Writing

Emma Jung: A Life Less Ordinary Part One

This is the first part of my short story based on the life and work of Emma Jung, sourced from books about Carl and Emma Jung.(See below). I have written it in the 1st person (close), imagining that Emma is addressing Carl in later life when they are both old. I wish to show Emma Jung from a woman’s perspective. What was it like, “warts and all”, being married to this great man, who left such an awesome legacy to the world?

I Am Emma Rauschenbach

Part One

I was telling our grandson Andreas just the other day, while out walking together, how he possesses the feeling function more strongly than I. He had just espied a darling dead chaffinch on the ground, and was kneeling over its poor lifeless body.

The words, Nothing truly dies that escaped my mouth, seemed to come from another’s voice, perhaps that of the dead bird itself.

When we returned home, you were there waiting for us with your old man’s rheumy eyes, teary from nostalgic reveries, no doubt. I thought How wonderful this togetherness, this Liebe, after all this time.

You often told the story of seeing me on the stairs at Olberg, my second family house, when I was a mere teenager. My words, as I turned towards you, struck you as prophetic, and you knew at that moment that I would be your wife.

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But it wasn’t always a bed of roses, as you well know, my dear one. During the early years, I rarely spoke to anyone, apart from my sister and my dear mama, about the state of my marriage. But in more mature years, it sometimes helped, if not myself, at least my analysands, if I talked openly about my own marital sufferings.

My comments, usually triggered by passionate exchanges, always arrived at the same point: There were three occasions when I tried to divorce my husband.

Sometimes the remarks had a ricochet effect, being passed on one time with delight to that great founder himself, Herr Professor Freud. He used to call me “the solver of riddles”.

I was cognisant of the split looming on the horizon between you two; well before either of you were willing to acknowledge it.

Oh, how I would come to miss our intimacies, his fatherly attentions, my transferences. Our exchange of letters, if you care once more to read them, says it all. My sense of solitude was complete after the final break. We regretted it, all three, and mourned in our own unique ways. So geht das Destin.

Those words I spoke concerning my marriage, were often followed by a shocked silence.

Nothing much matters now, in any case. As you yourself never fail to suggest, we might even say that I won out in the end, by clutching onto the string, like Ariadne in the labyrinth, finding my way to this haven of peace.

Divorce was never an option. Was it by a dark Fate that I was placed in such a cruel predicament by the one I loved? The intervention of what you called your “second personality” deemed it so. Whenever I mentioned the possibility of a separation, your reaction was to fall ill or have a near-death accident.

I always gave in and administered therapeutic assistance until you recovered. How could I do otherwise? I loved you, you loved me, and there were five more of us before very long.

Having grown up in the Haus zum Rosengarten, in a mansion with a rose garden, on the banks of the Rhine River in Schaffhausen, my childhood, unlike yours, had been idyllic. I was ever cognisant of this fact and never lorded it over you. In 1903, after the grand spectacle of our wedding, you took me to a small flat in the Burgholzli Lunatic Asylum, where catatonic schizophrenics and hysteric patients wandered freely in the grounds. I was never bored, you made me laugh and learn. It was the early years of psychoanalysis. I found it fascinating.

The first three years of our marriage were idyllic. The births of our first two daughters, Agathe and Gretli, only added to the bliss.

Signs of angst arose during the days, nay weeks, leading up to that prophetic meeting between the two of you.

Waves of dread stirred within my breast, then and recently, a knowingness that I might have to leave you soon.

I had been growling about the time you spent on your work. Why did you need so many patients when I was supporting you with my inheritance? Actually, it was one particular patient, the Russian Spielrein, whose attachment to you would come to worry me most; as it turned out, Herr Freud, too, calling it “transference”. Yes, I acknowledge I was jealous; of the attentions women poured on you, and annoyed at your endless flirtations. Shocked, too, at my own dark emotions, about which I had been ignorant up until that time.

My outpourings of jealous rage frightened me, as well as you; but you were able to absent yourself, faithful always to your beloved body of work.

≈≈≈

Seated on plush velvet underneath chandeliers, we waited for you, Herr Professor Freud, in the bar of the Grand Hotel near the famous Ringstrasse. I address you now in my imagination only. Carl had organized everything, so that nothing would interfere with this coming-together of two great minds, both intent on furthering the new science of psychoanalysis. We may have looked, to you, and to the outsider, like any young couple in love. Yes, we may have seemed happy together. Oh, how appearances can be mistaken.

My husband had insisted on bringing along dear Ludwig, his assistant at the Burgholzli, to act as chaperone and to guide me around the city. How I’d growled about that, too…. But could I blame this brilliant, impressive man I’d married, for taking control of every aspect of the event? He was well equipped to pursue his ambitions in the exciting field opening up before him.

As we walked along cobbled stones towards your apartment, Carl towering over your shorter yet dapper figure, Dear Sigmund Freud, my husband talked loudly as he was wont to do.

We joined your family of nine around the luncheon table. Carl dominated, once again, while your family listened with interest and admiration, you, sucking on your pipe. He, only interested in discussing psychoanalysis, was unaware of his lack of etiquette in not bringing the children and women into the conversation.

I left with my chaperone soon after the meal. Museums, especially the natural history one, beckoned me. How I would have loved to share these trips to the opera and to the theatre, or even to relax in the opulence of the Grand Hotel, with my beloved consort by my side.

That first night, Carl did not return to the hotel until late in the morning, having talked non-stop for thirteen hours straight with his newfound colleague in his rooms. It was well known among the cohort that the unconscious was the key to everything, and the key to the unconscious was the dream.

