Gems of dialogue

It's hard to describe why some particular lines of dialogue are memorable, any more than you could say "wow, those three notes in that symphony are brilliant!"  The dialogue itself only shows its excellence in the context that the author has set.  Nevertheless, there are passages of dialogue in books and stories that to me still stand out as absolute genius.

It's probably futile to try to explain why these particular passages leaped off the page for me, but I thought it might be a fun topic for this week's Fiction Friday to present here a few lines of dialogue that for me exemplify sheer, unadulterated brilliance in writing.  Each one of these sent a little shiver up my spine, and I thought: this is perfect.  See how many you recognize, and if you recognize them, whether you agree.  Feel free to add some of your favorites.  If nothing else, we'll all have a list of books to put on our winter reading list.

"Mother was always shoving me out into the world," Meg said.  "She'd want me to do this.  You know she would.  Tell her..." she started, choked, then held up her head and said, "No.  Never mind.  I'll tell her myself." -- Madeleine l'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time


"I am tired," he said.  "I did a lot today.  That is, I did something.  The only thing I have ever done.  I pressed a button.  It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned 'Off' button." -- Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven


"Most people are not looking for provable truths.  As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths.  What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning." -- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

"This belonged to my great-granddad," the sergeant said.  "He was in the battle we had against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayer for soldiers, ‘cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, ‘cos he couldn’t afford armour, and next day in battle - whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look, you can see the hole."

"Pretty miraculous," Captain Carrot agreed.

"Yeah, it was, I s’pose," said the sergeant.  He looked ruefully at the battered volume.  "Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really." -- Terry Pratchett, Jingo

"We will have peace, " said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort.  Several of the Riders cried out gladly.  Théoden held up his hand.  "Yes, we will have peace," he said, now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all of your works have perished -- and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us.  You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts.  You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor.  Cruel and cold!  Even if your war on me was just -- as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired -- even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there?  And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead.  When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc.  So much for the House of Eorl.  A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers.  Turn elsewhither.  But I fear your voice has lost its charm." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

"You suggested that Hazel should tell them of our adventures, Blackberry, but it didn't go down well, did it?  Who wants to hear about brave deeds when he's ashamed of his own, and who likes an open, honest tale from someone he's deceiving?  Do you want me to go on?  I tell you, every single thing that's happened fits like a bee in a foxglove.  And kill them, you say, and help ourselves to the great burrow?  We shall help ourselves to a roof of bones, hung with shining wires.  Help ourselves to misery and death." -- Richard Adams, Watership Down


"In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country.  The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer.  Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.  Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood." -- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"I believe that I am mad," said Vertue presently.  "The world cannot be as it seems to me.  If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it; if I can go, then there is nothing to go to."

"Vertue," said John, "give in.  For once, yield to desire.  Have done with your choosing.  Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue.  "I must choose because I choose because I choose; and it goes on forever, and in the whole world I cannot find a single reason for rising from this stone." -- C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress


"As for my gravestone?  I would like to borrow that great barber-pole from out front of the town shoppe, and have it run at midnight if you happened to drop by my mound to say hello.  And there the old barber-pole would be, lit, its bright ribbons twining up out of mystery, turning, and twining away up into further mysteries, forever.  And if you come to visit, leave an apple for the ghosts." -- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes


"Yes," she said coldly.  "Better that they die here and now, if that's what has to happen, than that they go with you and live.  They -- we -- did some lousy things.  But the price is much too high." -- Stephen King, Needful Things

So there are a few of my favorites.  I'd love to hear yours!

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My master's degree is in historical linguistics, with a focus on Scandinavia and Great Britain (and the interactions between them) -- so it was with great interest that I read Cat Jarman's book River Kings: A New History of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.

Jarman, who is an archaeologist working for the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, is one of the world's experts on the Viking Age.  She does a great job of de-mythologizing these wide-traveling raiders, explorers, and merchants, taking them out of the caricature depictions of guys with blond braids and horned helmets into the reality of a complex, dynamic culture that impacted lands and people from Labrador to China.

