The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday: does a good fictional story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest book ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad."

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot.

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-seven-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A few that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looks at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, "Demons of the Punjab," about the inevitability of death and grief, "Dot and Bubble," which deals with issues of institutionalized racism, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  The episode "Orphan 55," from the Thirteenth Doctor's run, pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me explain to you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to figure out what the lesson was. Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we readers will get to the punchline on our own.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea of what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Probably my most explicitly moral-centered tale, The Communion of Shadows, is about the fragility of life, the importance of taking emotional risks, and the absolute necessity of looking after the people we love, because we never know how long we have -- but I think the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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The writing brain

As a writer of fiction, I have wondered for years where creative ideas come from.  Certainly a great many of the plots I've written have seemed to spring fully-wrought from my brain (although as any writer will tell you, generating an idea is one thing, and seeing it to fruition quite another).

What has always struck me as odd about all of this is how... unconscious it all feels.  Oh, there's a good bit of front-of-the-brain cognition that goes into it -- background knowledge, visualization of setting, and sequencing, not to mention the good old-fashioned ability to construct solid prose.  But at its base, there's always seemed to me something mysterious about creativity, something ineffable and (dare I say it?) spiritual.  It is no surprise, even to me, that many have ascribed the source of creativity to divine inspiration or, at least, to a collective unconscious.

Take, for example, the origin of the novel I just completed two weeks ago (well, the first draft, anyhow).  Descent into Ulthoa is a dark, Lovecraftian piece about a haunted forest and a man obsessed with finding out what happened to his identical twin brother, who vanished ten years earlier on a hiking trip, but the inspiration for it seemed to come out of nowhere.  In fact, at the time, I wasn't even thinking about writing at all -- but was suddenly hit by a vivid, powerful image that seemed to beg for a story.  (If you want to read more about my experience of having that idea wallop me over the head, I did a post about it over at my fiction blog last August.)

So something is going on neurologically when stuff like this happens, but what?  Martin Lotze, a neuroscientist at the University of Griefswald (Germany), has taken the first steps toward understanding what is happening in the brains of creative writers -- and the results that he and his team have uncovered are fascinating.

One of the difficulties in studying the creative process is that during any exercise of creativity, the individual generally has to be free to move around.  Writing, especially, would be hard to do in a fMRI machine, where your head has to be perfectly still, and your typical writing device, a laptop, would be first wiped clean and then flung across the room by the electromagnets.  But Lotze and his team rigged up a setup wherein subjects could lie flat, with their heads encased in the fMRI tube, and have their arms supported so that they could write with the tried-and-true paper-and-pencil method, using a set of mirrors to see what they were doing.

[Image courtesy of Martin Lotze and the University of Griefswald]

Each subject was given a minute to brainstorm, and then two minutes to write.  While all of the subjects activated their visual centers and hippocampus (a part of the brain involved in memory and spatial navigation) during the process, there was a striking difference between veteran and novice writers.  Novice writers tended to activate their visual centers first; brainstorming, for them, started with thinking of images.  Veteran writers, on the other hand, started with their speech production centers.

"I think both groups are using different strategies,” Lotze said.  "It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice."

The other contrast between veterans and novices was in the level of activity of the caudate nucleus, a part of the brain involved in the coordination of activities as we become more skilled.  The higher the level of activity in the caudate nucleus, the more fluent we have become at it, and the less conscious effort it takes -- leading to the conclusion (no surprise to anyone who is a serious writer) that writing, just like anything, becomes better and easier the more you do it.  Becoming an excellent writer, like becoming a concert pianist or a star athlete, requires practice.

All of this is also interesting from the standpoint of artificial intelligence -- because if you don't buy the Divine Inspiration or Collective Unconscious Models, or something like them (which I don't), then any kind of creative activity is simply the result of patterns of neural firings -- and therefore theoretically should be able to be emulated by a computer.  I say "theoretically," because our current knowledge of AI is in its most rudimentary stages.  (As a friend of mine put it, "True AI is ten years in the future, and always will be.")  But just knowing what is happening in the brains of writers is the first step toward both understanding it, and perhaps generating a machine that is capable of true creativity.