But when you, Doktor Freud, talked about your ideas on sexual abuse being the cause of neuroses in later life, Carl begged to differ. Working closely with the insane, he had discovered for himself that sexuality and abuse were not the only variances at play in mental illness.

Despite this, he realised soon enough, that you, the wiser and older man, saw in him his legitimate heir.

≈≈≈

It is 1911 and I am seated here among all the luminaries, male and female. I feel blessed indeed, especially being here with you, my dearest Carl, as part of The Weimar Congress. I feel you leaning towards me, your breath on my hair, as if protecting me from reservations about my own self worth.

‘You have proven yourself as successful a psychoanalyst as I myself,’ you proclaim, ‘and you will be known by future generations, to have been part of the establishment of this new field of psychoanalysis.’

‘It is all due to your efforts, my dear man,’ I reply, ‘by initiating me into this field of study and practice from the beginning of our relationship. For this I will be eternally grateful.’

Nor do I feel less worthy than any of the other women, neither those youthful ones to my right, the prudish Antonia Woolf, nor the more mature women, seated here alongside me. Herr Professor Freud, that elegant man, has spoken kindly of my accomplishments. For this photo shoot, he takes centre stage, standing tall with the aid of a stool, and rightly so: A giant among men, on whose shoulders future generations of great men will stand.

And then I wake up and you are no longer here. Or is it I who have died and this is all a dream?

To be continued…

August 21, 2021 0 comment

Short Story Writing

Emma Jung: A Life Less Ordinary Part Two

This is the second part of my short story based on the life and work of Emma Jung. What was it like for Emma being married to this great man who left such an awesome legacy to the world? Was she the sacrificial lamb to her husband’s genius? Or did she, also, successfully achieve her own version of individuation, the term invented by her husband to explain personal transformation? (Leave a comment or question at the bottom of this page and I will reply.)

I Am Emma Rauschenbach

Part Two

Many will ask how I could go on living with a man who left me with the full responsibility for rearing the family, while he spent time with another woman, invited her into the household. I will tell them of my small victories, like the one during your earliest transgressions with the Russian Spielrein, whom I have long ago forgiven. She was, after all, just one of the many female psychiatrists and analysands who threw themselves unwittingly, perhaps, at my husband. After the fourth child, Marianne, I’d had enough. That is when I at last gained the upper hand in our disputes over my rights as a wife, and you heard my pleas. I was ready to leave, you begged me to stay. You promptly fell into bed with a dreadful migraine and a high temperature that left you shaking and out of control.

Like a dutiful wife, I then cared for you and nursed you back to health. Do you still remember all of this, my dearest one?

You were, yes, I avow it, handsome and charismatic, with your Teutonic good looks and vibrant personality. You are that, still, for me. How could I not forgive them all, seeing that I could not stop myself from succumbing to your charms.

Mind you, it was not love at first sight on my part. You told me that you knew, on catching a first glimpse of me as a teenager on the staircase of our house in Olberg, that I would be your wife. ‘I am Emma Rauschenberg,’ I said, in reply to your timorous query, and then the maid had come and ushered you into the salon where Mama awaited you.

≈≈≈

And so it was that I, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy industrialist, in 1899 fell in love with a penniless Irrenarzt, doctor of the insane. It was the talk of the town at the time: an attractive young woman engaged to this lowly man without finances, and lacking professional or social status. In the beginning, I saw only your arrogant side, your bulldozer personality and peasant-like manners. I rebuffed your first endeavours, which only made you more persuasive in your courtship of me.

The more I became acquainted with the gargantuan man that you were, and your equally giant personality, the more I delighted in your attentions and was enthralled by your vast intelligence. Mama, it would seem, had found me an harmonious match. I was soon betrothed. You shared your learning freely with me, satisfying that side of me that aspired to greater knowledge, denied me by my gender and by convention.

If Father had had his way, I would now be the wife of that truly conventional man he had chosen for me, son of his business colleague. My future pathway would have been laid out before me, one of bourgeoisie and of boredom. How fortunate was I to have been chosen, instead, by an unconventional suitor, who cared not for rigid rules of behaviour and comportment, and who encouraged me to learn and to better myself. How I adored that in you. I was only seventeen, and you, several years my senior. Was it Fate that had deemed it so? I was besotted and surrendered to my destiny.

It wasn’t long before you, Carl, good-looking and famous, and a virgin like myself when we married, fell under the spell of female admiration. It took me years to realise that your personality masked a dark interior, fostered by an isolated childhood and sexual abuse you’d suffered as a boy. It would take me even longer to appreciate your personal transformations, yea, that some would say were merely psychotic manifestations.

≈≈≈

My sister, urged on by her husband, took it upon herself to rebuke me: ‘How can you allow yourself,’ she said, ‘to be dishonoured in this way by your husband?’ I was always mute, with nothing to say, in my defence. This was typical of my introverted sensation type. You always said that “still waters run deep” in reference to my personality. Pressed further by Marguerite, who charged me with bringing shame upon my family, I became more and more reserved and unwilling to associate with anyone outside the family.

Around the time of the birth of our first child, Agathe, I asked you to consider a move. You stood there glowering, peasant feet planted firmly apart on the ground: ‘No, no and no,’ you shouted, ‘my work at the Bulgholzli must take precedence.’

I was only just beginning to see this hidden side of you.

Papa died and I gave birth to Gretli. It was now my turn to shout and scream.

