On Contradictions

"When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, 

but bend them with gentleness and time." --St. Francis de Sales

The last week and a half has been filled with a few contradictions around here. On one hand there have been great ups--including an evening at the circus in which we took our 4-year old granddaughter for the first time. What fun. Her vocabulary through most of the evening consisted of the words "oh, wow!" at everything she saw. (That is, until she fell asleep during the second half, slumbering even through the roar of nine motorcycles in a cage. Now that's a real contradiction.) On the other hand, there have been a few downs. Like a computer that died. 

Not unexpected since we'd been having problems, and most of the important stuff had been backed up so that's a plus. And the new computer is a beauty--oh, wow!--but the learning curve is steep. Oh, my. More contradictions.

Contradiction: 1. the act of denying what has been said, saying the opposite; 2. a contrary condition, disagreement, opposition; 3. an inconsistency.

Joy and frustration, laughter and gritted teeth, play and work, smiles and frowns, successes and missed goals. The experience of the last few days led me to wonder what others have said about the subject of contradictions. A few gems for the writer in us:

"One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions--there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality." --Justin Cronin

"As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory, and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional." --Hugo Weaving

"As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change." --Haruki Murakami

"Biography--a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified." --Jose Ortega y Gasset

"The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time." --Joan D. Vinge

"I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions." --Edward Norton

"Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat." --Audre Lorde

Contradictions. What ones have you been living with, and how are you handling them?

Seems like "being plugged in" to the internet, social networking, and all the bells and whistles carries its own set of contradictions. We love the connections but find ourselves frustrated by the black hole of time and distractions that take us away from our work. Discussions on the subject have been popping up in various places recently. One brave soul has unplugged from it all and lives to tell about it. See Marissa Burt's post, "Unplugged," here at Project Mayhem. Is there hope for harmony after all?

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Photo-A-Day: June

"The principles of true art are not to portray, but to evoke." --Jerzy Kosinski

I don't know about you but June came and went so fast, I'm still trying to process it all. Faces and places and  time all whizzed by. Thankfully another month of a photo each day helped record some of the highlights.

There were the special family visits and gatherings of course. And then, toward the end of the month came a different kind of highlight.You see, hubby and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary June 24. To mark the milestone, we retraced our steps to where we first met--and took a trip to Chicago.

Back all those many years ago we were college students and, coming separately from our respective schools, we had headed to Chicago for an education convention. Hubby traveled by bus, I arrived in a carpool of other students. We "bumped" into each other that first night and the rest, as they say is history. Some of the highlights of those days included walks in Grant Park, a play at the Blackstone Theater, and a subway ride to Wrigley Field for a Cubs game.

Well, we thought, what better way to celebrate our 40th than to re-enact some of those things? That's how we found ourselves on a bus (we're such sentimentalists) one day last week. Once in Chicago, we stayed in a hotel next to the old Blackstone Theater (now the site of a college), walked through the lobby of the hotel where we met, meandered through Grant Park, and once more rode the subway to Wrigley Field and took in a Cubs game, sitting in the same section and eating Cracker Jacks just like we did all those years ago. Which, looking back, doesn't seem so long ago after all. Those just starting out cannot comprehend just how fast those years do go by. Believe me.

We also went to Chicago's Institute of Art and to Millennium Park. We marveled at what we remembered and laughed at our confusion over how things had changed. It was a memorable trip--short but packed full of experiences and maybe just a couple of blisters (we did a monumental amount of walking). And that's another thing, the way architecture, patterns, colors and designs caught my eye. I credit that to the practice of taking a photo-a-day all these months.


Emotions worked their way into the experience, too--often swinging up and down in joyful, nostalgic, surprised, anticipatory, anxious, appreciative, reflective moods. Made me, as a writer, want to capture it all. Yep, I filled my writer's bag (or journal as the case may be) with images and ideas, characters and settings, sensory and structural details. Faces emoting, places evoking. The month of June gave me lots of material. Have a peek...