River Kings is a brilliantly-written analysis of an often-misunderstood group -- beginning with the fact that "Viking" isn't an ethnic designation, but an occupation -- and tracing artifacts they left behind traveling between their homeland in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to Iceland, the Hebrides, Normandy, the Silk Road, and Russia.  (In fact, the Rus -- the people who founded, and gave their name to, Russia -- were Scandinavian explorers who settled in what is now the Ukraine and western Russia, intermarrying with the Slavic population there and eventually forming a unique melded culture.)

If you are interested in the Vikings or in European history in general, you should put Jarman's book in your to-read list.  It goes a long way toward replacing the legendary status of these fierce, sea-going people with a historically-accurate reality that is just as fascinating.

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Writing through tears

I've written a number of scenes that have affected me emotionally while I was writing them.  Honestly, that's always what I'm trying to do to my readers -- grab them by the emotions and swing them around a little.  But none of them has struck me as so deeply poignant as this one, near the end of my novel The Communion of Shadows.

In it, the main character, Leandre Naquin, knows exactly when he's going to die -- on his thirtieth birthday.  The day he was born he had nearly died, but his mother made a bargain with the Angel of Death to take thirty years of her life and give them to her son.  The Angel of Death accepted the deal.  Leandre's mother dies young, and now approaching the age of thirty, he knows his own days are numbered.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons jc.winkler, Pic from the canoe on Bayou Corne, CC BY 2.0]

This scene happens the night before his thirtieth birthday, and is one of the few scenes I've written that had me writing through tears.  It's set in 1850 in southern Louisiana -- bayou country.

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Leandre thought back once again of what he’d said to the others after telling his own story, that knowing the timing of his death hadn’t changed anything, and he wondered again why he’d lied to his friends.  Everything else he’d said was scrupulously honest, at least insofar as he knew the details, but that had been an outright falsehood.  He had such a habit of blithe indifference toward everything and everyone that apparently he even had to pretend that he could shrug his shoulders at his own impending death.

He rolled over in bed, sighing harshly.  “Maman,” he whispered to the darkness, “how did you do it?  You didn’t hesitate when the Angel of Death showed up.  You were confident that you’d chosen correctly and told him you didn’t regret anything, that you were ready to go.  How can I find the same courage?”

He peered around the dark interior of his little cottage, illuminated by a beam of moonlight coming through a half-opened window.  The only sound was a soft sigh, which could have been the night breeze—or perhaps a slow breath, or the rustle of a long skirt.

He sat up, the light blanket slipping off his shoulders, ears and eyes straining.  The silence had returned.  After a moment sitting there, holding his breath, he lay back down on his side, once again trying to force himself to relax.

Then his eyes caught movement.  In the corner of the room there was a light so faint he thought at first it was a reflection of the moon’s glow.  Like everything in the dimness it had little color, just a gauzy white shimmer that could easily be dismissed as a trick of the eye.

With a sudden jolt he knew what it was.  He’d seen it before.  He was looking at the spirit of Azélie Naquin, that silent and watchful ghost he’d last seen when he was a child, standing gazing at him from the corner of his bedroom just as she was now.  His heart thudded against his ribcage, a combination of fear and longing and grief coursing through his veins.

“Maman?”  His voice sounded thin and hoarse in his own ears.

There was no change in the apparition.

Suddenly all of his defenses, all of the pretense to calmness and indifference, collapsed.  He choked out the words, “I miss you so much,” then his voice broke.  Tears flowed down his cheeks, soaked his pillow, and he drew his legs up so that he was curled up on his side, hugging his knees.  “I said Papa never recovered from your death, but I see now I never did, either.  The ache is just as real as it ever was.”

The figure in the corner moved closer, gliding like fog, and he could see the smooth outlines of his mother’s cheeks, the curl of a strand of hair behind her ear, the faint trace of a smile on her lips.  There was the scent of lavender he remembered from his earliest days, its faint sweetness bringing back memories of pressing his face into her shoulder when he was barely old enough to walk.

Still she did not speak, just gazed at him in love and pity, and he felt his heart breaking again as if she’d only died yesterday, not twenty years earlier.

“How do I do it, Maman?”  His voice cracked again, and in his own ears he sounded like the ten-year-old child he had been.  “How can I know if I made the right choice, keeping myself apart so I wouldn’t cause anyone else pain, so I can let go and die satisfied as you did?”