‘I want out of this marriage, I will not live here with a growing family. You keep me pregnant like a peasant woman, and you like it thus.’

‘Darling,’ you said, stunned into obeissance by my unlikely tirade, ‘just give me a little time, and we shall move. I’ll build a castle fit for a queen, you will see.’

We talked about our impending visit to meet the illustrious Freud in Vienna, and how I would be feted and welcomed into this new field of psychoanalysis by one and all.

≈≈≈

It was around the birth of our last child in 1914, that Toni Woolf inserted herself into our lives. If it was humiliating for me, this ménage à trois was hardly fulfilling for her. You claimed it was foretold by a luminous dream of a white dove that turned into a golden-haired girl who put her arms around your neck. You set off with Toni for a “vacation” in Ravenna shortly after Helene’s birth. Of course, I was unhappy when you invited her into the household; I excluded her from all meal times with the family. Yet she became your “other wife”, and “the other woman”, in relation to me, your legal wife.

Yes, I tolerated it; I could no longer risk another pregnancy; like all mistresses, she tried to persuade you to divorce me; but nothing could come between us in the end.

Her sudden death after the relationship had waned, left the two of us in total shock, and as close as ever a couple could be thereafter.

I see her now as your beacon of light during those dangerous voyages along the River Styx. Yes, she served as a source of insight for you, while delving into the underworld. And I nurtured our brood of five, relieved that childbirth years were behind me now. Was this a great sacrifice on my part, or an example of what you call

Why did I not succeed in divorcing you? one well may ask. I begged God and prayed for delivery from my shame.

Yet you enabled me, it must be remembered, to eventually grow and become an analyst in my own right. It was quite something for the time.

≈≈≈

None of it matters now that I am old. I have fulfilled the journey that I began with you, my husband, by my side. I have said this many times to you, my dearest love: We have arrived at this companionable state together. Love changed us both, as you never fail to point out, and Ours was a different kind of love.

Although our children refused to do so, I forgave the other who tried to come between us. Toni Woolf and I became friends in the end. It was I who attended her funeral, yourself being poorly at the time. She provided something that I could not offer you, n’est-ce pas? We can talk freely, and without rancour, about these subjects now. That is one of the benefits of growing old, my darling companion. The need for lust, for giving birth, for travel, even for your beloved active imagination, all is dead and gone, leaving only peace and serenity in its wake.

Still, last words are a thing of note, and those final ones from your dear mouth have brought me great pleasure, as they did so at the time of their being spoken.

Now I hear you tell Andreas to ask me not to visit him again. He’s having nightmares. I say to the child, I must return no more, though I shall mourn the times we spend together on our walks. I am, as my Lord has said, without a body, and you are of flesh and blood.

Nor can you join us, dear my Lord. You have unfinished work to do, but we are dead. How blessed I am to have paved the way for you.

I sense that I am talking directly to you, my darling Carl. Or are these words the ramblings to herself of an old woman, the one that I had become? I felt then that my time was nigh, yet I am young again. Ignore my words if they unsettle you, my dearest love.

Last words are indeed to be remembered, and I am eternally grateful for the ones you spake that day.

You said she’d been your perfume but that I was your Queen.

When you are ready, good my liege, you shall find your way home.

I await you here, meine Liebe, my dearest love.

August 20, 2021 4 comments

Novel Writing Writing

Write about what you know … 3 authors who recently did just that!

Three colleagues who assisted me in getting my writing off the ground, have just published new works: Dina Davis with A Dangerous Daughter (Cilento Publishing), who avoided lockdown and actually had a book launch in Darwin recently; Helene Grover missed out by a hair’s breadth to publicly launch her memoir, Sometimes the Music (Cilento Publishing), before lockown intervened; and Geraldine Star, who has just published her debut novel, Shee-Oak on Amazon.

A DANGEROUS DAUGHTER is a brave and inspirational story about healing from a mysterious mental illness set in Australia in the 1950s. Ivy, a teenager from an immigrant Jewish family, is on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to survive undiagnosed anorexia nervosa. After failed and sometimes brutal attempts of medicos to trial a cure, Ivy’s family sends her away to relatives in Perth, where hope becomes possible for Ivy through psychoanalysis. Drawing on true events from the author’s life, A Dangerous Daughter will resonate with people of all ages and cultures who have endured the shame and blame of this misunderstood disorder.

“Through deftly combining her life experience with fiction in A Dangerous Daughter, Dina Davis provides a window into the much-misunderstood eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, and the complications that surround it.”

“Dina Davis’s courage in creating this book will be a gift to many.” Dr Dianne Moses, Physician

Helene Grover’s SOMETIMES THE MUSIC is another bravely honest narrative; in places poignant, funny, adventurous, and, in turn, expressing a certain vulnerability. Sometimes the Music presents the captivating lives of Helene Grover and Serge Ermoll, two dynamic individuals, children of migrants from Paris and Shanghai, who land separately in Australia, where they ultimately find each other, and the music of Rock’n Roll and jazz, which bonds them together through difficult times. Helene says: “Some people plan their life. I fell into my action packed one.”

Geoff Kluke – Australian Jazz Legend, writes: I loved Helene’s book and you will too. Couldn’t put it down. She brings to life so many of those fabulous Jazz Legends and Characters many of whom are sadly no longer with us. The stories are so fascinating and entertaining. It brought a smile to my face to be reacquainted with many of them once more.

