Viewing entries tagged
ideas

Show don't tell - llet t'nod wohS

After last week’s post, where I dropped in the concept of “show don’t tell,” I haven’t been able to let it go. All week, there’s been a vague shadow of an idea, like an irrepressible ghost trying to get through to me.

I’d be cleaning my teeth, and over my shoulder is this thought, just kind of staring at me, eyebrows raised.

I’m in a meeting, and across the room in an empty chair, the thought is sipping ice water and rolling its eyes at my jokes.

Even now, in this bar with the renaissance cat paintings on the wall - the thought is next to me, flicking my glass, drumming its fingers on the table, staring at me expectantly.

Fine, I say to the shadow. I’ll write you.

--

The concept of “show don’t tell” is as old as any story. It’s powerful because it’s true, but it’s not simple, and it’s not binary.

On stage or screen, yes, we craft the story so that the audience can see the character’s identity through the actions they take. But what about literature? We learn so much about a character through their own internal dialogue, about how they perceive their world, and that’s all TELL, without any SHOW.

I am more like a book than a movie. I’m ruminative. I need to talk things through before ever acting. I have to speak, rant, question, second-guess myself, to get some clarity. And it’s not just clarity on what to DO, but even what it is I BELIEVE. My friend Jason and I are both ruminators, and will spend countless hours wandering city streets, spending a whole night on a single topic, just musing and playing with ideas around it, trying to get to the core of what each of us believe.

It sounds a lot like "all talk no action." How does “show don’t tell” work for that?

Often I have behaved as if my life were literature, and others could just read my mind. I’ve assumed that they understand my intentions, my motivations, my heart. On the inside I’m feeling all these things, and believing all these things, while on the outside, I’m as dull as a brick. I remember once being accused of indifference, of not caring about someone, and I was so shocked. To me, I cared deeply about this person - they were always on my mind - but to them, I was distant and uncaring.

Nobody can read our minds. Whatever we are thinking needs to be demonstrated somehow before others can believe it.

So we speak, or we act.

But, if we ONLY speak, then we may not seem authentic. We say things that aren’t proved by actions.

And if we ONLY act, then our actions can be misinterpreted. We do things that aren’t explained clearly.

“Show don’t tell” becomes a lot less simple, and certainly not universally true. To be honest (and to borrow a phrase from a Roblox game my kids play) it’s an absolute clutter-funk.

—

I look over at the shadow-thought, reclining in the candlelight, and I scowl.
"You are not easy to write." I grumble.
“But here you are writing” it replies smugly.
"But all I’m doing is dumping words onto a page. Adding to the noise. It’s all ‘tell.’" I say.
“So it doesn’t matter?”
“If I don’t do this, nothing happens at all. The words stay locked in my head, and nothing reaches anyone.”
“So it does matter?”
“Oh shut up."

—

Show. Tell. Talk. Act. They're all important. And we’ll all do it differently. This dance between speaking our truths, and acting on them, is a fluid, ever-changing energy, and really can't be constrained to a rulebook of specifics.

It's frustrating to admit, but most of our decisions are born from intuition rather than logic. Behind all the words and all the actions is a mysterious drive, a spark, a shadow of an idea that pushes us towards speaking or acting, and I don’t really know how much control we have over that. I heard an interview with a writer this week, and she was asked about her process, the rules she followed for writing her books.

She said that no system has ever worked for her. She said that the words come, and all she can do is write, and observe what she is writing, and make sure she believes it, and then edit appropriately.

Which I thought was wonderful, because I can’t do systems either. For writing or for living. But I can try to stay open to intuition, and respond with both words and actions, and then observe it all, and make changes, and keep growing.

—

I stare over my empty glass with a sigh, and the shadow-idea stares back.

“Is it enough?” I ask, a bit hopelessly.

The shadow leans forward, places a hand on mine, and smiles. “It’s enough."

Giving voice to the radio waves

Hemmingway once said "write drunk edit sober," which I love. Not that I often do exactly that, but the idea of freewriting is a strong one - that open-minded, hold-it-lightly, stream-of-consciousness that just plucks words out of the ether and tosses them to the page.