For the first time the ghost spoke to him, and he heard Azélie Naquin’s gentle voice, as familiar as if he had only heard it yesterday, as if the preceding twenty years hadn’t happened.  “You can’t.  You can’t know, my dear son.  No one can.  Everything you do is a choice, and it affects every other choice you will make, every other possibility you have.  No one can know if they chose correctly, because it is never given to us to see what might have happened had we chosen otherwise.”

“How can you bear it?” he shouted, his voice thick with tears.

“By knowing we all are in the same condition.  You said yesterday that millions of other men and women and children have died, and if they could pass those gates, you could.  Then you derided yourself for lying, but it wasn’t a lie.”  She reached out one hand, and caressed his cheek with a touch light as a breath.  “How many people are taken untimely by sickness or accident, who die without having prepared themselves, without making amends to the ones they’ve hurt and saying farewell to the ones they’ve loved?  You and I, we’ve been given a great gift, to be aware that our time is limited, never to think we had forever to do what we wanted.  Don’t doubt your choices.  You did what you could.  It is, in the end, all any of us can do.”

“I want to be brave.”  He hitched a sob.  “I want to be as brave as you were.  To be able to face the Angel of Death and say, ‘I’m ready.’”

“You will.  Whenever he comes for you, you will.  Because you will know, the whole time, that I am right there next to you, my hand on your shoulder, even if you don’t see me or hear me.”

“I’m so frightened.”

She smiled, the moonlight glinting from her eyes, still barely visible as a shimmering outline in the dark air.  “Anyone who can see how beautiful and terrible and complex and incomprehensible life is, and not be frightened, is a fool.”

There was silence for a time in the room.

“Sleep, my brave son.  You will do what you need to, and do it with great courage.  Do not doubt yourself.  I never have.”

The image of Azélie Naquin vanished.

Leandre said, “Maman?”  There was no response.  He brought one arm up over his eyes, as if to block out the entire world, and wept like an orphaned child.

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During the first three centuries C.E., something remarkable happened; Rome went from a superpower, controlling much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, to being a pair of weak, unstable fragments -- the Western and Eastern Roman Empires --torn by strife and internal squabbles, beset by invasions, with leaders for whom assassination was the most likely way to die.  (The year 238 C.E. is called "the year of six emperors" -- four were killed by their own guards, one hanged himself to avoid the same fate, and one died in battle.)

How could something like this happen?  The standard answer has usually been "the barbarians," groups such as the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, and Huns who whittled away at the territory until there wasn't much left.  They played a role, there is no doubt of that; the Goths under their powerful leader Alaric actually sacked the city of Rome itself in the year 410.  But like with most historical events, the true answer is more complex -- and far more interesting.  In How Rome Fell, historian Adrian Goldsworthy shows how a variety of factors, including a succession of weak leaders, the growing power of the Roman army, and repeated epidemics took a nation that was thriving under emperors like Vespasian and Hadrian, finally descending into the chaos of the Dark Ages.  

If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book.  It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

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Working titles

An author friend of mine recently posted a dilemma; she had come up with a killer title for her work-in-progress only to find out that another author had grabbed it first.  What to do?

Well, except for very famous, high monetary-value stories -- such as the ones owned by the Mouse Who Shall Not Be Named -- few titles are actually trademarked, which means that legally, you can publish a book under a title that's already been used.  In terms of common courtesy, however, the best answer comes from Wile E. Coyote: "Back to the old fiasco hatchery."

Myself, I think titles are critical.  They're one of the first things a potential reader sees (the first is most likely the cover illustration).  I find it intriguing to consider what people choose for titles, especially in cases where the choice is highly un-memorable.  Consider the formulaic approach, used most commonly in spaceship-and-alien science fiction: "The" + "alien sounding word" + one of the following words: "Maneuver, Gambit, Strategy, Solution, Encounter, Factor, Machine, Incident, Syndrome."   The Sqr'll'nutz Factor. The Bäbu'shkä Maneuver.  That sort of thing.

This book isn't real, but it definitely should be, because I would read the hell out of it.  (For other amazing examples, visit the page "Fake Book Titles Extravaganza!"  Do not try to drink anything while looking at this website.  You have been warned.)

The problem is, formulaic titles are often so ridiculously uncreative that they will promptly blend in with all of the other Encounters and Gambits and Maneuvers you've read about, and as a writer, that's definitely not the impression you want to create.  Memorable titles are short, pithy, and intriguing.  I tend to like metaphorical titles -- ones which provoke curiosity ("What on earth could that be referring to?") coupled with an "Aha!" moment when you read the story and actually figure it out.