These two authors have been part of writers’ groups for many years, the most recent one, linked to their current publishing success, being Randwick Writers’ Group, convened by Dina Davis. They have both been supported and published by Cilento Publishing, recommended by this author for all publishing and layout needs.

And then there’s Geraldine Star, also linked to Randwick Writers’ Group and others, who has taken the courageous step to self publish with Amazon, becoming an Indy author with her debut novel, Shee-Oak (Star Monde Australia). The lovely cover and layout are by Green Avenue Design, part of Cilento Publishing.

SHEE-OAK by Geraldine Star is a modern drama and testimony to the power of a stranger to undertake a troubled journey through alcohol, pills and romance to help transform a difficult young woman’s life.

A twist of fate on a rural back road begins an intergenerational story, in which vivid Aussie characters jump off the page with their personal battles, goals and changed hearts and lives. This is an authentic Australian story and voice with outback locations in which the dust and nature gets under your skin as you read.

Two women share a volatile adventure across the drought-stricken rural Hay Plain to Adelaide for a music festival. The transformative lure of pills, alcohol and romance drives them on with the possibility of a veritable explosion and tragic ending looming on the horizon for the women, ominous throughout.

I would recommend these 3 works for enjoyable/interesting reading during lockdown. And look out for future publications by them!

July 15, 2021 2 comments

Mythos Writing

Revisiting Persephone in the Underworld

My Links to the Myth

I have for a long while been drawn to the archetype of Persephone, who must descend into the underworld for half the year. My connection is linked to a long-term personal wish and desire for growth and change through psychological means. Personal attraction to an archetype is like an urgent calling, something that really speaks to you and urges you to investigate it further. There is also a possibility of extending this to a social context.

I previously wrote about this myth in relation to global warming and environmental degradation. See the previous post on this site at: https://anneskyvington.com.au/the-myth-of-persephone-and-demeter/
Now we have been rocked by a global epidemic that we have come to know as Covid19, a virus almost certainly transferred to humans from animals. Misinformation leading to increased fear among people, including the explosion of conspiracy theories, has added to the problems of finding solutions. If we are to progress as a species and as social beings, we must learn to work together as a global community.

This latest shock, represents a Persephone in the Underworld occurrence on a global scale. We are all in these dark times together, and we therefore need to look for solutions together.

The overarching symbol of the underworld is ‘the unknown’. Because it is hidden from view and unseen, it is a realm to be feared. However, one can learn to accept the reality of the underworld, just as Persephone has had to do. And by so doing, one can gain in fortitude and endurance.

The Story

Out of a crack in the earth, four black horses appear. Driving a chariot, Hades kidnaps Persephone who is picking flowers in a meadow, takes her against her will, down into the subterranean depths of the underworld. The earth closes up again, and all that is left above ground is the flowers that Persephone was collecting for her mother. She is to be married to Death, the consort of the King of the underworld. The black horses that draw Hades and the chariot represent intelligence, but, in this case, dying consciousness.

Demeter is finally able to recover her daughter, but not before Hades persuades his wife to taste of the forbidden fruit — that will ensure that she stays underground for half the year, representing the seasons of autumn and winter.

The relationship between Persephone and Demeter is basic to the whole myth. Persephone is the golden, naiive child of her mother, Demeter. She lives and plays in the apparent safety of the fields and sunlight provided her by Demeter, Queen of the horizontal world above ground. Demeter imagines that her daughter is safe from harm, happily picking flowers in the sunshine with friends and animals above ground.

The Role of Demeter

Demeter, whose domain is ‘cornucopian’ consciousness — the life of the fields and vegetation — is at first bereft, shocked and saddened over her daughter’s abduction. She then reacts with anger and inflicts famine on the earth above ground, instead of wisely seeking counsel about what to do in order to find her daughter and bring her back.

As goddess of grains and harvest, Demeter lives on the surface of things, unaware of the dark lurking out of sight; she is therefore lacking wholeness. Jung wrote that you can either have goodness or wholeness, not both together. In other words, experiencing the dark is part of becoming whole.

On a deeper level, however, the rape of Persephone represents for Demeter, a jolting of consciousness. This enables her to access, eventually, deeper levels of herself in order to grow.

The Transformative Meanings of the Myth

Demeter must learn that it cannot be always spring. She starts a relentless search for her daughter, but she remains depressed and angry; these negative emotions cause her surface domain to be depleted. If Persephone receives a shock at her abduction and kidnapping, Demeter is jolted out of her complacency, out of her superficiality. It’s a painful but necessary psychic shift that takes place within her. She experiences loss for the first time, and a new order, a new narrative, is born out of her despair and suffering.

Destruction is often the right hand of creation and creativity.

Can you see how this myth is relevant to our response to the pandemic as a community, both local and global?

June 10, 2021 1 comment

Short Story Writing

The Night of the Barricades

I open my eyes onto a strange world into which I’ve stumbled as if by chance. All is new and filled with an alien radiance, muted colours, greys yet beautiful. Hippies are twanging their guitars along the Seine. Flower sellers and precious bookstall owners hawk their wares along the promenades above. The ancient cobblestones conceal the holographs of those trapped forever in bloodstained revolutions. Seduced at every turn. I think that this must be my spiritual home, on the opposite side of the earth to my birth place.

The Frenchman I met while travelling across the Channel offered me the use of his apartment for two weeks. Why not? I thought. My tourist’s trip through the Mediterranean countries can wait. Generous and eccentric to a fault, these French — opposite story to what I’d been told! I find his street in a Michelin Guide book I bought at the Gare du Nord: rue Servandoni, in the sixth arrondissement. One change and out at the metro station near the Seine.