So, this post is a freewrite. I'd normally refine it, simplify it, whatever, but after reading it I thought it would be most authentic to just leave it as is.

Enjoy.
__________

What if everything is just flowing through us like radio waves all the time?
Energy and creation, messages from God, voices from the past.
And what if most of us, most of the time, were just oblivious to it?

The few who are sensitive to certain frequencies would “see” something that others don’t. They would “feel” something. An intuition, a 6th sense, a premonition, a prophecy.

In the pentecostal church I grew up in, we were encouraged to reach our senses out, stretch our sensitivity to “discern” spiritual movements in the world. And we did, and we felt stuff. We saw things, and heard things, we dreamt dreams and saw visions.

I have a friend who sees feathers. Not “I see dead people.. and feathers” kind of thing, but she just notices them. A feather in the wind, a feather on the ground, a feather in a doorway. She is very aware of feathers, and she assigns meaning to them. It's never just a happenstance, when a feather appears. The moment is elevated, and my friend feels seen and known by forces greater than herself. I see way more feathers now too.

I have another friend who feels the darkness someone else is holding. He says it's like a black wave, like ink, and when he gets that feeling be becomes more interested in the person, more attuned to their words, their fears and masks. And when the time is right, he calls it out. He asks them about their darkness, and they respond with surprise and relief, and they leave with a lot less ink in their waters.

I’ve been wondering whether this might actually be the masterplan for us humans: That we each see different things, interpreting the same event in an entirely unique and personal way, so that together we can be a full-spectrum community. I see X in that event, and you see Y, and instead of arguing that only one is correct, we consider that both frequencies are valid. An attitude like this would allow us to paint all the dimensions of something that would otherwise be limited to our single-perspective shape.

Like, if a giant cylindrical pyramid landed on its side in the desert, and there were two groups of people, one at the south end, and one at the west end. Those in the south would declare that what they see in the distance is absolutely a circle. Those in the West would say it’s definitely without a doubt a triangle. If neither group moves, then no amount of conversation between them would result in a change of opinion. They both have the absolute truth, and therefore the other options must be false.

It’s a dimension thing, and a perspective thing.

The solution of course is simple. Somebody leaves their fixed viewpoint and takes a journey of discovery. They do a lap of the cylindrical pyramid and realise that there are other dimensions in play. And when they return, they can share with the others the new, broader, wider truth:

That both sides were true, and neither had the whole truth.

But in our lives, we often can't move. We're stuck in our spots, and when we hear of new perspectives it's very hard for us to shift our understanding to believe it. Even when someone who has taken that journey of discovery explains it to us. But I think it's our unique privilege to try.

Perhaps what makes us human is our ability to intuit, to NOT take a “fact” at face value. To ask of everything, not “what is happening?” but “what do I make this mean?”

To incline our hearts towards the radio waves, and allow everything flowing through us to have a voice.

In story, we know that truth is NOT the facts. Nobody really cares about the facts. The audience is not here for the facts. That is just information. What the audience is most interested, in, and what we all actually need the most from each other, is an understanding of what we made the facts mean.

Meaning is not found in a list of facts, but in every unique and differing perspective of humanity. None of us alone can build a complete picture of our world.

We need each other.

Like-minded vs like-hearted

This week, I spent a lot of hours writing a thing. I had an idea, and was focussed on sharing it, pushing my opinion, convincing my readers that the idea is true. I was going to post it today.

But then I read it. And then I trashed it.

I realised that I was writing so that others would agree with me. Like-minded others who would rally to my side, while I shared a polaric opinion about something I honestly didn’t know enough about.

There is a great difference, it turns out, between being like-minded and being like-hearted.

Like-minded people gather together and agree, and rant against those that disagree. We form groups and sides, and double down on our beliefs and stances and our right-ness.

Like-hearted people, in contrast, gather on the plain of love, acceptance, and difference. We believe different things on the surface, we can disagree, and have totally unique life experiences. But we stay together to learn from each other: perspectives, opinions, wisdom from other angles.