As some examples, here are some of my favorite titles I've run across:

• All Hallow's Eve (Charles Williams)
• A Murder is Announced (Agatha Christie)
• Closet Full of Bones (A. J. Aalto)
• The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula LeGuin)
• The Eyes of the Amaryllis (Natalie Babbitt)
• Among the Dolls (William Sleator)
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman)
• Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer) - and interestingly, I didn't particularly like this book.  But the title is awesome.
• Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berendt)
• Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)
• The Stupidest Angel (Christopher Moore)
• The Fifth Elephant (Terry Pratchett)
• Wolves in the Walls (Neil Gaiman)

And a few that I think don't work so well:

• "O, Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad" (M. R. James) - a brilliant, and terrifying, short story with a title that's way too long and cumbersome.
• A Wind in the Door (Madeleine l'Engle) - an interesting title, but what the hell is the relevance?  At the end of the story, a door blows shut for no apparent reason, and I presume we're supposed to raise an eyebrow and say, "Ahhhh, now I see"?
• Dorothy Sayers's novels are kind of a mixed bag.  Busman's Honeymoon is really clever and intriguing, but Unnatural Death is generic and boring (aren't all murder mysteries about unnatural deaths)?  Interestingly, the latter started out as The Dawson Pedigree -- a much better title, in my opinion -- then for some reason she chose to go with the bland.
• Brandy of the Damned (Colin Wilson) - oh, come on.  I doubt the damned will get brandy, frankly.
• Postern of Fate (Agatha Christie) - my opinion may be colored by the fact that I think this is far and away the worst book she ever wrote -- rambling, incoherent, with long passages of supposed-to-be-witty repartee, and after reading it I still have no clue why the title is relevant to the plot.
• The Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Christopher Moore) - okay, I love Moore's novels and I know he was trying to give it a campy title.  Actually it's an awesome book - but the title is just goofy.

So, anyway, that gives you an idea of what I shoot for, with titles.  Here are a few titles I've come up with that I think work pretty well.  I'll leave it to you to decide if you think they're intriguing or dreadful.

• The Dead Letter Office
• Slings & Arrows
• The Shambles
• We All Fall Down (novella)
• Whistling in the Dark
• Kári the Lucky
• Descent into Ulthoa
• "The Pool of Ink" (short story)
• "The Germ Theory of Disease" (short story)

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One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

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Opening statements

There's a claim out there that if a work of fiction doesn't grab the reader on the first page, it never will. The whole "slow burn" approach to writing, which was pretty much universal back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, has been replaced by a necessity to hit the ground running.

My general attitude is that any time someone speaks in categoricals about writing, they're wrong. No, you don't have to only "write what you know." (Although if you're writing from the point-of-view of a character who belongs to a different demographic than you do, it's critical to have someone who is from that demographic read your story and tell you if you got it right.)  Yes, you can effectively write a modern novel that uses long, complex sentences.  No, you don't have to eliminate every single adverb, dialogue tag, semicolon, and use of the passive voice.

And no, it's not required to grab the readers by the shirt collar and scream into their faces by the end of the first page.

Be that as it may, I do appreciate a really snappy opening line.  It doesn't have to be action-oriented; not all books begin with car crashes, sword fights, and sex scenes.  Thinking about some of the best first lines I've read (I'll give a few examples of my favorites in a moment), I'm not entirely certain what it is that unites them, what distinguishes a first-class start from a more mundane one.  Something about unusual wording, a particularly piquant turn of phrase, a sentence that makes your ears perk up and leaves you saying, "wow, that wasn't what I expected, what on earth is going to happen next?"

As a brief aside, I think this is why I love Chris van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.  In this one-of-a-kind book, van Allsburg gives an illustration and a single line from fourteen (imaginary) novels, which were left at a publisher's office by the enigmatic Harris Burdick.  Burdick never returned, leaving the editor with fourteen mysteries -- what were the stories that went along with the lines and the illustrations?  It's left for the reader to figure out what they might have been.  (One particularly memorable example; a drawing of a girl and a boy, done in van Allsburg's inimitably beautiful style, standing next to a lake.  The name of the story is "A Strange Day in July."  The line from the story: "He threw with all his might, but the third stone came skipping back.")  I don't overstate my case by saying that every writer should own this wonderful, mysterious, fascinating book.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to pick out some of my favorite opening lines.  These are ones that grabbed me instantly, the first time I opened the books, and stand out to me still as some of the catchiest beginnings ever.  I'll be interested to see if you agree, and if you have some of your favorites you'd like to add.