It’s a steep climb up a creaking staircase to the small flat overlooking a courtyard at the back of the building.

February 15, 2021 0 comment

Novel Writing Writing

How I Created My Debut Novel

The Story of the Novel

Those in the know say Write about what you know. This could be my parents’ love story, with the boring bits left out.

My story takes place in a raw and natural setting called Karrana, where a stunningly attractive young woman is ready to break out of her universe and demand more from life. She’s clever and, like a bright chrysalis, just knows that she deserves more — like the cows know when it’s time to come home for milking. She meets the love of her life, or is it her polar opposite (?), at a victory dance. This novel takes place in an Australian country setting at the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. She falls pregnant in a moment of raw passion and rebellion. This throws her back into the very environment she is trying to break free from. This is a women’s story, so it’s about love, nature, pregnancies, child nurturing and dissatisfaction. And for those men who would understand and appreciate these themes. An accident to her first ‘golden child’ sends the young woman into a spin — a bit like a depression — followed by something akin to enlightenment, wherein passion leads her into a forbidden liaison with a sophisticated, refugee doctor in Sydney.

I won’t tell you the ending, but suffice it to say that it’s a bit complicated.

How I Wrote the First Draft

I wrote it chapter by chapter over a period of 18 months in 2013 – 2014, meeting in a group of four every fortnight, Randwick Writers, convened by Dina Davis. My first mistake was to engage an editor to do a structural edit when I had written the first draft. It was not ready to be assessed at this stage. After this, I put the manuscript away for some time and concentrated on blogging. I was also attending a larger writers’ group, and focusing on memoir writing. Later on, I worked some more on the story, while attending the Waverley Writers at the local library.

The Question of Structure

I had discovered that one of the hardest things about writing a novel is accessing knowledge and skills to do with structuring a longer work. That is, with the overall storytelling aspect. It begs the question of how to hold the whole novel in your sights, in order to appreciate or critique the structure and add significant bits and sacrifice others that might be scaffolding or padding.

Writers’ groups, unless there are novelists within who are aware of textuality, cannot usually help you with this aspect. Participants often focus on the smaller aspects to do with punctuation, words and grammar, all at the level of the sentence or the chapter.

It’s even harder to remember previous scenes or chapters of your colleagues’ novel manuscripts in a group. And, if you are writing a modern work, you need to consider recent changes that have taken place in this art form.

The Bigger Picture

I thought for a long while that it’s all about understanding Voice, Viewpoint, Point of View, Scenes and other issues, such as pace and narrative arc. And about writing a segment or a chapter from go to woe, that is, from the beginning to the end. But, after getting a grasp on such elements, and finishing the first draft, I was still searching for that elusive missing link, that was how to discover the overarching theme or rationale? for the novel I was writing. This became my next quest.

A Manuscript Assessment

A talented manuscript assessor at Writing New South Wales, requested, for a moderate sum, a couple of chapters of my manuscript, together with a synopsis, and then offered an hour-long Q&A session, where we worked together, asking and answering questions. That was what got me over the hump towards completion. After that, I knew where I was coming from and where I was headed. This was important for structural cohesion of the whole work; it enabled a final culling—and/or perfecting—of relevant motifs and metaphors. Within a relatively short period of time, I felt ready to publish the novel, so that it all hangs together. The missing link for myself, was knowing the right questions in relation to overall novelistic structure, to discover the ‘meaning’ of the work. After all, the novel is about many things, but this needs to be distilled into one or two sentences. Of course, if you plan the novel beforehand, you may not need this process, but there will be other different issues to confront.

Creating a Logline

I came across Jeff Lyons through Reedsy. Jeff is an expert in the art of storytelling. He states that you need a ‘logline’, which is a summary or premise, in one or two sentences, even before you start to write your novel. Of course, most people, and I am one of them, don’t work in this way. However, I have found that it is important to be able to do this, at some stage during the creative process. According to Lyons, the logline should include 7 parts: (i) a mention of the World of the novel (ii) the main Protagonist (iii) the Problem faced (iv) the Goal or Challenge for the protagonist (v) the personalised Opponent (vi) Choices or Decisions (vii) the Action taken by the protagonist.

The Logline or Premise of Karrana

In post-World War Two Australia, Bridie, a spirited young woman brought up on a dairy farm, surrounded by beauty and rawness, seeks romance and ultimate fulfilment. She hopes her choice of a mate, who she meets at the Karrana Victory Dance, will lead to a different future than that her mother, and, later on, her husband, want to keep her cosseted in. Her passionate nature, aided by fateful irony, deems that she demands more from life than nature alone; a family accident takes a hand in ensuring this.

July 4, 2020 0 comment

Publishing Writing

Randwick Writers’ Group: Sharing Writing Skills

A book about writing groups

Joining a writing group is very popular these days, at least in Anglo speaking countries. There are many different types of writing groups, just as there are various types of writers. Some writers simply wish to record memories for their family, children and friends to read. Writing correctly and clearly will be a main push for them. Others want to hone their skills towards the goal of writing a short story, or a longer genre, such as a novel or a modern memoir. They will need different skills, for example, knowledge of how to structure a particular genre.

I have been a member of three writing groups over the years, and most participants, when asked, expressed a wish to be published. One of the groups I was a part of was Randwick Writers Group, which has recently published a book that showcases work from six members in search of writing excellence. Each of the six participants found that being part of this group brought their writing up to a new level.

