Evoking a Story’s Environment: Characters and Landscape

One aspect of a well told story is to evoke an environment; what it feels like to be in it.

Paul Hollis’ novel, Loose Ends, from his Hollow Man series, offers some wonderful examples in its first chapter.

A note in passing, even the title, Loose Ends, conveys something about the story and plot. Both a character and a situation can be at loose ends.

Opening line...

“Life goes on,” he said, “even when you don’t want it to.”

This conveys something about the main character’s state as the story begins.

Continuing...

‘The words hung in the air, heavy with resignation, as if he uttered them not for comfort but to confirm some unwavering truth. Outside, he knew the world would press forward with its usual indifference; down in the street bus brakes screeched, car horns blared, and pedestrians and pedestrians weaved through crowds of living ghosts as the world moved on with us or without us.’

Note how clearly this evokes this place but also this moment in the narrator’s life. As readers, we are sharing this moment.

Continuing from the end of page one to page two, ‘The fading light of dusk framed his silhouette like he was a figure caught between two worlds, unwilling or unable to choose a side.’

Again, using language that evokes the inner journey of the character.

In passing, one finds the same technique in a novel like Henry James’ The Ambassador or Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

I do advise people to pack a lunch when they start a Henry James paragraph, or with Woolf, be prepared to go to great inner depths of a character in a single sentence.

Hollis’ language is more succinct, but the goal is the same, to allow a reader to share the journey of a story.

Continuing…

A female character observes of a mug she holds, ‘The jagged lines spidering across the glaze felt like a reflection of her own fractures, small but irreparable.’

Note what this conveys about her inner life. We don’t have to wait 40 pages to discover she’s a damaged human being. Why she is damaged is a coming revelation.

Continuing, ‘The room fell silent except for the faint ticking of a clock on the mantle, marking time with a cruelty she couldn’t bear.’

As the story advances with precision, the two characters come to a monumental decision, ‘Their presence (words) hung irreversibly like a stone dropped into deep water, sinking fast into the darkness but rippling outwards.’

Dark and deep. Lovely language that serves a dramatic purpose.

Moving to the end of the chapter, ‘The room fell into a pressing silence again, time marked only by the ticking of the clock, counting down the moments to a decision she knew she couldn’t undo.’

Note how this advances the plot and the inner journey of the characters. Each chapter in a novel should advance the story and plot.

As well, the audience is drawn forward to turn the page, the goal of a well-written chapter, a well-written paragraph, a well-written sentence.

Well done, Mr. Hollis.

Other novels reviews by Bill Johnson are available on his website, Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing.

Notes on the Movie Obsession

I recently viewed the film Obsession and found it thoughtful and intelligent in the vein of Good Dog, Broken Bird, and, going back, Companion.

These films all have strong, visual stories and thoughtful storytelling and ideas. They are about something.

In Obsession, an emotionally stunted young man treated by psych meds turns out to be practicing how to tell a young woman he works with that he has feelings for her.

Later, she even invites him to tell her how he feels, but he can’t.

In a curio shop, he finds the One Wish Willow and asks that his friend be in love with him. His wish is granted.

The first few days are glorious, but then she creates a shrine with the body of his recently dead cat that passed from an overdose of his spilled psych meds.

The film slowly develops what it’s like for the young man to be with someone who is obsessed with him.

Until the ending, when he understands he can only escape her obsession through his death or hers.

The utter horror of the film is when his death frees her of her obsession and she wakes to find herself in a bloodbath of dead friends, and she remembers what happened.

I felt for her in that moment, the horror, just as I was asked to feel something for the characters in Companion, Good Dog, and Broken Bird.

I’m looking forward to the Mandalorian and Grogu, and Spielberg’s ufo film and all the money that special effects can buy, but I’m seeing more powerful storytelling in these lower budget films.

I know horror isn’t for everyone, but these directors are gifted storytellers.

For more capsule reviews, visit https://www.storyispromise.com/quikcuts.html.

The Sheep Detectives

Equal parts funny, heart warming, and a relaxing night at the movies. When a shepherd with a flock is murdered, the flock, who speak when people aren't around, work together to help a local policemen figure out the murderer.

Storytelling, the Unconscious, and the Subconscious Minds

The unconscious is where we store memories. To help compact this storage of a huge volume of memories, feelings are shorn from each memory. Scientists have discovered that when people retrieve memories, they can be guided to attach different feelings to them than those that were originally experienced.

The unconscious is also where fixed ideas about who we are and what we think about our place and role in the world are embedded. Think of ideas buried there broadcasting a message, like a radio transmitter. 24/7. You might think of yourself worthy, but buried in your unconscious could be the message that you are not. Or any powerful message that drives your conscious feelings and awareness.

