by Debbie Bateman
Image use purchased from Adobe Stock
A body in repose
I have an art photo on the wall above my printer taken by my friend, the talented photographer named Matt Kubitza. In black and white, the photo shows an unclothed woman on her back with her legs crossed over a tall stack of books. An open book is on her lap. Other books scatter over the white floor—something about the IRA, a play by T. S. Eliot, lyrics from pub songs, books in German. They come in all sizes.
The bolder books drift upwards in partial states of openness, their titles concealed in the fluttering pages. Seems they have other places they’d rather be than in someone’s hands. A thin paperback by Cicero balances on the woman’s big toe. Her legs are crossed at the ankles. She is in full repose.
Over her lap, an open book reveals a close-up photo of a young boy. A knit cap perches on the tip of his head, leaving both ears exposed. Flat lipped and heavy browed, his round face is serious. He’s a child with experiences no child should have, and he breaks my heart every time, cracks it right open . . . which is a good place from which to write. I firmly believe this.
I look at this photo often. The boy opens me, and the other parts of the image remind me to keep tossing ideas into the thin air, to now and then dare to balance a particular idea like a book on my crazy-long big-toe. Yeah, the one that always turned black whenever I dared to train for a marathon. It’s a toe that sticks out, foolishly longer than all of my other stubbies, like it’s asking for trouble and maybe deserves whatever it gets.
What does that have to do with fiction?
The photo grounds me in the practice of being a creative writer. It reminds me of how it is done, the need to approach with vulnerability, to be naked on a white space. And the chaos of tossed books reminds me that it is equally important to surround myself with any random idea that flutters by. Let them heap onto the floor or float upward untethered by me.
It is no accident that my walls and the window frame and the blinds in my office are all paper white. For a brief crazy period, I considered painting my office orange. Then I remembered where writing begins and I welcomed the simple clean of an unwritten page.
All the stories and poems and personal essays I try to write, anything creative I seek to put into words, must be filtered through my body. The brain would like to claim authorship. It has lots of internalized theories like books all properly shelved and arranged in Dewy Decimal order, good stuff about how to write, keen observations about the human psyche, endless analyses of story structures—the stuff I like to hoard. But none of it does me any good until it is felt. For me, stories are born in flesh and bone and vital organs. If they are any good, if they are alive at all, I feel them in my nerves and on my skin.
Yearning and why it matters
Several years ago, a fellow writer recommended a super helpful book called, “From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction” by Robert Olen Butler. He argues that stories are not driven by the sequencing of action, but rather by the playing out of deep yearnings. And where do yearnings live? Well, in the body as emotions, mostly.
I struggled mightily for years, trying to find a way to express emotions that might resonate with readers. Like most things related to writing, it is a lifelong endeavour and worth every moment. Bodily sensations might happen first in the writer, but if they are not also experienced by readers, the story will never take a single breath.
Sometimes it’s enough to describe a gesture or a facial expression. A tool like “The Emotion Thesaurus” by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi can help with that. Colourful dialogue also can go a long way in conveying a character’s emotions. But for real impact, the writing must do more. It must evoke a visceral experience that is so strong the reader feels it in their own body. When that happens, not only do the feelings land more soundly, the reader gets a jolt of self-satisfaction and pleasure because they are using their imagination. This sort of thing is delicious, addictive too.
The objective correlative
Jack Hodgins addresses the need to convey emotions in his book, “A Passion for Narrative.” He recommends when trying to convey emotions, that fiction writers use the objective correlative. Say that fast three times, I dare you. It’s a big term for a powerful concept.
T. S. Eliot explains it better than I ever will:
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” (T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism)
Listening to the body
With concerted effort, I eventually came to recognize and appreciate the objective correlative in other people’s writing. But I never learned from the act of reading how to conjure the objective correlative in my own work.
Maybe that’s because philosophy draws most on the activities of the mind and emotions are an activity for the body. Being able to define something with words does not mean you can make it real. Like the woman in the photo on my wall, I must sink into the moment, be vulnerable and above all attune with my full body, every organ and bone and muscle and nerve.
When I do that, if I am lucky, the details of the story filter through a universal language of feelings. The living essence of the story is not captured by any individual action, facial expression, or tidbit of dialogue no matter how vivid. It lives instead in every word of the story. Holy wow, really? I kind of think so.
As for what shows up on the open book in my lap? That does not seem within my control and there is always a risk it will break my heart . . . which if you’ll remember, is the best place from which to write.
Full circle.
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Debbie Bateman 