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." -- C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

"The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse." -- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

"There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood." -- Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot,' or 'That Claudius,' or 'Claudius the Stammerer,' or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius' or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius,' am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled." -- Robert Graves, I, Claudius

"Well, I'm pretty much fucked." -- Andy Weir, The Martian

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." -- Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

"My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1958, at which time I was ten years and seven months old." -- Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

"Here's how it went down." -- Gil Miller, Spree 

"The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted." -- Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Just because I can, here are a few of my favorites from my own stories:

"Really, the whole thing started because of Marie-Solange Guidry's cheesecake." -- Periphery

"Claver Road doesn't end, it withers away." -- Descent into Ulthoa

"Darren Ault woke in pitch darkness, which was odd, because he was fairly certain he was dead." -- Lock & Key

"The woman sitting in the high-backed chair in Mr. Parsifal Snowe's office looked faded, like an item of clothing that was run through the washing machine a few too many times." -- The Dead Letter Office

"It had been a completely ordinary day for Duncan Kyle until the moment he fell through the floor of his living room at a little before two in the morning." -- Sephirot

I hope these would make you curious enough to continue reading!

An opening line isn't everything; there has to be a good story to follow.  And of course, plenty of awesome stories have unremarkable first lines.  But crafting a sizzling opening pitch is not a bad thing for a writer to aim for.  Knowing the way that brilliant first lines have stood out in my memory, some of them for many years, makes me all the more cognizant of how powerful a lure that can be to draw readers into the world of the story.

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Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

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Unexpected depths

A writer friend of mine on social media asked what I thought was a very interesting question, and one that would be a good topic for this week's Fiction Friday: what is the most memorable line you've ever read?  I've read a good many profound books, but the first thing that came to mind was a line not from a book but from a television show.  In the Doctor Who episode "The Face of Evil," the Fourth Doctor remarks, "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they do not alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

The aptness of that quote these days hardly needs to be pointed out.

But there are many others, in books, television, and movies, quotes that somehow stand out for their unexpected depth (sometimes even in otherwise silly settings; the episode "The Face of Evil" was unremarkable in other respects).  Some only gain their punch from the context -- I'm reminded of Eowyn's defiant "I am no man" in Return of the King, immediately before she stabs the King of the Nazgûl right between the eyeballs, and the heartbreaking line at the end of Vanilla Sky when Sofia Serrano says, "I'll see you in the next life, when we both are cats."  Neither has much significance unless you know the story.

But there are a handful of true gems that carry their weight even independent of where they're from.  Here are a few of my choices:

• "Deserves it! I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
• "You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do." -- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
• "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won.  There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall." -- Mohandas Gandhi in Gandhi
• "There is no greater agony than having an untold story inside you." -- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -- Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
• "Oh, yes, the past can hurt.  But you can either run from it, or learn from it." -- Rafiki in The Lion King
• "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
• "Get busy living, or get busy dying." -- Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption
• "Not important?  Blimey.  That's amazing.  You know, in nine hundred years in time and space, I have never met anyone who wasn't important." -- The Eleventh Doctor, Doctor Who, "A Christmas Carol"
• "Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back what you have stolen.  For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great...  You have no power over me." -- Sarah in Labyrinth
• "Live now; make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again." -- Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Inner Light"

Nota bene: If you can watch "The Inner Light" and not ugly cry at the end of it, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.  That episode has to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on television.

So... there are a few of my favorite profound quotes from fiction.  What are yours?

**************************************

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

Scum and villainy

For today's Fiction Friday, let's consider: Bad Guys.

