What about people? I’ve been thinking about this for months as I’ve been researching my new short story, “To Be, Or Not.”

The moral dilemma of how to help people who are dying is a very old one. We have recorded stories about euthanasia dating back to Greek times. Take for example, Hercules, the half-son of god, Zeus and the beautiful mortal, Alcmen.

I share the Hercules story below. How do you feel about Hercules What do you think of his son Did his son do the right thing?

Zeus gave Hercules superhuman strength to be able to conquer challenges.

That superpower also made Hercules a hard to manage child. Added to that, his stepmother, Hera, made him insane and gave him an enormous temper. His temper was the ruin of him when he slaughtered his family.

He was punished by having to endure superhuman feats, but Apollo promised Hercules if he completed 12 nearly impossible Labors, (like strangling a lion, traveling to hell and back, killing a multi-headed hydra monster) Zeus would make him a god and he would never go to Hades,  the underworld.

The process of his death was horrific.

He was tricked into wrapping himself in a beautiful cloak pre-soaked with a powerful poison that burned the flesh. As Hercules flung the cloak around him, he shrieked in agony, and immediately threw off the cloak—taking off all his flesh and skinning him alive.

To his son, he demanded, “Help me die!”

“No, I will not be your murderer.”

“I ask you to be my healer, the only physician who can cure my suffering.

Hercules then ordered his funeral pyre built and threw himself into the raging flames to end his torture.

To burn alive was better than to prolong his suffering.

What do you think? When is it okay to help people end their suffering?

Or are you the kind of reader who likes leaky plot spoilers. Or at least doesn’t mind learning about them.

In case you hate spoilers, I won’t reveal one novella ending I’m bursting  to rag about. It was the inspiration to write this blog.

I’ve watched several Stephen King movies: Mercy, Carrie, Green Mile, Children of the Corn, Shawshank Redemption. But, wanting to have more of a sturdy, scholarly understanding of his writings, I got about 50 more SK stories to study. I faithfully read The Sun Dog, taking notes, marking  the margins. And when I got to the almost end, I was at peace, satisfied. And then came the Epilogue. I can’t tell you about it, but “swearword.” SK does say that he likes his stories to have a “bite.” I have no more fingers on my write/right hand.  

My reaction to the final plot twist has me wanting to find out more about spoilers and how people react to them. What I learned surprised me.

One View

There’s a common belief—some call it a “debunked scientific myth—that finding out the end of a story or being let into a plot twist ruins the thrill of reading.

So, to avoid having their surprise wrecked, the anti-spoilers may go to extraordinary lengths.

They may:

Yell, “Don’t tell me!” as soon as someone begins to talk about a book, they  

Go to a movie or read a book first before someone else can tell them.

Play music on their headphones around friends who like to share spoilers.

Avoid social media and the internet.

Buy an app that lets you screen out mentions of the book/movie you want to be surprised by.

The Other View

There’s also a belief out there that spoilers enhance the reading experience for some. Are you surprised by that too Well, it’s true, they really do.

You may relate to the pro-spoiler mindset if you can read The Gift of the Magi every year without losing enjoyment or read or see various versions of standards—say Westside Story, Macbeth, Pinocchio–with no impatience, boredom or regret.

What makes people enjoy or not enjoy a story—knowing or not knowing plot points and twists?

That’s the question that researchers, Johnathan Leavitt and Nicholas Christenfeld at the University of California, San Diego looked for answers to.

Their answer Spoiler alert:  “What we found, remarkably, was if you spoil stories, they [readers] actually like them more.”

How Their Experiment Worked

The researchers gave 800 participants three tests as they responded to short stories with up to 4,200 words, using different literary genres including ironic-twist stories, mysteries, evocative literary stories

In the study, those cognitively oriented people who enjoy thinking and puzzling more than the average person were frustrated by spoilers revealing the ending. These readers crave the challenge of figuring it out and don’t want that triumphant feeling to be taken away by a spoiler.

An extreme of that anti-spoiler belief is one reader saying, ”I’ve never read To Kill a Mockingbird,  but I know how it ends, so I see no reason to read it.”

Another group in the study, the majority of readers in the experiment,  preferred knowing the ending. That way without the distraction of figuring it out, they can enjoy the aesthetic qualities, get the purpose of the overall narrative and can integrate the plot points that got the story to the end.

Which type of reader are you? As for me, I get the most out of reading everything twice!

 A good working definition is: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.