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On the Subject of Emotions, Inspired by Pinocchio

"Why engage emotions? To create a good read. So yours will be the book that readers come back to again and again. So your characters will be remembered. So your novels will be recommended among friends." --Beth Hill

The day we chose to go to the art museum dawned sunny and bright. We knew, among other things, that we would view a sculpture that had only recently been dedicated. What we didn't know was what a lift we would receive when we rounded the bend to see it for the first time.

And then...there he was. Bigger than life--all twelve feet of him--cast in bronze and catching the sun's rays on his face: Pinocchio. Wow!

"Pinocchio (Emotional)," arms outstretched and face to the sky, stands outside the entrance to the Cincinnati Art Museum. Created by sculptor and artist Jim Dine, Pinocchio, the sculpture, has become an overnight attraction. The museum itself, dating back to 1886, is world-class---built, incidentally, only 3 years after Italy's Carlo Collodi first published his original Adventures of Pinocchio in novel form.  Now visitors stop to have their pictures taken with Pinocchio, faces animated and smiling, before entering the museum. Who wouldn't smile in the presence of such an overgrown, whimsical figure exuding such, well...such emotion?

You remember the story of Pinocchio, right? How Geppetto, the wood carver, makes a wooden puppet, telling the doll he will be his little boy. But almost immediately, Pinocchio gives Geppetto grief with his naughty behavior, enough so that he gets into more and more trouble. And each time he lies, his nose grows longer. "Pinocchio," says his guardian Fairy, "Every time you tell a lie, your nose will grow. When you tell the truth, it will shrink. You can only become a real boy if you learn to be brave, honest, and generous." (See more on the story at these links: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Emotions range from defiance, alarm, fear, shame and loneliness (after all, bad boys turn into donkeys, you know) to surprise, hope, gratitude, elation--and love. By the end of the story, Geppetto is able to say, "Pinocchio, today you were brave, honest and generous. You are my son and I love you." On that day, the wooden puppet becomes a real boy.

I think I see now why Dine titled his sculpture "Emotional," don't you?

Emotions. Feelings and responses, perceptions and sensitivities. Reactions to life, positive and negative. We don't always know why we react the way we do, but we know how we feel. And it is through the use of emotions in our writing then that we also engage our readers, trigger their emotions, help them feel what the characters are experiencing--and create a good read. Yet, how do we go about conveying emotion in our work? Three tips to consider:

1. Raise the stakes. This sure happened to Pinocchio. Orson Scott Card, in Characters and Viewpoint, says: "Reading a story is not a passive process. While a reader may seem to be sitting still, slowly turning pages, in his own mind he is going through a great number of emotions. Underlying all of them is a strong tension. The stronger it is, the more the reader concentrates on finding out what happens next...the more intensely he feels all the emotions of the tale."  There are several things a writer can tap into, according to Card, in order to help raise those stakes, including the use of such elements as suffering, sacrifice, and jeopardy.

2. Touch the reader. Beth Hill, at The Editor's Blog, says "Readers like to be touched, moved, by story." A sample from her list of 18 suggestions for helping readers feel emotion includes: don't hold back...recognize the importance of word choice...create a situation that's important, vital, or life-altering if not life-threatening (again the case for Pinocchio--and Geppetto)...put characters under time constraints...write conflict into every scene.

3. Show, don't tell. We as writers hear this over and over, but nowhere is it more important than as a way of conveying emotions. "Let your readers figure out what emotion characters are feeling by reading their actions," says Evan Marshall at Write the Novel Fast. We don't have to be told that Pinocchio is disobedient and impudent. He shows it by dancing on the table when he's told not to, when he runs away, when he lies and his nose grows. We don't have to be told he's ecstatic over becoming a real boy, he shows he is by his actions.

Need help in identifying various emotions? You might want to check out Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, Wikipedia's Contrasting and Categorization of Emotions, and Buzzle's List of Human Emotions.

All of these thoughts stemmed from a simple trip to the art museum. And that only as we stood outside! Imagine the emotion-evoking images and masterpieces that awaited us inside, including artwork by Monet, Picasso, Duvenek, Warhol, and Henri Matisse. Ah, what an inspiring day.

Emotion: how does it contribute to making a book you've read memorable? How do you stir it up in your writing?

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