All of that, of course is far in the future (maybe even more than ten years), and Lotze himself is well aware that this is hardly the end of the story.  As for me, I find the whole thing fascinating, and a little humbling -- that something so sophisticated is going on in my skull when I think up a scene in a story.  It brings to mind something one of my neurology students once said, after a lecture on the workings of the brain: "My brain is so much smarter than me, I don't know how I manage to think at all!"

Indeed.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun and amusing discussion of a very ominous topic; how the universe will end.

In The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us through all the known possibilities -- a "Big Crunch" (the Big Bang in reverse), the cheerfully-named "Heat Death" (the material of the universe spread out at uniform density and a uniform temperature of only a few degrees above absolute zero), the terrifying -- but fortunately extremely unlikely -- Vacuum Decay (where the universe tears itself apart from the inside out), and others even wilder.

The cool thing is that all of it is scientifically sound.  Mack is a brilliant theoretical astrophysicist, and her explanations take cutting-edge research and bring it to a level a layperson can understand.  And along the way, her humor shines through, bringing a touch of lightness and upbeat positivity to a subject that will take the reader to the edges of the known universe and the end of time.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The voices in our heads

If you needed any further evidence that novelists really are a breed apart, consider the study that was carried out by some researchers at Durham University that appeared in the journal Consciousness and Cognition last month, and was the subject of an article in The Guardian this week.

The team of psychologists surveyed authors at the International Book Festival in Edinburgh, in 2014 and 2018, and asked a  set of curious questions:

1. How do you experience your characters?
2. Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?
3. Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?
4. Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?
5. Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?
6. How does the way you experience your characters’ voices feed into your writing practice?  Please tell us about this process.
7. Once a piece of writing or performance is finished, what happens to your characters’ voices?
8. If there are any aspects of your experience of your characters’ voices or your characters more broadly that you would like to elaborate on, please do so here.
9. In contexts other than writing, do you ever have the experience of hearing voices when there is no one around?  If so, please describe these experiences.  How do these experiences differ from the experience of hearing the voice of a character?

Question #9 was obviously thrown in there to identify test subjects who were prone to auditory hallucinations anyway.  But even after you account for these folks, a remarkable percentage of authors -- 63% -- say they hear their characters' voices, with 56% having visual or other sensory experiences of their characters.  62% reported at least some experience of feeling that their characters had agency -- that they could act of their own accord independent of what the author intended.

You might be expecting me, being the perennially dubious type that I am, to scoff at this.  But all I can say is -- whatever is going on here -- this has happened to me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Martin Hricko, Ghosts (16821435), CC BY 3.0]

Here are two striking examples of this -- with as little in the way of spoilers as I can manage, in case you want to read the story yourself.

My novella Convection, in the collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows, is about seven people trapped in an apartment complex during a Category-5 hurricane, trying to survive while the world is falling apart around them.  I had initially come up with the character of Jennie Trahan to be the obnoxious, irritating antagonist, getting in everyone's way, criticizing, obstructing, and generally being a class-A bitch.  About a third of the way through, something happened -- something I can best describe as Jennie telling me (in her bossy, snarky tone of voice) that she wanted a different role.  It was almost like she yanked the keyboard out of my hand, told me to go to hell, and started writing her own part.  In the end, you not only find out why she acts the way she does -- something I honestly didn't know about her when I came up with her -- she ends up being one of the most sympathetic (and important) characters in the story.

The other case of this was in my novel Lines of Sight, the first in the Boundary Solution trilogy.  One of the first things that happens is that while out investigating a sighting of the mysterious and frightening Black-eyed Children, the main character Kerri Elias's partner Mike Rivers is abducted.  This spurs Kerri to try to find out what happened to him and, if possible, get him back, but the problem was that I didn't know what exactly had happened to him until halfway through the second book in the trilogy, Whistling in the Dark.  There was a point where suddenly I had the puzzle worked out -- it just popped into my head, as if someone else had explained it to me -- and I said out loud, "Oh, so that's what happened to Mike!  Huh.  I didn't know that."

Those of you who are not fiction writers might well be backing away slowly, keeping your eye on me the whole time, but turns out, I'm far from the only author this has happened to.  Here are some examples that came out of the study:

• I have a very vivid, visual picture of them in my head.  I see them in my imagination as if they were on film – I do not see through their eyes, but rather look at them and observe everything they do and say.
• Sometimes, I just get the feeling that they are standing right behind me when I write.  Of course, I turn and no one is there.
• They [the characters' voices] do not belong to me.  They belong to the characters.  They are totally different, in the same way that talking to someone is different from being on one’s own.
• I tend to celebrate the conversations as and when they happen.  To my delight, my characters don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.
• They do their own thing!  I am often astonished by what takes place and it can often be as if I am watching scenes take place and hear their speech despite the fact I am creating it.