 My Own Humongous Inspiration

 It was 1970. San Francisco. I was visiting the public TV station, KQED, to research an article about a female producing group, Femmedia, who was videotaping a show that day.

 I had never been to a TV studio. So, when I walked into the other world of the dark control booth, my mouth dropped open. I was agog. I’d never seen anything like it before.

 A wall of black and white monitors (1970, remember) lined the wall that looked out at the stage.

 Two men sat at the controls, moving levers up and down.

 One man, his nasal tone snide, said, “Alright, send the goddam talent in.”

 I was magnetized, outraged at his contempt for the actors.

 Right then and there, I determined I would have something to do with making sure actors were treated with respect. Of course, I knew nothing about actors or acting. (In fact, I had a prejudice from my college days that they were “showy” and therefore superficial.)

 Within a split second, I realized I’d first have to learn to act. I’d heard of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in San Francisco. So, I would figure out a way to go there. It still amazes me I had absolutely no qualms about being able to achieve that. I’m usually a worrier. But in that split second, I felt limitless.

 Within a year, I was enrolled at ACT for three of the most exciting, creative, and fulfilling years of my life. After many years of acting myself, I became an acting coach.

I was devoted to the wellbeing of actors.

The Characteristics of Inspiration

My inspiration incident shows some qualities of inspiration noted by psychologists Todd M. Thrash and Andrew J. Elliot in the Harvard Business Review:

 1.     Inspiration propels a person from apathy to possibility and transforms the way we perceive our own capabilities.

2.     Inspiration is evoked spontaneously, without intention.

3.     Inspiration often involves a moment of clarity and awareness of new possibilities. This moment of clarity is often vivid, and can take the form of a grand vision, or a “seeing” of something one has not seen before.

4.     Inspiration involves approach motivation, in which the individual strives to transmit, express, or actualize a new idea or vision. According to Thrash and Elliot, inspiration involves both being inspired by something and acting on that inspiration.

5.     “Openness to Experience” often comes before inspiration, suggesting that those who are more open to inspiration are more likely to experience it. 

 How much does inspiration matter A whole big lot.

 Inspired people report higher levels of belief in their own abilities, self-esteem, and optimism.

 What’s the catch?

 The catch is that because it is so important, we may try to will it, force it upon ourselves. And that pressure on us is counterproductive. We can be open to experience it, but we can’t make it happen.

 Julia Cameron, in her book, The Artist’s Way, gives suggestions of how to prepare ourselves for being “Open to experience.” She teaches us how to prime our openness by writing three pages of stream of consciousness each day and giving ourselves artist dates, excursions to explore unfamiliar sights.

…

This morning I saw a headline that got me in that inspired state: A man’s foot found in Yellowstone hot spring. It shocked me. Made me think it would be a great opening image for a short story. I could invent what on earth made him end up like that. Hmmm.

My favorite birthday present was a box of labels to paste inside my books,  claiming them as mine. The charming worm in the center of the label announced, “As for me, give me a book.”

Because I read well in the first grade, I got to sit in the front row. The front row was okay, but the real important thing about the front row was that I could have eye contact and a feeling of closeness with my angel teacher, Mrs. Bowles. I loved her.

What was I getting out of my reading Many things. At home, it was an escape from scolding comments or glaring eyes. Give me the isolation of my room, a cat, a green apple and my book and I was in heaven. Safe. Calm.

But I was not only escaping hurts, I was also having vicarious learning. As a teen who had to be in bed by nine at night, I had many vicarious romances through books. Romances of the fun kind, the lovey-dovey kind and the scary kind. I was warned by The Scarlet Letter to stay away from anything I would feel guilty about. I can still picture Hester Prynne in the woods and still feel so sad.

Now that I’m doing a deep study about the power of stories and writing stories myself, I want to take a clearer look at what makes them so powerful. (Stories are so effective at influencing people that the Harvard Business organization stresses the importance of stories for building businesses. There’s a quote at the end of this blog about that.)

WHAT MAKES STORIES SO POWERFUL?

For one thing, we LEARN by experiencing, not by following conceptual edicts.

Stories give us a sensory EXPERIENCE, rather than a CONCEPT.

CONCEPT V. EXPERIENCE

My first learning about the difference between CONCEPT and EXPERIENCE was decades ago when I was learning the skills of acting.

Way, way, way back then, the Sandy Meisner technique for training actors had become popular. Meisner developed his groundbreaking technique to guide actors in behaving instinctively and getting in touch with their emotions instead of getting trapped in their own thoughts or concepts.