This book is unique in that it has followed members from the initial phase of setting up the group, until this point, five years later, when three members have published novels, and the rest are on the point of doing so.

If you would like to find out more about the workings of writing groups, this book is what you are looking for. As well as informational content, it also showcases the writings of the authors. It can be purchased through the publisher, Ginninderra Press or through online book stores, such as Amazon and other online bookstores. Enjoy!

Click on this link to have a peep inside the online digital version of the book.

https://www.book2look.com/book/TPULpSvFiE&bibletformat=epub

Purchase the digital book at Amazon Australia

May 7, 2020 0 comment

Writing

What I learnt from writing a novel…

Before You Start…

I don’t believe anyone just knows how to write a modern novel. There are theoretical questions before you even put pen to paper that a wannabe author needs to consider. Otherwise, you may end up with a hodgepodge of outpourings that no-one is tempted to spend the time reading. Perhaps, as they practise the skill, writers begin to be able to repeat the novel writing activity more and more easily. The following are some of the questions that you will need to answer to begin with.

What Genre is it?

One of the first things you need to know before you start to write a longer work is what genre you’re writing in. Otherwise, it’s likely you’ll never finish it, never feel satisfied with it, nor ever get it published. I’d begun my writing journey by pouring my heart out, about my life, about everything. This was a therapeutic exercise, if nothing else. Then I discovered that I didn’t really know what genre, if any, I was writing in.

Memoir or Autobiography?

Was it fiction, memoir or autobiography—or aspects of each? I’d come to realise that autobiography was usually written by famous people about their whole lives. Mine was closer to memoir, as it dealt with real events and real characters from my family, but with a restricted focus.

How to Write a Memoir

Through research I discovered that a memoir is a more modern genre than an autobiography. Furthermore…

(1 ) A memoir is only part of a life and has a certain focus. (2) It is written utilising creative writing devices, such as characterisation, scenes and events, dialogue, emotive language, and metaphor etc. (3) It has a structure and a dynamism that invite the reader to continue reading it. (4) A memoir is on average 50-60,000 words, that is, shorter than an average novel, (70,000 words) but usually longer than a novella (20-30,000 words). Autobiographies are often much longer, since they involve a lot of ‘telling’, that is, detailing of events in a logical sequence, and may contain photos as well.

Problems with Memoir Writing

There’s an innate problem with writing about your life, and that is that your relatives might not want to be shown up, warts and all, in a publication. Clive James got around that issue by using humour to recreate his childhood narrative, which is part of an autobiography, Unreliable Memoirshttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/398913.Unreliable_Memoirs

Benefits of Writing Fiction

When I turned to fiction, I found I could draw on family events and characters, while transforming them into something ‘other’, yet still ‘true’. To distance myself slightly from the events, I employed a subtly ironic tone, and a narrator who is inside, yet outside, at the same time.

After writing up the first draft of my story, and gaining insight from members of a small writing group made up of writers working on novels, I found myself on my own. No one was able to tell me, even experienced authors and editors, how to shape my work into this most enigmatic of objects—a novel.

Constraints of Writers’ Groups

Writers in groups tend to share short segments of their novels with colleagues. The best feedback one can offer in such a situation is grammatical corrections, or, perhaps, comments on the style of the writing. Positive or negative feedback rarely touches on ‘the big picture’ (of structure, voice, timing, and overall viewpoint), which is the most important and difficult domain of the novelist.

Short Story Writing

Creating a novel proved different from writing a short story, which I’d practised and blogged about here. Being a lot longer, at least eighty thousand words, a novel is more difficult to structure than a shorter genre. After researching novel writing, online and in books, I went back to the drawing board and tried different methods for transforming content (chapters, scenes, segments) into something readable by others.

Looking at the Whole

How do you hold an overview of the whole novel in your mind? This is essential, before you can tie ends together, deleting boring parts, or adding in the motifs, imagery and metaphors that act as signposts for the reader to enjoy the flow of the narrative. This is part of the question of narrative drive. Each chapter and part of the novel must lead logically or thematically on to the next part, for the reader to remain interested—driven!—to read until the end. As a writer, you will have to find your own method for holding the work ‘in the hand of your mind’, so to speak.

The method that I chose was, towards the second half of the process, to lay the chapters out on the kitchen table, from chapter one through to chapter forty, considering themes, arcs and overall ‘meaning’, after having discussed the latter with an narrative expert during a question-and-answer session.

December 27, 2019 0 comment

Short Story Writing

At the Swimming Pool

A Short Story

Jeanie is one of these inch worm types. One toe in; one toe back. The cold has always been alien. From birth, really. Even today, with the water temperature around twenty degrees. Babies are gurgling in mothers’ and fathers’ arms in the pool, for God’s sake.

Cassius with the lean and hungry look is descending the stairs. Italian background, perhaps? You can’t help but notice him. He’s wearing long black tights. Nothing else. She sees the bulge as he mounts the cement block. Has he come from the yoga centre up the top? The Breathing Space? That would explain the tights.

A shallow dive from his perch on high. Shallow depth at this end, mind. Heart-stopping … gasp…! The thin man’s head emerges intact, midway down the pool. No problem. She breathes out, a sigh of relief.

Breaking the ice is the problem for Jeanie. Rubbing water on her legs, her arms. It doesn’t help much. She flinches. Retreats, as a small child jumps in, splashing her.

Immersing the neck and the head is the worst. Actual pain. What a waste, if you’ve just washed and primped your hair. Still, it’s over once your hair is wet.

