting on two socks in quick succession was the one tiny task that made my brain decide ‘Yep. Enough is enough. I’m going to my happy place now, for a little while.’ It was a very strange moment though, to snap back to reality with a sock in your hand, not quite sure what you were going to do with it.

I feel a little bit like that this morning – overwhelmed with deadlines, things to remember, entries to competitions that I simply cannot forget, planning for the future, and lots of other things. I feel a brain freeze may be imminent, and so I’m trying to distract myself in order to stave it off. I can’t exactly avoid putting socks on, in case that simple action tips my brain over into the abyss again, so I’ll have to be clever about it.

Something that might help me to divert my own attention is the fact that I now have a printer that works once again. Huzzah! I never realised how useful a gadget a printer is until I didn’t have one. I’ve been happily looking forward to printing my current short story project and getting at it with my editor’s pen ever since yesterday evening. Nothing can really compare with printing a piece and seeing how it fits on the page, and whether it flows properly, and how its sections look in black and white. I finished this particular story last week, and it’s definitely one of the weirder pieces I’ve ever written (and I say this in full knowledge of the fact that I’ve published a story about cannibalism – so you can perhaps gauge what I’m talking about.) I like the story, but I’m not sure about it. It’s amazing how printing something out can make or break it; I wonder sometimes if printing a piece fools you into thinking it’s a proper book, and you can slot it into a different critical space in your brain, one that you reserve for formulating thoughts about other people’s work, and not your own. Certainly, seeing something of mine on paper allows me to look at it with a completely new perspective.

I guess this is the only way to avoid the dreaded brain-freeze, then – focus on one small task at a time, break it down into do-able chunks, get it off your schedule, and move on to the next small task. If you look at everything all at once, it’s no wonder your brain decides to vamoose.

Image: casartcoverings.com

So, that’s just what I’ll do. I’ll get this story out of my head, and then move on to the next thing, and after that the next, and after that, the next, and so on for the rest of my life. I’ll never be finished, of course, but I hope I won’t be popping back to consciousness clutching a random sock in my panicky fist ever again, either.

Happy Tuesday! May your day be both panic- and sock-free, and I hope your brain is at full power.

Writing Ethics

Today, something slightly odd is on my mind. Despite this, though, I’m confident that someone, somewhere, has thought about this very same issue and has come up with some conclusions, so I just want to throw this post out into the ether and hope for the best. In a lot of ways, today’s question is related to the ideas I talked about here, but I think it deserves its own post.

Here it is. Do you ever worry about the ethics of what you write?

A couple of days ago, I started writing a short story. It began innocently enough, with my narrator reminiscing about a lovely summer she’d experienced as a child, where the sky was always blue and most of her time was spent on the beach, or hanging out with her friends. However, as the story progressed I realised I was doing something rather larger than writing a short story. I was, in fact, talking to myself about something that had actually happened, a real-life tragedy; I was writing a fictionalised memoir of a very sad event that took place in my home town a long time ago. As a result I began to wonder if it was right, or fair, or proper, for me to take an event like that and use it as I saw fit in order to create a piece of writing out of it. I’m still not sure.

Image: amazon.co.uk

The very sad event in question involved a tragic accident where young lives were lost, suddenly and terribly. Of course, I realise that the story I wrote may never (and, for a variety of reasons, probably never will) be read by any eyes except mine, so the issue is largely moot, but the question is still nagging at me. Is it fair, or right, to make use of real-life events, particularly sad events, to create a story?

The story I wrote doesn’t slavishly follow each detail of the event as it actually happened, but creates a world where a similar accident takes place. Characters are invented, timelines are shifted around, and the people in the story are older than the real-life players. Nevertheless it is, I suppose, my attempt at fumbling my way through the jumble of emotions that I obviously still carry with me surrounding this event. I know most stories have a grain of truth somewhere in them, and may be sparked off by a real-life happening, but I’ve never before written a story which had such a firm basis in fact. I’m not sure it’s something I’d like to do again. I feel, in some ways, like it’s a violation of the memory of those who passed away, and that it’s disrespectful to their families and those who dearly loved them. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure why my feelings run so deep. Perhaps it’s just because of the emotive subject itself, and the particular loss that I remember experiencing at the time.

Another story I’m currently working on features a child – probably about twelve or so – who is being bullied at school. I’m trying to create a story where the child finds the courage to stand up to his bullies, but I’m concerned about whether that’s the ‘right’ thing to do or not. Should a story ‘teach’ a child to take certain actions in the face of aggressive behaviour? Should the story fall in line with whatever is stated in the official guidelines provided by schools, or failing that, the State, or whomever else? I’ve written this story, and I’m happy with it, but I’m hesitating to send it around to publishers. I’m just not sure it’s right, and I’m also not sure if I should be worrying so much about this issue.