For example, a line may read, “I hate you.” Some actors might try to think of a time they hated someone and try to apply that feeling to the line. That’s the Stanislavski Method.

Meisner technique would ask the actor to say the line laughing, or worried, or flirting—with whatever their emotional reaction was at the moment.

Here’s another example of the difference between a  CONCEPT and EXPERIENCE.

CONCEPT: “DON’T MAKE ASSUMPTIONS. CHECK OUT THE REALITY OF WHAT YOU ARE THINKING. “

Good advice, right Maybe, but… How inspired do you feel to take this advice Blah, blah, blah. More words. There’s no picture I see, no sounds, no feelings, tastes or smells.

My senses are not involved. I’m not involved. The statement is an intellectual CONCEPT.

Below is the same message told  as a story. As you read, notice your level of engagement with the story, compared with your engagement with the concept statement: “Don’t make assumptions. Check out the reality of what you are thinking.”

In his book, True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart, Zen Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, gives a powerful example of a cautionary tale. It’s a true story of a Vietnamese couple.

STORY AS EXPERIENCE

The newly wed husband had to go to war. Both husband and wife were very sad, especially since she was pregnant, and he would be gone for two long years.

When he returned to her, after  his two years of service, he was excited to see his son and wanted to hug him. When he reached for his son, the son pushed him away saying, “You’re not my Daddy. Some other man is my Daddy. He comes to us every night.”

The husband was so distressed as he imagined this other Daddy, he went to the taverns every night. He refused to speak to his wife, who didn’t know what their son had said. His wife felt so hurt and rejected that after a time, she went out to their backyard and threw herself into the river and drowned.

The day her body was found, the husband came home to care for his young son. That night he wanted to read a bedtime story to his son, and he lit a candle. When the husband’s shadow appeared on the wall, his son pointed to it saying, “Oh, look. There’s my Daddy.” The wife had been faithful and had only been trying to include her husband by telling her son that her own shadow was his father.

This cautionary story gives us advice about, “What should you do if you think (are assuming) that a partner is cheating.”

It’s a cautionary tale, a tale that warns us to be careful: if we do certain actions, bad things will happen.  If we don’t share our worries and pains and see if our beliefs are true, we lose. Big time.

The same story message could be told in a prescriptive tale of the same story might be that the husband works up the courage to tell the wife what the boy had said. Then the wife could correct his misunderstanding.

Another prescriptive tale might be that the wife tells the husband that she feels hurt and rejected by his absence. Then he could tell her how hurt he was by what the boy said. Then they can get it worked out. So, the mature and useful behaviors are modeled for us and the message now becomes, “When we share our worries and pains and see if our beliefs are true, we gain.”

Here’s that bit from Harvard Business Publishing psychologist Lani Peterson says:

“Storytelling is essential. If you’re trying to engage, influence, teach, or inspire others, you should be telling or listening to a story, and encouraging others to tell a story with you. You’ll have plenty of science to back you up.”

I’d love to hear any of your stories!

I’ll admit it; I’m a fan of Rachel Maddow. I feel distress for her every time she shares that she spent the whole day working on other stories, and then, what do you know, a new story has become more important by airtime.

And, yarg, all that work must be throw out.

I had another blog post for you today, but then yesterday the L.A. times published an Op-Ed, Second Opinion by Emily Falk that I think is more timely. Oh, well, I’ll do my other post another time.

Sigh.

(By revealing this personal story, I’m practicing what the article revealed.)

Here’s the more timely piece:

WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU BOTHER TO READ STORIES?

What would you answer to the Why Bother to read stories question?

Are you in the camp that thinks taking time to read stories is a frivolous, shallow, self-indulgent, even a  lazy, waste of time and attention This would be the camp that thinks that reading a fiction story is a much less powerful way to learn than reading a something with “just the facts”.

I confess that during a strenuous doctoral training I sometimes thought of fiction reading as a “guilty pleasure.”

Uh-oh. To both you and myself.

If you are in the “It’s frivolous” camp, you’d be in the not-so-right camp. New neurological research shows the opposite is true.

In a recent experiment subjects were given a similar message in two ways, 1)  a personal story, and 2) a teaching, didactic statement.

Here are examples of each type of message:

A personal story such as, “Joe his never smoked a cigarette in his life. He has heart disease because he was exposed to secondhand smoke from his father.”

A teaching principle: “Smokers can harm other people. Every year a lot of non smokers die from heart disease caused by secondhand smoke.”