One of the problems I find with a lot of writing is that the antagonists are completely unbelievable.  Take, for example, the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings.  I know I'm stepping on hallowed ground by even suggesting a criticism of Tolkien, but have you ever asked yourself why the Orcs were so pissed off at everyone?  Now, I'm not talking about Saruman's Orcs, who were promised rewards; but just your run-of-the-mill, cave-dwelling, dull-witted nose-picker sort of Orc who lived in the Misty Mountains and who presumably didn't give a rat's ass who won the Battle of Helm's Deep.  They somehow still hated the Elves and all the rest, just 'cuz, and were willing to die by the thousands because of it.

Well, I'm not buying it.

That kind of villain becomes almost a Snidely Whiplash caricature, mwa-ha-ha-ha-ing over the predicament of the protagonist for no obvious reason.  And while this worked to comic effect in Dudley Do-Right, it kind of falls flat in a serious story.

Stories which carry some emotional weight -- which, presumably, is what most authors are aiming for -- need to have an antagonist with as much depth as the  protagonist.  To me, the best stories are the ones where you end up feeling some understanding for the antagonist.  You still don't want him/her to win, but you think at the end, "I almost felt sorry, there, when (s)he was ripped apart and eaten by rabid weasels."

Take Darth Vader, for example.  How much less powerful would that story have been had you not felt a little sad that he had taken the path he did, when he died in Luke's arms?

A writer I know, who shall remain nameless, suffers from the worst case of One-Dimensional Villain Syndrome I've ever seen.  Every story she's ever written has an arrogant, patriarchal, middle-aged white male as the villain.  Furthermore, these APMAWMs are always guilty of victimizing and demeaning women, but the women always end up Showing Them A Thing Or Two, leaving the APMAWM in question to retreat in disarray.  It's as predictable as clockwork.  The result, unfortunately, is that besides the stories appearing completely formulaic, it leaves us wondering about what the APMAWMs do in their spare time, when they're not looking around for women to degrade.  Nothing, is my guess, because these dudes seem to have no other characteristics than (1) the required anatomical equipment and ethnic group identification, (2) arrogance, and (3) patriarchiality.  They have no other motivation, no other personality traits, and (most importantly) no sympathetic characteristics at all.

Note that I am not objecting to this on the grounds of my meeting three of the above-mentioned characteristics of APMAWMs.  Nor am I saying that men who do those sort of horrible things don't exist.  (Much though I wish that were true.)  It's the fact that their villainy is all they have; there's nothing else to them.  For what it's worth, I respond with equal eyerolling when I read a story from the 30s or 40s which features the femme fatale stereotype.  I want to find out what these women do, when they're not lounging on the tops of barroom pianos smoking cigarettes in long holders, looking for naïve young men to lure into fornication.  What do they like to eat for dinner?  How do they pay the rent?  Do they get together with friends on Saturday morning to drink coffee and discuss how the fornication went that week?  Do they subscribe to Femme Fatale Weekly?

Saying that a character is evil "just because this character is evil" isn't enough.  What motivates him/her?  Power?  Revenge?  Lust?  Greed?  And why has this become a driving motivation?  Just as no one is evil "just because," no one becomes evil "just because."  An antagonist needs a backstory, a reason for their actions.

As my college creative writing teacher put it, "Always remember that all villains are the heroes of their own stories."

And they can't be thoroughly evil.  Sauron aside, no one is 100% evil.  Even the worst of the worst have some positive traits, and those can be used to set off the bad things they do, to heighten the tragedy of their characters and actions.  Maybe the bad guy hates his neighbors, but loves his dog.  Maybe she is greedy as King Midas but never forgets to send her mother a gift on her birthday.  Maybe he's a thoroughgoing APMAWM but has given everything to the family business, so he can pass it along to his children.  And so on.

Life is full of contradictions, and good writing reflects life.  This applies to the bad guys as well as the good guys.  Antagonists should be as richly three-dimensional as protagonists -- it's one of the hallmarks of deep, interesting, and believable fiction.

*************************************

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday, that I thought would make a great topic for this week's Fiction Friday: does a good 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 novel 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-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 couple that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looked at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, 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.  In the most recent incarnation of the Doctor, the episode "Orphan 55" 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 tell 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 see 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'll figure it out.

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 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.  Two of my most explicitly moralistic tales, the short stories "Last Bus Stop" and "Loose Ends" (both available in my collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows), are about the fragility of life and how we should look after each other because we never know how long we have -- but I think in both cases 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.

*************************************

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

The mad clockwork

I am fundamentally an optimistic person.