The conscious mind is, in most people, consumed by measuring and weighing things. Our relationships, our standing compared to others, how we judge and measure ourselves compared to others. In most people, a significant part of the conscious mind is engrossed in these issues.

Narrative tension in a story is the tension a character feels about something they seek to gain, achiever, or, in some cases, avenge. It can be the tension a character experiences from a change in circumstance that changes their standing and relationships or a change in a character's internal sense of who they are.

In life, we experience narrative tension about the 'story' of our life, and whether what we seek is within our grasp. Our narrative tension can also revolve around our desire to escape something we feel is imposed on us, whether by fate or our choices.

We also experience narrative tension when our conscious story of who we are is in conflict with an unconscious story of who we are.

An example, a nun told a story about two women. When they were young, the mother constantly referred to one daughter as the 'pretty one' and the other daughter as the 'smart one.' The 'pretty one' grew up to be a lawyer who worked at the United Nations. No matter what she accomplished, inwardly she felt stupid.

The 'smart one' grew up to be an attractive young woman who, no matter what compliments she received about her looks, felt ugly inside.

In each case, they experienced narrative tension over the internalized story idea of who they were, opposed to external validation.

I heard one aware person refer to these kind of people as hungry ghosts.

When I read novel manuscripts written by struggling writers, I can tell with a certainty what they are ashamed of, who they blame for their situation in life, and what fuels the rage that burns within them. What the main character in their novel wants, that I have to guess.

Bringing this back to writing, struggling writers who unintentionally go into their unconscious to write (watch the movie created from memories, write down the details) tend to write visual information shorn of emotional content. It moves the writer because he or she attaches emotion to the events or people described, but the writing doesn't generate that effect for a reader.

Writers who have internalized an understanding of storytelling can use their subconscious to develop insight into the narrative tension of their characters. Think of the subconscious as like the engine room in a 40's film. The captain gives an order, which someone relays to the engine room, and power is made available to turn the ship in a specific direction or speed up or slow down. But the Captain never has to go down to the engine room to get that result.

One accepted idea about storytelling is that many successful writers are intuitive about creating stories. Brain scans have shown that what people often consider to be intuitive thoughts are just as often the subconscious floating ideas up into the conscious mind.

That requires that a writer have internalized an understanding of storytelling the subconscious can work with. That's the problem for most struggling writers. I often find that new writers are blind imitators. They can quote people like Stephen King's book On Writing, but their own writing is lacking.

A solution to this is for the struggling writer to gain and internalize an understanding of storytelling. This means being consciously aware of the mechanics of how to tell a story, the techniques that I cover in A Story is a Promise (and that others have covered in their own way).

The reason even this pathway will fail for many struggling writers is they have no real interest in telling a story to an audience; they are really telling a story to themselves to deal with their internal narrative tension. When the fuel for that burns out, they move on to doing something else that helps them balance their narrative tension.

Instead of learning the craft of storytelling, some writers blame their lack of intuitive storytelling ability or credit the success of other writers to their intuitive sense.

When a writer confuses their narrative tension with the narrative tension of a novel's main character, they can fail to recognize why a story character isn't coming to life and what to do about it.

I've written in another essay about how getting to the subconscious can be a pathway to the superconscious, and a deeper ability to understand a story character's narrative tension. I believe that when writers are in what is called a creative flow, their subconscious is actively generating new ideas and insights into their story, characters and plot, this rises to conscious thought, which sparks new ideas that in turn generates a strong flow of subconscious and conscious ideas for a story.

One of the pleasures of deep meditation is a sense that different aspects of the brain (left hemisphere, conscious/subconscious/unconscious) experience a clarity and unity. All the doors in the house open, so to speak.

That makes creating a story a pleasure to experience.

To read more of my essays on the craft of storytelling, visit https://www.storyispromise.com

My writing workbook A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling is available on Amazon.

Forestalling the Conceptual Mind in Storytelling

by Bill Johnson

The power of a story is in the intensity of its scenes. Each scene should be a complete experience unto itself, something readers can immerse themselves into.

In a powerful scene, readers can surrender themselves to the story. They can let the situation take care of them. But this requires not a dry description of events, but an unexpected revelation of feelings and illuminations of ideas and understanding.

To write an intense scene, write it as an evocation of what an environment feels like to character, what a character feels in reaction to events.

To do this, feel your way into a story, into a scene, into a moment in a scene.

Many writers enter a scene from their head, a conceptualizing of details, what's going to happen next.