What they discovered was that when people’s reasoning was disrupted with neurological stimulation and then they were asked to come up with arguments for or against the statements, they could come up with much better arguments for or against the personal stories than arguments for just the facts.

The Takeaway The two types of messages were processed differently and the personal story had a more powerful effect.

These findings inspire me. Let me know what YOU think about the new findings.

Emily Falk, “How storytelling can promote social change: Stories processed in the brain differently from other kinds of information, more, deeply affect people’s belief” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2021. Op-Ed, Los Angeles Times, research provides some answers

The secret fear of fiction writers is that they are deficient, deficient in the ability to make up a story. Koch says, “The mere word story immobilized [writers] as headlights immobilize the deer. The dreaded monosyllables plot worked on them like Kryptonite: Flash it before them, and they would slump down helpless.”

Stories, Stephen Koch says, are not made up out of thin air. The word invent comes from the Latin root, “to discover.” Writers don’t invent or make up stories out of thin air, they find them, discover them, uncover them—in the real world, or in their imaginations.

The search for the story is usually long, slow, delicate, and often is rewarded only in the last moments of work.

The story is found in the preverbal world within. It can take a long time for the preverbal to be translated into a verbal story.

Our story panic is based upon not recognizing “that storytelling—all storytelling—begins in precisely this speechlessness.”

This is the essential state  of “Not knowing.”

Learning to tolerate, even enjoy, uncertainty is a gift to ourselves and others.

Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 57-59.

I want to share one of the things I’m learning about the depth, pervasiveness, and horror of racism.

I have always hated any behavior that diminished or damaged the self esteem of another person. As a six-year-old, the first time I saw, in Chattanooga, TN, that “coloreds” had to have a separate bathroom, I cried for two days, my grandparents told me.

In in my role as a psychotherapist, the way I’ve worked for kindness and empowerment has been with improving how couples treat each other and how an individual treats him/herself.

Thanks to George Floyd–and the many before him and after him—my focus for “Do no harm” has widened to include race relations. I’m in the early stages of learning, discovering my own privileges, and unhelpful beliefs. Granted, right now my learning (enforced by Covid-19 avoidance) is from books, webinars and zoom sessions with my white women’s group about how we can be better antiracists. I have much to learn.

One of the most powerful things I’m learning is how I have been guilty of Tone Policing.

Tone policing is something I didn’t know about seven months ago. Here is how Ijeoma Oluo explains it in her book, So You Want to Talk about Race. “It happens when someone (usually a privileged person) in a conversation or situation about oppression shifts the focus of the conversation from the oppression being discussed to the way it is being discussed.”

Oluo goes on to say, “Tone policing prioritizes the comfort of the privileged person over the oppression of the disadvantaged person. . . To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation.”

Bam, crack, whoosh, fffft, pow. That’s the sound of my mind, blown.

This idea was a shock to me. After all, I grew up in an authoritarian household. I would be punished if I complained, argued, expressed anger, disappointment, or disagreed. Even if I showed those things on my face, without a word. I learned to “ask nicely,” contain any of my feelings except appreciation, and to “shut up” generally speaking, to avoid parental wrath.

That early family training, along with twenty-some years of white-taught communication trainings is getting dislodged and drawn out.

I’d love to talk, e-talk, with anybody who is also learning to talk about race. Please comment on this blog, or tweet, or Facebook comment. (See my website, upper right corner for social media icons.)

Warmly,

Aletta

But there’s an even greater aloneness. It’s the aloneness that comes with having no way, and no one who can tell us what is “right” and keep-able, and what is “wrong” and cut-able.

We are alone when telling our story, It’s never been told before. We might have alpha and beta readers; we may have design and copy editors who can help.

But they cannot feel for us when something fits, when something is right for our story. There’s no one who has been exactly where we are going. We alone can determine, “Is this right?”

So the question is, How do we recognize when something is right- or not?

For me, the feeling of “rightness” is a kind of soft, subtle thud in the heart/solar plexus of my body. The feeling I have when someone is speaking heart truth. The feeling I have when I have finished what I want to say. A feeling of completeness.

With my novel-in-progress, Whatever It Takes, I started with an idea of a shy artistic girl who learned how to show up and speak up for herself. She had lots of barriers to that, so there was plenty of conflict built in. Following that story line was satisfying for several months of writing. That part was releasing.

But as time went on, I had the felt sense that it was missing something-not quite “right.” The character’s life changes needed to matter more.

