I met 90 writers from all over the world, mostly women. We represented four different generations and every continent. I loved sharing meals and ideas with them in our Harry Potteresque Dining Hall. And I aslo learned a lot.
Until this summer what I knew about writing I learned mostly from a lifetime of reading – Jane Austen, Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf, others. I love stories. My process was to sit most mornings before work and write, without censoring, until I had a first draft. Then, using intuition, hard thinking, and listening for the musical flow of the words, I’d revise and edit, haphazardly.
But this summer at Oxford I learned about other things writers are supposed to be aware of. Things like the fictive dream, authorial voice, character is plot, fabula and syuzhet, psychic distance, filtering, and editing in layers.
Maybe I’ll be a better writer now. I haven’t written anything since returning home. Instead, I’ve been rereading a book I wrote before Oxford to see if, by chance, my process incorporated any of these things whose names I had just learned. The book, A Jungian Understanding of Transcendent Experiences, is part of a series called Paranormal Perspectives. The brief was: “Write the story of your paranormal experiences from the perspective of both a Jungian psychologist and a person looking back at her life.” I now wonder how this book would have been different had I been to Oxford before writing it. Some thoughts on this.
Let’s take the concept of the fictive dream. I hadn’t heard that term before. And I’m pretty sure Jane Austen hadn’t heard it either, but she sure knew how to create one. I think I knew how to create one too, even before Oxford told us creating the fictive dream is rule number one of writing. I seem to have understood that I needed to evoke a world for the reader, a world with granular sensual detail, invite them in, and make them want to be there more than where they were. I probably also sensed that to go on reading they would need to feel secure in that world. Maybe I knew this because it’s not unlike my work with patients. They must feel safe in the alchemical vessel of our therapeutic relationship, or they won’t keep coming to therapy to meet themselves in new ways. Writer and reader need mutual trust and so do therapist and patient. Strange for me to learn how akin my writing and my work with patients are. I didn’t make the connection myself. It was suggested to me by a fellow Oxford writer. Of course, now it’s like the cabbage rose pattern in the wallpaper. Once you see the pattern, it’s everywhere.
The pattern is also in the kinship of authorial voice and therapist’s voice. Too much authorial voice takes the reader out of the fictive dream. But if you allow the protagonist to speak, you stay in the world of the fictive dream. Similarly, it’s better to allow the patient to tell her story with minimal intrusion.
And just as you’re not a good therapist if the patient’s needs and desires aren’t clear to you, you’re not a good writer if your character’s desires, as well as whatever is stopping her from attaining those desires, aren’t clear to you. Plot is created by what the characters want and their frustrations in attaining it. Character is plot.
I’ll venture to say the same connection between therapy and writing exists with fabula and syuzhet. Fabula is the raw material, the chronological events of a story. It’s also the raw material of an experience a patient’s is sharing. Syuzhet is how the author or the patient chooses to tell that story, how she orders the events, not necessarily sequentially, but instead with attention to some motive of her own.
Another thing we learned about at Oxford was psychic distance. This refers to the emotional distance between the storyteller and the characters. The closest psychic distance is when the story is presented as stream of consciousness, where you’re inside the character’s head. Patients also vary the psychic distance when recounting their experiences. A further out psychic distance is telling the story in a factual way as if you’re a bystander. It’s useful to ask what motivates a character or a patient to choose a particular distance.
We all know as writers how important editing is. After you filter out unnecessary speech tags and irrelevant generic details, you can begin the serious business of editing in layers. You read through to check that you are showing, not telling. Read through again to make sure that your timeline works, and again to see that your voice is clear. Edit again to check your characters’ motivations and the development of their arcs. Read yet again to see if you’ve varied the psychic distance, while preserving both your voice and a strong fictive dream. This too is not unlike the process of therapy where you visit and revisit a complex or a fear, or a dream, or an event, again and again, turning it over to make sense of it, to understand the symbols, the archetypes evoked so the patient can finally integrate it comfortably into her psyche.
There’s a lot more to good writing than I realized. Loving doing it is a start, but not enough. I haven’t yet integrated all these new concepts into my writing process. Turning these new techniques over in my mind to make sense of them and learning how to work with them will take a little time. I’d like to have some fun doing it, not hold on too tightly. Hopefully they will improve my process and help me become a better writer.
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