I often find it difficult to engage with a single-minded writer. They either have me on their side, or they don't, and then they are just trying to convince me of something. That's fine for a science paper, but it's not STORY.

Storytelling is all about like-heartedness. All writers have deep beliefs and opinions, but the great ones never explicitly need to share them. They wrap their world views in a trojan horse of shared narrative experience, allowing their audience to walk with them and draw their own conclusions in their own time.

Storytelling invites everyone in. It may seem like the softest tool of revolution, but it honestly has the most power to actually change someone’s mind. Living like-heartedly means you don’t have to convince, win or own. You just have to invite, and listen, and share the stories.

How should a human being lead their life?

Aristotle poses this question in his writings in Ethics, and it’s one we all ask ourselves at some point in our lives:

“How should I lead my life?”
“Why am I here?”
“What is meaningful? Worthwhile?”
“What’s the goal, outside of survival?”

I doubt there will ever be absolute definitive answers to these kinds of questions, but I want to share a storytelling perspective that I just find useful to life-hack some meaning into my days:

For some context, when writers and speakers craft their stories, they have certain intentions. They might want to move the audience. To elicit an emotional reaction. Or tell a story that is considered meaningful, memorable. Or they have an idea to unpack, a vision to share, an inspiring something that could spark change in the audience.

They essentially craft stories to describe their own beliefs and values, in such a way that strangers will be moved towards those values in some way. They have this crafting toolkit that allows them to build meaning and influence into their scenes. They have the ability to generate an interesting and engaging story, that forces an audience to sit up and listen.

It's a bit manipulative really, but a good storyteller will deliver their content in such a way that others’ attentions are captured, their interest held, their hearts awakened, their imagination alive, their minds intrigued and challenged. And when the story is over, the values of the audience may be slightly more aligned to those of the teller.

That’s a really powerful skillset. And no, I don't think the ability to influence others makes life meaningful.

What interests me is WHY storytelling elicits this engagement at all. Do we, the audience, respond to good stories because they are told well, or are good stories told in response to our natural predilection to respond to those deeper elements contained within?

The storytellers of old may have developed their craft out of necessity to be paid, but the chemistry works for a reason, and I think it’s this: We all respond to STORY because we are built to engage in the deep elements within the story.

Conflict. Meaning. Love. Loss. Transformation. Everything we respond to in a story is a reflection of what resonates in our real lives. The story is simply the archetype of a truth that we all deeply and intuitively understand.

For example, let's say we have a protagonist in a story who gets removed from office through a nepotistic process. The storyteller is describing an injustice, a bullying, and we the audience immediately feel it. Not because we have been specifically overlooked in favour of the boss’s daughter for a "logistics role" at work, but because in our deep human core of universal understanding, we have felt the same. The surface experience is different, but the underlying philosophical base is the same. On the surface, there are a billion different stories, but below, we are the same.

When searching for meaning, this concept really makes my heart leap, and it's at the core of my story coaching work: how to get past the surface differences, and realise that we are the same. We’re all in this together. We are human.

We need to get over, get past, get beyond our assumption that whatever is happening on the surface is all that is happening. The surface is not the truth. The surface is just “life”. It’s the stuff that’s happening. But below it is where the storyteller works: In the realm of what we make those surface experiences mean. This is the space I want to consider a whole lot more often: what did I make that mean?

So this is where I find meaning for myself. This is why I’m still learning and researching how storytellers craft their stories. Because within that crafting is a deep insight into the human condition, and a whole toolkit for creating meaningful life experiences.

These days, my question is this:

“By implementing the ancient tools of story in my actual day-to-day living, can I generate new life experiences that I and others would find interesting and engaging? Could I create life scenes that capture attention, hold interest, awaken hearts, revive imaginations, intrigue and challenge minds?”

And my answer is yes. I absolutely can. It will be a life’s work, and it will be infused with hope and love and conflict and mindfulness. But also, a little more meaning.

