Wednesday 17 October 2012

Sympathectomy


I happened across this word the other day and it hit my funny receptors.

Sympathectomy – surgery to remove that completely superfluous and useless emotion...sympathy.

Sympahty? Ugh. It trips you over and gets you empathising with other people. Next thing you know, you’re taking time off your important and busy schedule and... listening to people, possibly even helping them. Economic rationalists will argue strongly about the resultant loss of productivity. And subsequently refer you to the nearest surgeon.

I thought I’d stumbled into a Dilbert-esque formula for creating winners in the rat-race. Surgery for CEOs to remove even the slightest possibility they base decisions on anything other than monetary concerns.

Darn it! Wrong again. It’s actually a procedure to remove a part of the Sympathetic Nervous System (the system that looks after things far too trivial for our conscious attention to deal with. Yanno, useless stuff such as heart rate, blood pressure, responses to dangerous stimuli and the immensely important actions of blushing and sweating.)
 
 A sympathectomy is actually a little more mundane, performed on those who blush and sweat too easily – or believe they do. It involves removing some nerves to cut down on cheeks that redden too quickly and underarms that could house a few fish.
 
Excessive blushing or sweating? Actually, that sounds kind of like a sensitive person to me. Prone to nervousness, anxiety. Maybe a nervous tic or two. Easily embarrassed. Takes on other’s emotions. Maybe gives in a little too readily. Tries to see it from another’s point of view. Everybody's point of view. Who'd want to be like that? Yep, an excess of sympathy/ empathy there. What a ditherer! Definately a candidate for the procedure to turn them into cold-hearted sharks.
 
No thanks. I think creative people need an abundance of empathy or sympathy. Writers need to see a conflict from many angles to make a multi-layered story. Good stories need heroes/ines the reader can immediately identify with. A great villain too. A great villain isn;t a shadowy figure who does nasty things randomly, and makes the protags life a misery. No, their goals need to clash with the protagonsists’ goals. The better a writer can flesh out everybody’s motives, the more lively the story. And writers need to dither, to experiment, to show sympathy and understanding and empathy for all.

Our softer sides might slow us down in the rat race, but as they say, the trouble with the rat race is that the rat wins.

Saturday 6 October 2012

I"'ve got an idea for a story!"

"Great! Write it."

I always say this as enthusiastically as possible. Mainly becuase I don't want to discourage anybody but also because it sounds much nicer than "So what?"

I believe that everybody has an idea for a story. Ideas for stories are as rare as the ability to take air in through our noses. Actually, they're more common, because some people can't breathe nasally. Recounting tales is older than printing, older than writing, as old as communication itself. It's something we do everyday to help make sense of the world. We narrate our lives, directly and thorugh metaphor. We invent lives and narrate them. However, only a small handful of people tell stories that others actually want to pay to read.

I've heard people say that they had thought about a story about a school for wizards years before Rowling did, except she beat them to it, and look at how well she did with it. As if simple timing was what stood between them and the entire Harry Potter empire.

Which is rubbish. Sure, they might have had that idea. But on what planet does a story require just one single idea?

A story consisting of a single idea would be "Once upon a time there was a boy wizard called Harry who went to a wizarding school and defeated an evil guy who also happened to have killed his parents. The end." And I lied. That snippet's comprised of more than one idea. 

A story consists of millions of ideas. Ideas about characters and situations and complications and resolutions. About personalities and voices. About tension and drama and humour. Every word choice is itself an idea about effectiveness and economy.

Luckily, ideas are generous and gregarious and breed prolifically. Ideas are everywhere, and ideas come to those who are patient, and even those who are not. Some ideas are fantastic, many are not. I guess the art is to discriminate between them.

But what I've learnt since making the decision to take creative writing seriously is the more I encourage ideas, the more freely they flow. Ideas are social creatures, they attract more ideas. They like to party in my brain and are amenable to being pinned-down on paper. And the more ideas I have, the more confident I feel to cull the duds.

So, have you got an idea for a story? Well, great ... write it. And keep going.