I know that might be surprising, given that I frequently write here at Skeptophilia about the absolute mind-bending stupidity humans sometimes come up with.  Even so, I'm firmly of the opinion that most people are decent and kind, and just want what everyone wants -- stability, the basic necessities of life, friendship and family, acceptance, support.  Traveling as much as I have reinforced that; everywhere I've gone, even to places where the culture is entirely different from the one in which I was raised, I've found that friendliness is reciprocated and most people I meet are basically good at heart.

But if there's one thing that I can identify as a pervasive flaw in the human psyche, it's our determination to keep doing things the way we've always done even after it's been demonstrated beyond any doubt that it's not working, or is causing actual problems, sometimes worse ones than the ones we're solving.  Two obvious examples come to mind, and are probably the same ones you'd come up with.  Climate change -- after all, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius told the world about the greenhouse effect in the 1890s, and theorized that burning fossil fuels would boost the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and raise temperatures.  So it's not exactly a new idea.  Scientists have been recommending a severe cutback on fossil fuel use since the 1970s.

And yet here we are.

The other one is of more recent vintage, and is the recommendation by medical professionals to wear masks and avoid gatherings to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.  The sense of this should be obvious when you look at success stories like New Zealand, which effectively eradicated the disease entirely.  But no -- to score political points, even if it's at the expense of thousands of lives, idiots like Jim Jordan and Sean Hannity talk about how "the left" (for that, read "people who would like their friends and family to stay alive") wants to cancel Christmas, and that the suggestion we have virtual get-togethers this year is the equivalent of carpet-bombing Whoville.

The reason the topic of continuing to repeat our mistakes ad infinitum comes up is that I just re-read the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller.  

The first edition cover, from 1959

The book takes place after the "Flame Deluge" (the nuclear war that we came so close to back in the 1960s and 1970s) effectively destroyed civilization, sending us back into the Dark Ages.  It's divided into three sections: Fiat Homo ("Let there be man"), Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"), and Fiat Voluntuas Tua ("Let thy will be done").  There is about an eight-hundred-year gap between the sections, and each one has as its main character a monk of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz in the deserts of New Mexico; first the meek, earnest Brother Francis Gerard, then the brilliant but conflicted Dom Paulo, and finally the staunch, deeply courageous Abbot Jethrah Zerchi.  And through the course of the book we watch civilization rebuild, to the point that they're on the verge of doing it all again, despite knowing what will happen, despite seeing all around them the effects of the first global nuclear war.

[The image is an Amazon link if you'd like to order a copy]

Near the end of the book is a passage, spoken by Abbot Zerchi, which would be in strong contention for the most poignant lines ever written:

Listen, are we helpless?  Are we doomed to do it again and again and again?  Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an endless cycle of rise and fall?  Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk.  Ground to dust and plowed with salt.  Spain, France, Britain, America -- burned into the oblivion of the centuries.  And again and again and again.

Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

I first read this brilliant, beautiful, and devastating novel when I was an undergraduate, and although I kept my copy of it, I never re-read it until I was casting about for something to read a couple of weeks ago and stumbled across it.  And it's still as spot-on as it was when it was written in 1959, back during the Cold War, when kids did nuclear bomb drills by hiding under their desks, and we all pretended that this was somehow preparing for the results of an all-out war.

The threat of nuclear war has fortunately faded, but that tendency to repeat our mistakes hasn't gone away.  We only listen to the scientists when what they say is convenient and won't disrupt our comfortable lives.  We don't even considering changing our course until things have gotten so bad that a course correction is unlikely to have any effect.

And we still tolerate elected officials who don't deserve the title of "leaders," who choose to play politics when the health, safety, and lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of people are at risk.

I wish I could find some positive way to end this post, but like the last Abbot of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, instead I'm afraid all I can do is stand there in dumb amazement at our determination not to learn from history.  Sure, some of us act; there are those few who are truly willing to walk their talk regardless of the risk, people like Dr. Sandra Steingraber whose fight against the disinformation campaign from the fossil fuels industry has landed her in jail.  People like author, journalist, and dedicated environmental advocate Bill McKibben.  People like the late Wangari Maathai, who virtually single-handedly improved the lot of Kenyan women through her tireless efforts to break the patriarchy's stranglehold on business.  People like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg and Cameron Kasky and Emma González and Jamie Margolin, who have refused to take no as an answer despite the difficulties and personal risks involved.