"The writers we surveyed definitely weren’t all describing the same experience," said study lead author John Foxwell, "and one way we might make sense of that is to think about how writing relates to inner speech...  Whether or not we’re always aware of it, most of us are trying to anticipate what other people are going to say and do in everyday interactions.  For some of these writers, it might be the case that after a while their characters start to feel independent because the writers developed the same kinds of personality ‘models’ as they’d develop for real people, and these were generating the same kinds of predictions."

Which is kind of fascinating.  When I've done book signings, the single most common questions revolve around where my characters and plots come from.  I try to give some kind of semi-cogent response, but the truth is, the most accurate answer is "beats the hell out of me."  They seem to pop into my head completely unannounced, sometimes with such vividness that I have to write the story to discover why they're important.  I often joke that I keep writing because I want to find out how the story ends, and there's a sense in which this is exactly how it seems.

I'm endlessly fascinated with the origins of creativity, and how creatives of all types are driven to their chosen medium to express ideas, images, and feelings they can't explain, and which often seem to come from outside.  Whatever my own experience, I'm still a skeptic, and I am about as certain as I can be that this is only a very convincing illusion, that the imagery and personalities and plots are bubbling up from some part of me that is beneath my conscious awareness.

But the sense that it isn't, that these characters have an independent existence, is really powerful.  So if (as I'm nearly certain) it is an illusion, it's a remarkably powerful and persistent one, and seems to be close to ubiquitous in writers of fiction.

And I swear, I didn't have any idea about Jennie Trahan's backstory and what happened to Mike Rivers.  Wherever that information came from, I can assure you that I was as shocked as (I hope) my readers are to find it all out.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The heart of the story

As a fiction writer, I am constantly working to make sure my writing is engaging.  What writers want, after all, is to keep readers turning the page, and when "The End" is reached, for them to go immediately to Amazon and order another.

I'm a "genre writer" -- paranormal/speculative fiction, with occasional forays into science fiction or horror -- and a lot of the writing in that realm is highly plot-driven.  Keep things moving, don't dawdle too much on setting and description, make every page exciting and every chapter ending a cliffhanger.  But some new research out of McMaster University has illustrated something I've always believed -- however plot-dense it is, all stories are, at their heart, character stories.

What the researchers did is hook people up to an fMRI machine, presented them with a brief prompt -- things like, "A fisherman rescues a boy from a freezing lake" -- and asked them to express the story behind the prompt in spoken word, written word, or drawings.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The results are fascinating.  In each case, and no matter what the prompt, the test subjects' brains responded the same way.  The network called "theory-of-mind" -- which responds to other people's motivations, personalities, beliefs, motives, and actions -- was the primary area that fired during the activity.  In spite of the fact that these characters were entirely fictional, and had not even been considered prior to the assignment of the prompt, the brain responded to their stories as if they were real people.

"We tell stories in conversation each and every day," said Steven Brown, associate professor of psychology, neuroscience, and behavior at McMaster, who was lead author of the study.  "Very much like literary stories, we engage with the characters and are wired to make stories people-oriented...  Aristotle proposed 2,300 years ago that plot is the most important aspect of narrative, and that character is secondary.  Our brain results show that people approach narrative in a strongly character-centered and psychological manner, focused on the mental states of the protagonist of the story."

Which I find absolutely fascinating, and which squares with my experience both as a writer and as a reader.  There have been times I've read books -- won't mention any names, out of courtesy to my fellow authors -- in which I've found the concept intriguing, but I have either not cared about the main characters or else actively disliked them.  And no matter how fascinating the plot, if I don't give a damn about the characters, why would I care enough to read to the end of the book?

I try my hardest to keep this in mind when I'm writing, and especially apropos of the characters who aren't likable.  It's easy enough to form an emotional attachment to the Good Guys, but a pet peeve of mine is Bad Guys who are one-dimensional.  Much as I love The Lord of the Rings, why was Sauron so damned nasty?  Did he actually like living in a wretched wasteland, and palling around with Orcs and Trolls and Giant Spiders and the like?  Did he finish his morning cup of coffee, and immediately look around for someone to torture?

