Writing as Therapy for the Author

Laura Vivanco

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:

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)

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.

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.

The Science of Love: Good News/Bad News

Laura Vivanco

The Bad News - The Truth About Prairie Voles

Prairie voles might once have been thought suitable mascots for the romance genre, because, although "Fewer than 5% of mammals are habitually monogamous. Prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are among the select few. After mating, the males "fall in love": they stick close to their chosen one, guard her jealously and help her raise their young." (BBC). Or so everyone thought. Now it turns out that

"monogamous" prairie voles are really just a bunch of randy rodents. A study published in Animal Behaviour found the prairie vole, Microtus ochrogaster, displayed considerable sexual promiscuity. Almost a quarter of litters were found not to have been fathered by the live-in partner of the mother prairie vole.

"There is a difference between social monogamy and sexual fidelity," said the study's main researcher, Professor Alex Ophir, of Florida University, Gainesville. "You can pair with a partner for life and still have sex with others - and that is what prairie voles do. There is a lesson there for humans."

The discovery of prairie vole promiscuity is crucial because these animals are favourite subjects among researchers, selected because they had displayed life-long monogamy. These previous studies also showed that dopamine, a brain chemical released during sex, played a key role in determining vole sexual behaviour.

Dopamine - the vole's love drug - causes males to lose interest in other females and acts on the nucleus accumbens, a region in the forebrain of many animals, including humans. Previous studies claimed dopamine locked the vole into monogamy and, by inference, played a similar role in humans - an idea that promised new ways of understanding, and possibly treating, serial promiscuity. (McKie, in The Observer)

The Good News - Romance Authors are Right to Mention the Hero's Smell

I've been noticing that the hero's smell is often mentioned in romances. The description often goes something like this: "he smelled slightly of horse, soap and a scent that was uniquely his." And it seems that smell, particularly the one that's "uniquely his," is important in mate choice:

Among the constellation of genes that control the immune system are those known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which influence tissue rejection. Conceive a child with a person whose MHC is too similar to your own, and the risk increases that the womb will expel the fetus. Find a partner with sufficiently different MHC, and you're likelier to carry a baby to term.

[...] At the University of Bern in Switzerland, human females were asked to smell T shirts worn by anonymous males and then pick which ones appealed to them. Time and again, they chose the ones worn by men with a safely different MHC. (Kluger, in Time)

And in addition, to paraphrase the lyrics of Betty Everett's "It's In His Kiss" just a little, "if you wanna know, if his MHC is different from yours, it's in his kiss, that's where it is":

if the smell of MHC isn't a deal maker or breaker, the taste is. Saliva also contains the compound, a fact that Haselton believes may partly explain the custom of kissing, particularly those protracted sessions that stop short of intercourse. "Kissing," she says simply, "might be a taste test." (Kluger, in Time)

There's even a scientific basis for all those couples in romantic suspense who fall in love really quickly:

Meeting a stranger when physiologically aroused increases the chance of having romantic feelings towards them ... It's all because of a strong connection between anxiety, arousal and attraction. In the "shaky bridge study" carried out by psychologists Arthur Aron and Don Dutton in the 1970s, men who met a woman on a high, rickety bridge found the encounter sexier and more romantic than those who met her on a low, stable one. (Case, in New Scientist)

The Bad News - HEA may turn to Increasing Irritation

The initial glow of falling in love tends to wear off, as described in detail in Kate Nash's "Foundations" (lyrics here, and video and song here), and:

If your spouse already bugs you now, the future is bleak. New research suggests couples view one another as even more irritating and demanding the longer they are together. [...] [Kira] Birditt and U-M colleagues Lisa Jackey and Toni Antonucci looked at how negative views of spouses, friends and children changed over time [...] In all age groups, individuals reported viewing their spouse as the most negative compared with children and friends. The negative view of spouses tended to increase over time. (MSNBC)

and

Psychologists studying relationships confirm the steady decline of romantic love. Each year, according to surveys, the average couple loses a little spark. One sociological study of marital satisfaction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Penn State University kept track of more than 2,000 married people over 17 years. Average marital happiness fell sharply in the first 10 years, then entered a slow decline. (Schechner, in the Wall Street Journal)

The Good News - True Love Can Last

For some people, however, that initial glow never fades: there are

men and women who say they live in the thrall of early love despite years of marriage, busy jobs and other daily demands that normally chip away at passion. Most couples find that the dizzying, almost-narcotic feeling of early love gives way to a calmer bond. Now, researchers are using laboratory science to investigate [...those] who live fairy-tale romances. (Schechner, in the Wall Street Journal)

And

Aron has conducted fMRI studies of some of those stubbornly loving pairs, and initial results show that their brains indeed look very much like those of people newly in love, with all the right regions lighting up in all the right ways. "We wondered if they were really feeling these things," Aron says. "But it looks like this is really happening." (Kluger, in Time)

For more on the science of love, RfP's got an index of Time's annual Mind/Body special issue on the theme of "The Science of Romance".


Other News

Harlequin's Valentine's site is now up and there are free short online reads available: an inspirational romance, Family Ever After, by Linda Goodnight, and a vampire paranormal, Desire Calls, by Caridad Piñeiro.

The RNA 2008 Romance Prize for category romances was won by Kate Hardy's Breakfast at Giovanni's. It'll be out in the US in April, with the title In Bed with her Italian Boss.

AAR's Annual Reader Poll closes on the 17th of February 2008. Only novels with a "first US publication date (copyright date) of 2007" are eligible. Laurie Gold has clarified that readers who don't usually visit AAR are eligible to vote: "we want more than simply AAR’s readership involved; we want to draw from the entire community of online romance readers."

The first illustration, from Wikipedia, is of the "theatrical masks of Tragedy and Comedy in refined mosaic" originally from Hadrian's Villa and now at the Capitoline Museums, Rome.

The second illustration is of Harlequin, from Wikimedia Commons.