Activists like them are absolutely critical, and give me hope, but we need more of them.  A lot more.  My intuition is that we're at a crossroads; a point where we're faced with a choice between doing things as we've always done despite knowing, knowing with absolute assurance, that the old ways don't work, and changing what we do even if it's hard.

Let's all dedicate ourselves, today, to making the right choice.

*************************************

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

[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.

***************************************

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 lure of the storyteller

I've been a storyteller since I can remember.  Nicer than calling it "compulsive liar," which I suppose is what it is, not that I claim my stories are true anymore, something I was known to do as a child.  Even if you know it's not real -- maybe especially if you know it's not real -- to imagine things to be different than they are, to dream of a world different than the one you inhabit, is mesmerizing.

I had my first experience sharing a story I'd written when I was in first grade.  It was a ridiculous little thing, with equally ridiculous illustrations, about a bird that fell out of its nest and bent his beak, then had to find someone to help him straighten it out.  I was terrified when I got up in front of the class to read it... but they loved it.  They laughed at the right places, and applauded when I was done.

And I was hooked for life.

What's curious is why this drive exists at all, and why it is so common.  Almost everyone either likes telling stories, hearing stories, or both.  What possible purpose could there be to telling stories that are obviously false both to teller and listener?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A new paper in Nature: Communications, by Daniel Smith et al., sheds some light on this uniquely human behavior.  Entitled "Cooperation and the Evolution of Hunter-Gatherer Storytelling," the researchers conclude that storytelling exists to pass along social norms, encourage cooperation, and enhance social cohesion.  The authors write:

Storytelling is a human universal.  From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories.  Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling.  Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller.  Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a foraging ecology, such as cooperation, sex equality and egalitarianism.  These themes are present in narratives from other foraging societies.  We also show that the presence of good storytellers is associated with increased cooperation. In return, skilled storytellers are preferred social partners and have greater reproductive success, providing a pathway by which group-beneficial behaviours, such as storytelling, can evolve via individual-level selection.  We conclude that one of the adaptive functions of storytelling among hunter gatherers may be to organise cooperation.

So storytelling helps the community by teaching the social structure, and helps the storyteller by increasing the likelihood (s)he will have sex.

Which is pretty cool.

In a piece that study lead author Daniel Smith wrote for The Conversation, we find out that it's not only literal storytellers who are more likely to get lucky:

Even in modern, Western society skilled storytellers – ranging from novelists and artists to actors and stand-up comics – have a high social status.  There is even some evidence that successful male visual artists (a form of modern-day storyteller) have more sexual partners than unsuccessful visual artists.

This, Smith says, not only explains why we've become storytellers, but why we've become story listeners.  He writes:

Humans have evolved the capacity to create and believe in stories.  Narratives can also transcend the “here and now” by introducing individuals to situations beyond their everyday experience, which may increase empathy and perspective-taking towards others, including strangers.  These features may have evolved in hunter-gatherer societies as precursors to more elaborate forms of narrative fiction. 

Such narratives include moralising gods, organised religion, nation states and other ideologies found in post-agricultural societies.  Some are crucial parts of societies today, functioning to bond individuals into cohesive and cooperative communities.  It’s fascinating to think that they could have all started with a humble story around the campfire.

As a novelist, it's not to be wondered at that I find all of this pretty cool.  Not, I hasten to state for the record (mostly because my wife reads my blog) that I'm looking forward to any hanky-panky with starry-eyed groupies.  But the idea that our penchant for telling stories performs a vital function, benefiting both teller and listener, is fascinating. I'm a little curious, however, about the function (if there is any) of stories that don't tell any kind of explicitly moralistic message.  Ghost stories, for example.  It's possible that the social cohesion aspect exists for those as well -- the telling-tales-late-at-night-while-camping phenomenon -- but one has to wonder if there's a different benefit accrued from different types of stories.

Maybe telling a scary story makes it more likely that a person of your preferred gender will cuddle up to you afterwards for reassurance and comfort, and also increase the likelihood of of your getting laid.  I dunno.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.  Because I write paranormal fiction, and what the plots of my novels have mostly done is made people wonder if I was dropped on my head as an infant.