So, I asked myself, what would really matter more than one person’s triumph over her ancient imprisonments? My answer: One person trying to do something beneficial for another and receiving something beneficial and growing in the process.

My next question was, what relationship would show that? A mother and child. Now that grabbed my heart! I felt full, and happy, and charged up.

But did I have the life experience for that- to follow the edict of “write what you know” As a therapist, I’ve had deep experiences of helping parents and children heal their hearts from disconnections. And as a mother, I’ve had my share of temporary disconnections and reconnections with my own children.

So, writing about a mother and son and how they healed their hurts was compelling to me. It felt right.

I’m interested in YOUR thoughts. Let’s have a conversation. Tell me about how you recognize and cultivate your inner sense of what’s “right.” Or, perhaps about your struggling to find that sense.

That belief is the exact reverse order of cause and effect and a perfect example of “the tail wagging the dog,” and “the cart before the horse.”

As a therapist, I see many depressed clients. In the beginning of our work together, the hardest part is for the client is to realize that they can’t just wait to feel better before they start doing healthy things, like exercise. It’s really difficult because at the depth of their depression they “have no energy” and think they cannot even get out of bed, much less walk around the block.

Unfortunately for them, feeling better only happens after they take actions. And they may never spontaneously “feel like” doing the actions.

The same principle applies to the process of writing. Or anything else.

Here’s a list of things writers  need for their fiction writing: Inspiration, confidence, knowing why you’re writing, knowing how to write, knowing the story, knowing and understanding the characters, having completed research.

And here’s the possible bad news: “Every one of the things above comes to you only in the process of writing. They are the result of writing…The belief that you must have them to begin is the most common mistake of all, and it is fatal. Right here—on the jagged rocks of that false belief—is where most good ideas break up and sink without trace. Inspiration and confidence and conviction and craft and knowledge are not what makes writing possible. It’s exactly the other way around. Writing makes them possible.”

“Productivity is the only path to confidence.”

“Since writing is what generates inspiration—and not the reverse—abundant writing produces abundant inspiration.”

Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 4.

“Not being yourself is the worst form of self-disrespect.” ― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I’ve been a scared-y cat. I have been one of those people who has remained silent when I’ve seen and heard incidents of unfair treatment of People of Color (POC). I have wanted to share a beautiful moment with you, but I’ve been too afraid to bring up the subject of. . .er, well, ahem, okay, injustice towards POC. Saying it like it is: too afraid to mention the subject of racism. I’m challenging my own fears by writing this blog post today.

I don’t like to be in trouble, or to stir up trouble for others. I don’t want people to fight, so I’d prefer to avoid any mention of prejudice, just keep quiet. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

But—a big but.  I have been moved from my hiding stance by the BLM protesters, by John Lewis’s call to get into “good trouble”. I’m working on correcting my previously unconscious complicity in racism.

A little backstory. I grew up in a quiet, safe, tree-lined Philadelphia suburb. Nobody locked their front doors and most people left their car keys in the ignition. No social or racial frictions—at least not on the surface, and at least to my child eyes.

Then when I was ten years old, I went to Chattanooga, Tennessee to spend the summer with my Grandparents. I was (and still am) horrified to see that some people, black and brown people, had to sit at the back of the bus—couldn’t join the rest of the people in front. Horrified that they also couldn’t use the water fountains; they had their own. Those black and brown people even had to use a separate bathroom.

I would burst into tears every time I saw new evidence of the cruelty of demeaning and excluding people of color, I can still see those “No Colored” signs in my mind, and the images still hurt.

Now to the beautiful moment. One day, when I was about fourteen years old, I trudged home from after-school field hockey practice a little early. As I was walking up the hillock to our front door, I passed Lilian, the Black woman who cleaned for us every other week. I rarely saw her, so she probably wouldn’t even have recognized me away from my home.

She was still pulling on her raincoat as she started down the hillock. As we passed each other, I could see that her eyes sparkled and her “hello” seemed particularly animated. Expansive. That’s nice I thought.

When I got as far as the kitchen, where I would usually find my mother, she was sitting at the kitchen table with an enigmatic smile on her mouth and a look of joy in her eyes. Her look was surprising enough that I asked her, “What happened?”

“Lillian asked me to call her Mrs. Gray from now on,” she said.

“Wow, that’s beautiful,” I said as my heart burst with happiness.

My mother and I were both feeling the uplift from something righteous happening. We felt a vicarious pride for Mrs. Gray for claiming her dignity.

This is a cherished memory of my mother, who in those moments showed her value of a Justice for ALL. A value I share.