It's a map of a journey, an outline, if you will, but not the journey itself.

For many, once they start down this path of understanding their story by conceptualizing where it's going next, they can't stop drawing that map.

To live in and experience a situation is different from outlining a situation with details.

Let your reader live in the unexpected moments of a scene.

Write a scene from a character's point of view as if it will be the last of their life.

Immerse your reader in that moment.

If you want to see an example of a story that heightens the effect of its moments and scenes, watch Alphaville 69, by Jean-Luc Godard.

Watching the film, we can never know what's going to happen next, just as the main character doesn't know what's going to happen next. Our attention is pulled into the film and becomes immersed in the main character's journey. It's a journey that is constructed one moment at a time; we're never playing through a scene just to get to the next one.

If you can't forestall your conceptual mind from taking over as you write, consider writing scenes around feelings as a separate step in your process. Focus on each scene separately; focus on each moment. Don't plan on getting to the next scene, let yourself immerse yourself in the moments.

I've found that children can do this easily, but most adults have been trained by the school system into essay-style writing. Create a thesis statement, then write to expand on that statement. It's a who, what, when, where, why style of writing. It's a map for writing an essay, not telling a story.

Don't confuse the map/outline for the journey.

Take your readers on the journey and let them explore it with you.

I have other essays that explore the nature and craft of storytelling at A Story is a Promise | Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing!

My writing workbook A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling is available on Amazon.

Capsule Movie Review - Broken Bird

The set up for this film is a young girl is traumatized when her family's car goes off a mountain road and she spends days alone with the bodies. Later in life, she becomes a mortuary assistant to recreate the family she lost. This is horror like Hitchcock's Psycho, or a story by Poe. It's a true descent into madness.

The film making is striking and beautiful, the main actress a marvel, and I appreciated seeing it on a large screen.

I suspect the film will find a wider and appreciative audience when it's available on streaming. It might even be considered a cult classic some day.

The film is a singular vision, but not for everyone.

I offer capsule movie reviews on my website at https://www.storyispromise.com/quikcuts.html.

The reviews are meant to offer a glimpse into the mechanics of a film and what it did to satisfy - or not - an audience.

Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing! Website Rebuilt

I've rebuilt my writing website, Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing! | A Story is a Promise with the help of Chatgpt, at https://www.storyispromise.com.

It was a long process that started with some simple fixes and became more complex and detailed.

I really needed the help to navigate the Google Search Console, to interpret messages and to figure out problems, like a word processing program that used curved apostrophes that didn't work with the Console.

My original site went up in 1995 when people thought you were talking about spiders when you mentioned the web.

Those were the salad days of my site, reaching a hundred visitors a day.

Ah, youth.

My latest post of the website is Storytelling and the Superconscious Mind

It has been a pleasure and a priviledge to work with so many talented writers over the years.

Blessings on your journies.

Bill Johnson

Buddha in the Garden, by Upasika Yoly

Buddha in the Garden is a charming and delightful book about how someone seeking to live by the tenets of the Buddha can manage a garden.

The author moved from creating an organic garden in the lush Willamette Valley, with abundant rainfall and fertile earth, to a place in Arizona where limited rainfall and scarcity of nutrients made a garden a target for insects and animals.

To protect a garden in such an arid climate, how is the concept of no killing resolved? Or can it be?

By looking at each pest and guest with a calm mind, the author developed a deeper appreciation of how to avoid just being reactive. Right View leads her to Right Action.

To replace a ‘Fix it Now!’ mentality with a calm ‘how does this action reflect the wheel of life?’ guides her to a deeper understanding that the order of life and death also leads to renewal and rebirth.

Her individual chapters on dealing with specific guests and pests ranges from the deeply insightful to the playfully charming.

In one chapter, after cleaning and sterilizing a kitchen counter, she notices a lone ant. Instead of reacting by using a newspaper to transplant the ant outside (and likely causing its death by separation from its colony), contemplation gives her the insight that the ant is a scout, and if left alone to return to its colony, it will relay the message, no food on this counter.

The author goes from reacting to skunks with great fear and foot stomping to speaking to them with a calm voice that they respect. And she learns that they are great protection for the garden at night.

From calm reflection she discovers that some bees love to frolic in a cool spray.

Her garden helps her to develop a compassion and a mindfulness of life.

Buddha in the Garden in an ideal companion for those who would like to deepen their appreciation of life in all its forms. It is a treasure trove for anyone seeking to garden in a mindful, peaceful way.

Available as a ebook and soft paperback on Amazon.

A glossary includes reading and viewing recommendations on YouTube.