She knows … knows it all…. Enlightenment, even, doesn’t help.

Cassius is doing laps. Such style. Such graceful ease, the arms arced at the elbows, breathing in and out on either side.

She’s immersed now in delicious liquid. The whole body baptised. Is the water getting warmer? Or has her body adjusted to the cold? There are warm spots in the water. Do adults urinate in the pool? Babies and children, perhaps? She thinks of the French word for swimming pool: “piscine”.

Jeanie notices people. The matriarch with the white cotton hat. Standing in the water up to her neck. Watching. Greek background? German, perhaps? The middle-aged man with white hairs on his shoulders, like a bear. A new baby makes swimming motions, safe in its father’s grasp. Little arms and legs moving back and forth like a turtle. The French family, doing perfect Australian crawl.

Cassius is heading for the block again. Another shallow dive. Effortless. She breathes through it this time, knowing now that he knows how to avoid smashing his head on the rocky bottom. Crimson blood rising to the surface.

The white-hatted woman stares at him. Frozen. He meets her gaze. She points to the signage at the steps of the pool. Dozens of small icons. Jeanie follows the direction of the sharp finger. Hard to see from here. A dog with a slash across it? A diver with a red cross through it? Is there one for urinating? She thinks not.

‘Diving is not allowed in here,’ the woman scolds, ‘it says so on the sign.’

‘I know how to do it,’ he says, ‘without hurting myself. From years and years of practice.’

He’d chosen a space when it was clear of bodies too. No children in the way.

‘It is to protect others,’ she says. ‘Children … from getting hurt.’

Jeanie can see both sides, now. She’s seen teenagers jumping and skylarking from the high cliffs at the Surf Club side of the rock pool here. No one’s ever said anything to them. Not even the lifesavers.

As she treads water, half-wading, towards the end of the pool, she meets his gaze. Dark eyes. Intelligent. Brooding?

‘It’s just a case of fear,’ she murmurs, ‘about people hitting their heads…’

‘I don’t care,’ he says, ‘about other peoples’ fear.’ She flinches inwardly, desiring to know more. Perhaps he’s read that recent book she’s seen somewhere: The Subtle Art of Not giving a F*ck”. Four-and-a-half stars on Amazon. She might download the kindle version. Much cheaper, really.

‘I’ve recovered twice from brain damage,’ he lets slip out, ‘anyway.’

She wants to ask questions, find out more about him, but he’s off, probably sorry that the words have escaped his secret mouth. Smoothly tanned, his hair a little longer than the norm, but neat.

She watches as he springs out of the pool at the deep end. Lithe. Self possessed.

On the rocks that lead down to the water’s edge, Cassius sits in a lotus position, facing out to sea. The Pacific Ocean, not always, though, she thinks. Sometimes even antagonistic.

But today it is tranquil. Calm as its namesake.

In profile, like a sphinx, Cassius is lost in meditation. Upright, lean and spare, solar plexus taut, his body merged into head and bust. Toes sticking out at the end of legs that have disappeared.

What is going on inside of him? Inside his belly? Inside his brain? His mind?

She has read about the kundalini, a dormant energy inside all of us. When she googled it, she found the word ‘dharma’, ancient Buddhist teachings, and the expression:

‘The figure of a coiled serpent—a serpent goddess not of gross but subtle substance’.

Lovely words that have stuck in her mind. Words of poetry. Not to be confused with reality, of course.

Looking at the sphinx man, she imagines the snake uncoiling secretly within, tries to see the movement on the outside of the belly. Nothing. Not a move. Not a flicker. The surface hard and still.

Other words come to her now, slipping like small blue sea creatures out of the slumbering unconscious of her mind. Something about the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown of the head. Waves of light and energy coming from the lowest point in the body, to the seventh at the top.

‘And with each awakening, the psyche of the person will be transformed.’

