While researching the MA thesis which eventually became "Healing Writes: Restorying the Authorial Self through Creative Practice," romance author Valerie Parv started
to question a disclaimer, routinely included in the front matter of every edition of my novels, which states:I've had my doubts about the truthfulness of that kind of legal disclaimer for some time, because authors frequently blog about their sources of inspiration. Trish Wylie, for example, acknowledges that "Justin Hartley inspired me to create Alex from [...] His Mistress: His Terms" and "the man who inspired Gabe in my linked book Claimed By The Billionaire Bad Boy [...] is Tom Welling." Kate Hardy has also mentioned a few of her sources of inspiration, and although she states that "Most of the time the inspirations [...] don’t remotely resemble the originals by the time I’ve finished with them," the sources of inspiration are still "distantly inspired" by real people, places, events etc.All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.Reflecting on my creative practice [...] caused me to consider whether, rather than being 'pure invention,' the ideas most likely to inspire me to develop them into stories were those resonating with my lived experience. (314)
Parv, though, wants to explore a different sort of inspiration, and the need it fulfills:
[Edited to add - I should have started by giving Parv's definition of a central term in her work, "restorying," so here it is:
I began to consider how writers including myself might frequently revisit themes and ideas which resonate with our lived experiences. I call this restorying, an unconscious process whereby aspects of one's life history are rewritten through one's creative work to achieve a more satisfactory result.That should make the following quotes from her thesis rather more easy to understand. I apologise for not having included the definition when I first put up the post.]
catharsis in the form of restorying takes place within the creator of the work [...]. The research adds to our understanding of the therapeutic benefits of writing to the writer, while analysing an area not previously explored: the nexus between the writer's work and narrative therapy. (317)and,
Having accepted that writing is therapeutic, we can then look at how creative choices may be unconsciously cathartic, and how writers may be drawn to pursue themes and issues leading to this catharsis, rather than to themes which lack restorying potential. (322)Parv's MA thesis contained a novel as well as this analysis, but only the analysis is included in the free pdf provided by the Queensland University of Technology. Since it's relatively short (around 40 pages) and readily available, it seems simpler just to direct potential readers to it. I'd rather not attempt to summarise it because it's not at all in my area of expertise and I wouldn't want to misrepresent the ideas it contains. That said, I think most of the ideas Parv explores are summarised in this quote from Christine Wells:
What we do when we write romance is bleed onto the page. A romance writer doesn’t open a vein, she opens her heart, and while our characters are not ourselves, never us, they do show truth as we know it. I never realize what truth I’m telling until I read the finished novel.Parv's thesis perhaps also perhaps explains why many authors have what Jennifer Crusie termed a "core story":
look at everything you’ve written down and try to find the patterns. If all the stories are about small towns, your pattern is easy. But what if some of them are about small towns, but one is about a detective agency in a big city and another one is about making a movie set in the middle of nowhere? Then look closer for the pattern: They’re all about small communities, relationships defined by environments. One of your books is about stray cats, another about drug addicts, another about people lost at sea: You write about saving the lost. Find out not what you think you should write or what the market says you should write but what you actually do write when you sit down at the keyboard. That’s your core story, the thing you return to obsessively even though you write it differently each time. That’s who you are as a writer.
The illustration is of the birth of Athena (the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom) from the head of Zeus. I found it at Wikimedia Commons. You could say that she was born in this rather unusual manner as a result of Zeus's attempt to repress some rather traumatic news.
Very interesting post Laura. Given me a lot to thing about.
ReplyDeleteWould someone be kind enough to define the term 'restory' for me, since it does not, as far as I can discover, yet feature in any standard dictionary?
ReplyDeleteIs there really no alternative to the word? I feel that anyone who sets store by the meaning and practice of writing in the English language should think long and hard before adopting such a repellent verb.
Sorry to sound so testy. It is a bad time for me, as Laura knows.
I'm glad you're finding it interesting, Keziah. Valerie Parv had already done all the hard work of thinking through the ideas, of course, and as I hadn't seen any discussion of her dissertation elsewhere, I thought I'd share the link at TMT.
ReplyDeleteTigress, I know you're missing your mole (and for those who haven't seen the sad news about Talpianna, it's here). I wonder what she'd have made of "restorying." Parv defines it like this:
I began to consider how writers including myself might frequently revisit themes and ideas which resonate with our lived experiences. I call this restorying, an unconscious process whereby aspects of one's life history are rewritten through one's creative work to achieve a more satisfactory result.
Thank you very much for quoting the definition, Laura. I do not agree that redaction of one's own life story is wholly unconscious, whether it is consciously creative or merely a product of everyone's selective memory: surely it is always a blend of conscious and unconscious.
ReplyDeleteI would, in any case, use 'redact' or even plain 'edit'. There is no need to coin a new term. All of our conscious experiences, sight, sound and memory, have been edited by means of a complex blend of the deliberate and the inadvertent. There is nothing new about this, and it affects far more than the creative process.
I am wholly in agreement with the proposition (if I have understood it correctly) that different writers of fiction have different central concerns, which will have been influenced by their own personal experiences. But that is no more than saying that all of us are products of our own cultures and our own pasts, that we instinctively think subjectively unless we make a conscious effort to stand back and be objective.
To me, what is particularly interesting is that subjectivity and emotion are often strengths in imaginative writing and other creative arts, whereas they are more inclined to be a weakness in other kinds of endeavour. In much academic work, attempted detachment and objectivity, those unattainable goals, are likely to produce far more useful results.