I realise writers can’t tailor their work to suit an agenda, and they have to write whatever they feel drawn to. Despite this, do any of the questions I’m raising here make sense to anyone else? If you’ve experienced an ethical dilemma in your work, how did you solve it? Do you even agree that what I’m describing counts as an ‘ethical’ dilemma? Writing shouldn’t be didactic, of course, but I think it can sometimes be a fine line when the audience you’re writing for is composed of children and their parents. While what you’re writing shouldn’t teach, or preach, I’m not sure it should exhibit behaviours or thought processes which would be alien to the children’s experience or their parents’ wishes either.

I think I’m going to put away my story about the summer, and leave it to posterity. It will be my private memorial to a quiet, personal pain. Even if it’s not unethical to write a story based around a sad event like this one, I don’t feel it’s appropriate to make work like that public. Perhaps I feel this way because of the nature of the event itself; I’m wondering if this whole issue is bothering me so much because the event is one that had an impact on my life when I was at an impressionable age. Perhaps tragedies that are devastatingly personal (as opposed to historical events, for instance) shouldn’t be made use of in order to create art. Having said that, of course, I didn’t set out to write a story around this particular event – it came, fully formed, out of my brain. So, if there’s something in my mind that needs to be said, who am I to deny it the chance to be expressed?

*sigh* Back to square one.

Opinions? Comments? Flying tomatoes? I’d love to hear your views.

Dreams (Includes some Jimi Hendrix)

Good morning!  I’m having one of those mornings where your brain stays about an hour behind your body.  It can be a good sensation, or it can be ultra weird.  I’m not completely sure what this morning’s sensation is, yet.  All I know is, I’m thinking about dreams.

I read a great blog post about dreams last night just before I went to sleep, which must have acted as the seed for my own brain-dancing last night – I had one of the most vivid nights’ dreaming that I can remember for quite a while.  To begin with, I was in a prison camp with Caitlin Moran (who, of course, was far too cool to talk to me) and hundreds of other people, and my survival depended on my ability to see – and thereby avoid – the red lattice of laser beams keeping me and the other prisoners penned in.  We’d just had a huge prison assembly when the guards started firing on us randomly, and some of the other people, who couldn’t see the laser beams, made a run for it but ended up getting zapped before they could be shot.  It looked like I was going to escape, and I was running for it towards some trees… when something woke me.  Then, I blinked at the darkness and panicked for a bit, until I realised that no matter how cruel a prison camp I might have ended up in, surely the cell wouldn’t look like my old bedroom at my parents’ house, so I concluded – cleverly, I thought – that it had all been a dream.  When I fell asleep again, I was surrounded by the glass walls of a building that I’ve dreamed about before, several times.  I’ve never been able to figure out what it is, or what it means – usually, I just pick a random corridor and follow it.  It’s a low-ceilinged, green-tinted building, like a hotel designed during the 1970s.  It’s mostly made of glass, with lots of ferny plants everywhere.  Some doors I can’t open, and the ones I can lead to blank rooms with a view over the roofs of an anonymous city.  Someday, I’d love to know where this place is.  I’d be slightly worried if this giant, empty building represents my mind, so I’m hoping it’s just a repressed memory of a deeply unfashionable place that I’ve actually been to.  Fingers crossed.

I woke up this morning, then, my brain full of pictures, and I started thinking about dreaming.  Do you have a favourite dream?  I do.  When I was a teenager at school, I became obsessed with Jimi Hendrix.  I listened to his music non-stop, I drew his image on everything I owned, and I read whatever I could about his life.  Then, one night, I had The Dream.  It was so amazing that when I woke up, brimming with the sounds, colours and beauty of my dream-experience, I had to write it down immediately in case any shred of detail would escape.  It began in what looked like an old power station, and I was wandering around inside it, hopelessly lost.  I passed iron doors that wouldn’t open, glass windows too dirty to see through.  Then, just when I was giving up hope, I heard a liquidy guitar riff, coming from somewhere just ahead; I ran towards it, to find a door open.  Through it there was an old-style American diner, complete with red leather booths and a large curving counter.  The only other person there was Jimi Hendrix, up on a small stage; he raised his hand in greeting as I entered, and proceeded to play me an entirely new, completely unheard, utterly amazing piece of music.  He then joined me in the booth, where we sat and talked for ages, though I couldn’t remember all the details of our conversation.  He held my hands, and when I woke up, I could still feel the touch of his fingers.

I still get a thrill, even writing about it.  I wish I could explain how much a dream like that meant to me, an awkward and deeply shy teenager.

I’ve sometimes been inspired to write by dreams; occasionally, details or names will come to me in a dream, and – if I remember them when I wake up – dreams can be rich sources of ideas.  My problem is remembering things once I wake!  When I was younger I used to record my dreams on waking, but as an adult that became impractical.  Sometimes I dream solutions to plot problems, and once, in recent months, I woke with a strange word burned across my vision in red letters.  I didn’t know what the word meant, but I wrote it down anyway and made a story around it.  It would make you wonder what your brain gets up to at night, when you’re not keeping an eye on it.

Tell me about your dreams, do.  Can you remember them?  Do they inspire you?  And – most importantly – have you ever dreamed about Jimi, and does he ever ask about me?