Bad Guys -- even, in the case of Really Bad Guys like Sauron -- have to have some sort of motivation other than just being evil 'cuz they're evil.  In my own books, I had a striking experience with writing a character who is truly awful; Jackson Royce in this summer's release, The Fifth Day.  He is not a nice man.  But along the way (no spoilers intended) you begin to find out why he acts the way he does, and by the end, he's pitiable.  Still not likable, but pitiable.  I had one reader tell me, "Man, you had me hating Jackson and feeling terribly sorry for him at the same time.  I didn't think that was possible."

To me, that says that at least on that level, the story succeeded.

So it's fascinating that neuroscience has given us a first approximation to why we respond this way.  Humans are social primates; we're wired to react to the people around us, to parse their actions as if we could see inside their minds.  In other words, to put ourselves in their place, think whether we would have done the same, and try to ascribe motives to what they've done.

This tendency is so powerful that it activates even in the case of fictional characters.  Which, perhaps, explains why humans have been storytellers as long as there's been an audience of listeners and a campfire to sit around.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The writing brain

As a writer of fiction, I have wondered for years where creative ideas come from.  Certainly a great many of the plots I've written have seemed to spring fully-wrought from my brain (although as any writer will tell you, generating an idea is one thing, and seeing it to fruition quite another).

What has always struck me as odd about all of this is how... unconscious it all feels.  Oh, there's a good bit of front-of-the-brain cognition that goes into it -- background knowledge, visualization of setting, and sequencing, not to mention the good old-fashioned ability to construct solid prose.  But at its base, there's always seemed to me something mysterious about creativity, something ineffable and (dare I say it?) spiritual.  It is no surprise, even to me, that many have ascribed the source of creativity to divine inspiration or, at least, to a collective unconscious.

But now, Martin Lotze, a neuroscientist at the University of Griefswald (Germany), has taken the first steps toward understanding what is happening in the brains of creative writers -- and the results that he and his team have uncovered are fascinating.

One of the difficulties in studying the creative process is that during any exercise of creativity, the individual generally has to be free to move around.  Writing, especially, would be hard to do in a fMRI machine, where your head has to be perfectly still, and your typical writing device, a laptop, would be first wiped clean and then flung across the room by the electromagnets.  But Lotze and his team rigged up a setup wherein subjects could lie flat, with their heads encased in the fMRI tube, and have their arms supported so that they could write with the tried-and-true paper-and-pencil method, using a set of mirrors to see what they were doing.

[image courtesy of Martin Lotze and the University of Griefswald]

Each subject was given a minute to brainstorm, and then two minutes to write.  While all of the subjects activated their visual centers and hippocampus (a part of the brain involved in memory and spatial navigation) during the process, there was a striking difference between veteran and novice writers.  Novice writers tended to activate their visual centers first; brainstorming, for them, started with thinking of images.  Veteran writers, on the other hand, started with their speech production centers.

"I think both groups are using different strategies,” Lotze said.  "It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice."

The other contrast between veterans and novices was in the level of activity of the caudate nucleus, a part of the brain involved in the coordination of activities as we become more skilled.  The higher the level of activity in the caudate nucleus, the more fluent we have become at it, and the less conscious effort it takes -- leading to the conclusion (no surprise to anyone who is a serious writer) that writing, just like anything, becomes better and easier the more you do it.  Becoming an excellent writer, like becoming a concert pianist or a star athlete, requires practice.

All of this is also interesting from the standpoint of artificial intelligence -- because if you don't buy the Divine Inspiration or Collective Unconscious Models, or something like them (which I don't), then any kind of creative activity is simply the result of patterns of neural firings -- and therefore theoretically should be able to be emulated by a computer.  I say "theoretically," because our current knowledge of AI is in its most rudimentary stages.  But just knowing what is happening in the brains of writers is the first step toward both understanding it, and (possibly) generating a machine that is capable of true creativity.

All of that, of course is far in the future, and Lotze himself is well aware that this is hardly the end of the story.  As for me, I find the whole thing fascinating, and a little humbling -- that something so sophisticated is going on in my skull when I think up a scene in a story.  It brings to mind something one of my neurology students once said, after a lecture on the workings of the brain:  "My brain is so much smarter than me, I don't know how I manage to think at all!"

Indeed.