:)
Self-analysis is always a bit ... uhm ... embarrassing, if not downright painful, but that said, I guess there is more than just a kernel of truth in what Parv writes. When I look at the short stories and novels I wrote in my late teens and early twenties, I can now clearly see that most of my works back then were in some way or other concerned with searching for the lost sister. Indeed, I even wrote a story about twin sisters, one of whom is stuck in a mirror-world until her sister manages to free her and enable her to step out of the mirror. For years I completely failed to see the significance of this story for my own life.
ReplyDeleteSo yes, our life experiences do spill over into our writing - whether we are aware of it or not. I wouldn't call it "opening a vein", though.
~*~
AgTigress, I'm so sorry and so shocked to hear about Tal's death. I've never met her in "real" life, of course, but I appreciated her comments on TMT, and she often made me smile. ((((hugs))))
"I am wholly in agreement with the proposition (if I have understood it correctly) that different writers of fiction have different central concerns, which will have been influenced by their own personal experiences. But that is no more than saying that all of us are products of our own cultures and our own pasts."
ReplyDeleteI think Parv is going a bit further than this, because I think she's suggesting that writers are often subconsciously using their fiction as a way to explore issues arising from their personal histories in order to try to reach a better understanding of them, or to come to terms with them.
"our life experiences do spill over into our writing - whether we are aware of it or not. I wouldn't call it "opening a vein", though"
I suppose it might depend on what one thinks is meant by "opening a vein." I think it could be interpreted as meaning that an author opens her or himself up emotionally during the act of writing, and thus lets a very intimate part of her or himself flow onto the page.
I'm going to make a very personal, not deep, but honest comment here: Yes; for me, writing fiction is all about dealing with "personal issues." I've sometimes felt guilty about this, because it seems as though fiction is supposed to be "all made up." If you want to write about yourself, write a memoir, or an autobiography.
ReplyDeleteBut the "restorying" part is what makes fiction so much more satisfying than those two limited, nonfiction forms. I actually like this word "restorying." To me, fiction means, among other things, telling a story. Most of us view our lives as a story, a narrative. For some of us, it's a pretty boring story. For others, it may be a sad story, or one of triumph in obstacles overcome, or any number of themes. Fiction allows us to retell that story in ways that help us make sense of our past, perhaps even find a happy ending or at least a resolution to problems that seem hopeless or unending in "real life."
On top of all this, fiction can have a shape, a narrative arc, a beginning, middle and end, that ordinary lives often seem to lack while we're living them. We get to make something beautiful or exciting out of mundane events, like artists who take found objects and junkyard discards and turn them into compositions with meaning and form.
I see fiction as a way to tell my life story, only better. It's fiction. I don't have to apologize for its being more interesting than my own life, or for departing from the literal truth. It's ultimately the old cliche about the definition of fiction: telling lies to arrive at a deeper truth.
Thank you for this post, Laura. It touched on something very meaningful for me. I don't feel able to "analyze" it very deeply. Just to say that for this writer, it rings true.
'Most of us view our lives as a story, a narrative'.
ReplyDeleteIs this a common perception amongst those who write fiction? I have never thought of viewing my my own life as a story. The advantage of fiction (as Ann, indeed, goes on to say) is that it can be shaped into stories that are a great deal more coherent than most real lives, and can be elegantly tweaked and redacted to remove all the irrelevant, contradictory and often boring detail. I don't see why that process should necessarily have to involve a starting-point in the author's autobiography.
Clearly this way of looking at the creation of fiction works for some writers, but I wonder how widespread it is. It seems to me that it might be only one of many different modes of fictional composition.
I've sometimes felt guilty about this, because it seems as though fiction is supposed to be "all made up." If you want to write about yourself, write a memoir, or an autobiography.
ReplyDeleteFrom the point of view of a reader, I would say that there's absolutely no need at all for you to feel guilty. How could your writing not be influenced by your own thoughts and experiences? If it wasn't, wouldn't it lack individuality? And if you didn't put at least some of your emotions into your work, wouldn't it lack intensity? That's what Holly Lisle seems to think, at any rate:
I've found that when I take my worst moments, the painful, humiliating, disastrous, or simply dreadful ones that still make me cringe inside, and I change them enough to keep from getting sued, they make good fiction. And my responses, translated to the character, seem to live.
You can only write what you know, but you can take the fears and hopes and feelings you've experienced in a relatively mundane existence and translate them to a broader canvas with imagination and persistence.
I'm fairly sure I've read other authors mentioning on their blogs that they do this too. Also, as I just discovered via Google,
postmodern texts typically call attention to their status as fictions, as verbal constructs. The language of such texts calls attention to itself, and the author - or an author surrogate - is often present as a character in the narrative. (Diedrick 14)
so perhaps it's really very fashionable to insert yourself into texts (as long as you do it in a suitably postmodern way)! ;-)
'Most of us view our lives as a story, a narrative'.
ReplyDeleteIs this a common perception amongst those who write fiction? I have never thought of viewing my my own life as a story.
I suspect that a lot of people who aren't authors of fiction do try to fit their lives, or parts of their lives, into stories. It's certainly something that Robert J. Sternberg suggests is the case with regards to how people think about their romantic relationships.
People do tell stories about their lives, and in my experience when they do so they select the bits that they think are most interesting/meaningful/amusing and work them into narratives e.g. "how I met my spouse," or, on a more quotidian level "what happened today at work". That's not exactly the same as writing fiction, of course, but it does mean that to some extent the accounts have been "redacted to remove all the irrelevant, contradictory and often boring detail." And those stories probably get reworked to fit new circumstances, for example, the events at the beginning of a "how I met my spouse" story might be presented rather differently if the speaker's HEA mutated into a not-so-happy-ending. Then it could suddenly become a "how I met that ******* and didn't realise till it was too late" story.
came over to read the great post, but an stunned into silence at news of the loss of Tal.
ReplyDeleteThank you for providing the link.