Nook

I recently attended a writer's club in the city. An eclectic group of authors, screenwriters and creatives spend ten or twenty minutes at a time writing things based on a prompt. The focus this week was on past memories, childhood moments, that sort of thing. The idea is that the prompt triggers certain words, that draw out certain memories, that remind us of forgotten experiences, that we can use to discover more about ourselves. It's a kind of narrative therapy, as well as a creative writing exercise.

For me, this exercise was a reminder of how I synthesise my thoughts and ideas. It's embarrassing to admit, but I honestly feel like my head is perpetually empty. A clean slate, or a holding space. Until I speak a word, or write a sentence, my mind is entirely blank. When I form the words, my brain then catches up - it's quite backwards to how I imagine most humans think.

I've gotten used to it over time, but it's still scary: To do or be anything in life, I have to somehow trust that my emptiness is fullness, and then I have to speak myself into being.

Anyway, below is a piece I wrote in the writer's club. You might see a progression from "empty headspace" to "childhood memory" to "what really matters to me."

(The prompt was "cosy nook" incidentally, and we had twenty minutes.)

----

I like freedom. I do. Wide open spaces, and open skies, and all of that. But they are not my favourite places. What I love more than anything are smaller spaces. Snuggle spaces. Cosy nooks. When I’m in the wide open, my mind reaches for the ceiling, it stretches to the edges of sight. I take in as much as I can reach, and it’s hard to process it all. Writing in a field is not easy for me.

No, what I love are loft spaces. One desk and a rainy window. A rug, a heater, a chair and some whisky. Constriction of the physical space, so that my mind can relax, strip down to it’s togs, and dive into the deep well of internal space.

When I was a kid, we moved houses a lot. I didn’t think it was anything unusual, but eventually I learned that no, most families had more than one Christmas in the same house. Most kids had treasures, and stuff from years ago, whereas we always arrived at a new house a box or two lighter. It was the moving company that lost the box, Dad would say.

But here’s the thing. As far as childhood memories go, my most fondest ones involve those cardboard boxes. When we were getting close to moving day, we would have rooms piles high with boxes, pushed up against the walls and the windows, three or four high. I would get lost in the beige cities of the spare bedroom, spend hours snuggled in a corner, the towering boxes on my left, and the window to the garden on my right.

I don’t ever remember the garden though. I never saw outside the glass. My world was two feet wide and as deep as my 10-year-old body, and it was wonderful. I had books to read, a cat to pat, and nothingness to stare at. It was the late afternoon light that really got me. Everything just glowed, and I would focus my attention on a space three inches in from the window, on the fine cloud of haze, dust and cat hair that spun in lazy golden circles. It was eternal time in that space.

No, writing in a field is not easy for me. I would need to build a barn.

Transformation

In storytelling, there is always a great emphasis on making an audience feel something, or think something, or change somehow. We ask "how will this story transform my audience?"

But why is audience transformation important? Why bother considering who we are speaking to, or writing to, at all?

For many, especially in academia, considering one’s audience is not their highest priority. Their concern is for the integrity of the content, the completeness of the information. And that’s okay. They are doing exactly what they should be doing - accurately documenting a concept for historical record, for education.

The subtle (but actually enormous) difference between information-sharing and storytelling, is in the intent:

Storytelling intends to move others.

Storytelling is social change-making, idea-sharing in a way that is memorable and transformational. So, how the audience responds to your ideas does matter. A well-crafted story allows your reader or listener to easily take your ideas with them. Like a passenger on a road trip, your idea is driven to fresh places, introduced to new friends, shared and enjoyed.

It's transformation, not documentation.

Storytelling is a relationship. It seeks permission, it respects all parties, it builds trust. It opens possibilities for your audience, but doesn’t coerce change out of them.

Whether we are on a stage, writing a book or in a conversation, wherever our ideas are being shared it is vital that they are delivered with care and consideration of the audience in front of us. If we cannot make our audience care somehow, our stories will go nowhere.

When an audience is open to our message, then our ideas, our contribution to the world, have the best chance of making the personal, societal or relational impact they were conceived to make.

You are an explorer

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

- Terence McKenna, ethnobotanist (1946-2000)