She moves away to the other end of the pool. To the shallows. When she looks back to the rocks at the deep end of the pool, the sphinx-like man has gone.

~~~

The next day is Friday. There is nothing in the flat to eat. She hasn’t eaten breakfast, so by lunch time, Jeanie is ravenous. She dresses to go to lunch and then have a swim in the pool. She walks to the end of the beachfront and orders a late lunch at the restaurant on the esplanade above the pool. Expensive, but it can’t be helped. She will take half back for her flatmate.

She’d planned to go for a swim straight after lunch. But something leads her to look at the program for the Yoga classes in The Breathing Space, nextdoor to the restaurant.

The world is the great gymnasium, where we come to make ourselves strong, Swami Vivekenanda it reads out the front.

She walks into the yoga room. A lovely warmth engulfs her body. She finds a spot in the corner at the back of the class, places her beach towel on the floor. The sun is streaming in through glass windows. She takes off the tee shirt she’s worn over her swimsuit. She sits cross-legged, her palms facing up on her thighs.

Straight-backed and peaceful, she thinks of the sphinx-man at the pool.

The meditation teacher is a plump, motherly type in soft cotton harem pantaloons and a flowing jacket. Belly fat oozes over her waist. She exudes love, her voice soft and maternal.

It isn’t necessary to close your eyes, the matriarch is saying. Better to remain open, so as not to fall asleep. She feels spirit arise from deep in her belly.

A lit candle glows in front of Jeanie. There’s a strip of paper at her feet with a wisdom mantra on it: OM A RAPA TSA NA DHIH: ‘May the wisdom mind find you’ or something like that.

Her heart swells within her breast. She closes her eyes. She notes the video at her forehead, flickering on and off in tune with the woman’s voice. The colours are those of the rainbow, pink, green, orange, that flood the shapes in her head.

The serpent goddess of subtle substance slides into her mind.

The lulling voice of the teacher is telling them they can lie down now.

Ah, great! Horizontal.

She is talking about love now. About sending loving rays out towards friends, acquaintances, nemeses. Transmitting love direct from the heart.

Would the objects of her love receive the message? It doesn’t matter.

Will the sphinx-like man be the object of her transmitted love? Why not? If she saw him again, would she recognise him from the brief encounter at the pool? It matters not. The love is all that matters.

Perhaps it was he who had brought her here. She never would have thought of coming, otherwise.

Was he real, or was he an illusion, like so much about life and love?

One foot in front of the other; no need to hurry; try to live in the present time, brings her back to the swimming pool and to her inch-worm approach to life. And to the Sphynx-like mystery man who seemed to ratify her way.

This story was first published on Denise Baer’s blog: (http://baerbookspress.com/), along with other song theme-based stories.

November 5, 2019 0 comment

Mythos Writing

Ancient Stories from Childhood

As a child growing up in a valley where diversity was met with suspicion, I learnt, first-hand, about racism. However, I also saw paradoxes within my cocooned world, and turned to STORY to try to understand the conflicted reality surrounding me like a grey pall after bushfires.

One of my favourite uncles, let’s call him ‘Barney’, was the most forthright in expressing overtly, the racism that reigned in our world. Don’t go near them dirty blacks; strange words, falling on deaf childhood ears in my case, since the Aborigines were mostly out of sight in this happy valley. Yet this uncle was kindly, with childlike, cerulean blue eyes, which twinkled when he laughed and played funny tricks on us; and he worked like a dog for my beloved grandmother, who whispered that he was worth his weight in gold and that the Good Lord (who hailed from Northern Ireland in her case) would reward him in the afterlife. He’d been caned by the nuns for his stutter, which turned him off school and, perhaps, away from religion, for good. (The nuns were real cruel to us kids, he told me. Dadda let me stay away from school afterwards.)

Later on, I thought that it was a pity they’d taken Barney out of school— ‘thrown the baby out with the bathwater’ to quote an apt cliché — since education can be what saves children who are stuck-in-the-mud of poverty or of ignorance.

Strangely, at the end of his long life, Uncle Barney’d requested a Catholic funeral. Was it in reverence to his father’s religion, or was he, perhaps, hedging his bets when it came to the afterlife? For this occasion, I, a lapsed Anglican/Buddhist — and the offspring of a marriage between Catholic and Anglican parents — officiated at the ceremony. The dark-skinned Filippino priest was grateful for my support, given his poor English and lack of acquaintance with the deceased. The funeral went off without a hitch, and I was applauded as a one-time celebrant for the Catholic Church par excellence, much to the chagrin of some of my atheist brethren who attended the service.

‘You can’t please everyone’ was one of the lessons I’d learnt in childhood from reading Aesop’s Fables: a collection of oral tales credited to a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. It was the story titled The Boy, the Man and the Donkey that first introduced that idea to me.

There was another supreme paradox, and one that proffered a kind of balm for my heart and eyes. Uncle seemed colour blind when it came to his choice of best friends. They were four brothers from a neighbouring farmhouse that fronted the riverbank, who looked like they’d stepped out of the pages from The Thousand and One Nights; swarthy-skinned Assyrian men with dark hair and Anglicised names — Sammy, Teddy, Dan and Freddy — who we kids idolised for their storytelling prowess.

One of the stories, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, kept us entranced for weeks at a time, we kids and our uncles, sprawled around on the grassy bank of the river beneath the starry sky. The brothers took turns to recount by heart such tales from The Arabian Nights.

They were, I realised much later on, from Assyrian Christian backgrounds.

Not until adulthood did I come to realise the extent to which religious differences had led to many immigrants, such as our Assyrian neighbours, having to leave their homelands — in this case from the Middle East. My reaction to religions has been, as a result of such experiences, to lose trust in dogmatism, and to move towards an appreciation of mythology and of spirituality in the broader sense.

Mystics from all paths, Judaism, Christianity or Islam, seem to be more interested in what unites people of different religions, rather than what separates them. The Sufis were mystics, who may lay claim to being the originators of all of the major human attempts to penetrate beyond the apparent world, to glimpse the reality that lies beneath appearances.

Sufis say that, before you can acquire higher knowledge, you need to look within and rid yourself of psychological and emotional blocks, and to resist following the spiritual herd, which can lead to religious fanaticism.

According to Idries Shah, the last publicly know teacher of Sufism, Sufis have had a major influence upon Western thought, via important individuals such as Roger Bacon, St Francis, Ramon Llull, and many others.

The early Sufis were wanderers throughout Asia and the Middle East, dispensing a form of Islam different from the modern one, and from that of the Islamic Golden Age in the Middle Ages. They connected with spiritual travellers from the West, who were escaping religious persecution, and with traders from the Far East, who exchanged wisdom and ideas with them, including Oriental Buddhism.

Christian mystics, too — the contemplatives — have been the ones who reached out beyond the boundaries of institutional religion to embrace the teachings of other faiths.

When I return to my Happy Valley and pass by the cathedral — with the lead glass window dedicated to my paternal grandmother — I remember the sense of mystery and of awe that enlivened me as I sat, long ago, in the pews there, and I realise that I have carried something of it with me to this very day.

September 8, 2019 0 comment