Inevitably, emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil. ~Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens
Story Challenge | WEEK 1 | Beginnings ... and the shocking splash of the deep end, the thrill of starting in the middle, and the unmooring beauty of imagining instead of remembering
Hello, friends, and welcome to Writing in the Dark’s 12-Week Story Challenge!
If you’re not a paid subscriber yet and want to participate, you can manage your subscription here—and if you’re super new here and want more info about the Story Challenge, you can find that here, here, and here. Also, throughout the Story Challenge, I’ll be referring to a literary concept called concrete specific detail. If you want a review of this powerful, consistently crucial tool, you can find that in the first post of the Essay Challenge, The Things Themselves, with its shimmers/shards exercise, or in the Eleven Things post here.
I’m excited for us to dive into stories—and, specifically this week, beginnings. I remember when I was mentoring new writers for AWP through the Writer to Writer program, the first “module” was about beginnings, and one of the questions involved looking at our favorite openings. I don’t have just one favorite, but among the many I love is this opening passage to Jane Hamilton’s novel, Map of the World:
I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.
So lovely. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we begin with beginnings, one more bit of housekeeping, which is to answer the question of how do you participate in this Story Challenge, anyway?
It’s easy. Every Wednesday for twelve weeks, a new Story Challenge post will arrive in your inbox (they’ll be archived here on WITD in order, too, for easy reference; you can search Story Challenge on the homepage or look on the top navigation bar to find that archive). Every post will include a craft essay followed by a specific exercise for you to complete. It’s great if you can do the exercises the same week I post them, because there’s so much collective energy in the comments.
Which is how the interactive nature of the Challenge works—you post your questions, observations, insights, and snippets of work in the comments, and I’ll be hanging out there, too, to answer questions, give feedback, offer encouragement, clarify whatever confusions arise, and enjoy the mayhem with you. I am so excited!
Oh, and for founding members,
and I will send out several Voice Memos & Video Notes (embedded in the Story Challenge posts they relate to), and we’ll also be offering two Live Salons on Zoom (dates to be announced next Wednesday) during the Story Challenge.Meanwhile, let’s unpack the question of how to begin a story—starting with an even deeper question: what is a story?
I like to think of what Franz Kafka said about a book—that it “must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” What Kafka meant, when he said this, is that literature’s purpose is to make us feel something.
The same is true of story. Whether we wish to think of our stories as “literature” or not, we’re wise to acknowledge that stories (fiction or creative nonfiction! the same rules apply when it comes to “building axes for the frozen seas inside us!”) are more than mere anecdotes or updates or vignettes or recaps. Stories are something other, something more. Stories move—they move within themselves and they move within us, too. They do this by evoking emotion. Think about that word, emotion. It literally has the word motion inside it! Sometimes we forget this when we talk about feeling. That feeling is movement.
But it is.
And if the purpose of stories is to make us feel, then to really understand stories, to enter whole-heartedly into this Challenge with an expansive reverence for what a story is and what it can do, we should also consider the nature of feeling itself.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in his landmark book, The Feeling of What Happens, writes beautifully about the science of feelings, drawing our attention to the:
… very different biological impact of three distinct … phenomena: an emotion, the feeling of that emotion, and the knowing that we have a feeling of that emotion.
Damasio says he’s not trying to complicate something simple, but rather to “break down, in approachable parts, something that is quite complicated.” He expounds on the progressive nature of emotion, feeling, and consciousness of feeling, as well as the role of emotion in human evolution:
Emotion was probably set in evolution before the dawn of consciousness and surfaces in each of us as a result of inducers we often do not recognize consciously; on the other hand, feelings perform their ultimate and longer-lasting effects in the theater of the conscious mind.
What Damasio calls the “longer-lasting effects of feelings” might be the gold in fiction that falls from the “mother-of-all, the thing that startles us back into Life,” as Joy Williams says in her eloquent treatise on why writers write. How amazing that this startling, Life-giving effect Williams refers to isn’t abstract or theoretical.
It is bodily.
Emotions occur in the body—in the blood and the bones and the viscera. And they serve a survival function, which Damasio explains this way:
… emotions—these complicated collections of chemical and neural responses—are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life.
To assist the organism in maintaining life!
Joy Williams may not have meant to be literal about good writing “starling us back into Life,” but science tells us that our lives do depend at least in part on our ability to feel. Damasio breaks down how, biologically, emotions create feelings within what he calls, beautifully, the “theater of the body”:
[E]motions use the body as their theater (internal milieu, visceral, vestibular, and musculoskeletal systems), but emotions also affect the mode of operation of numerous brain circuits: the variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.
It’s so fascinating we experience the same biological cascade in response to a powerful fictional scene as to a real-world event. Our bodies and brains can’t fully distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. The same physiological and chemical responses occur—adrenaline and cortisol release, for example. And laughter and tears are just as “real” in response to stories as to life. Our minds may know we are only reading, that the scene isn’t actually happening, but our brains and bodies respond to a degree as if it is.
This phenomenon has been confirmed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Research shows that stories activate the brain’s affective empathy network—and this effect is stronger when the material is intense. In fact, it’s with fear-inducing scenes that readers felt the most and were overall most transported. I wonder if this is partly because when we fear for a character, we may also root for her, cheer her on. We may hope for her. Something is, as they say, at stake. Damasio explains:
Emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward or punishment, of pleasure or pain, of approach or withdrawal, of personal advantage or disadvantage. Inevitably, emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil.
That emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil feels sort of logical to me. That emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward and punishment, etc., seems right. And that emotions are directly related to our actual survival feels like a radical revelation.
In conclusion: we have to feel to live, stories make us feel, and the negative scenes in stories make us feel the most (conflict drives plot). And since we feel to live and stories make us feel, stories save our lives.
Or something like that.
Story Challenge Week One: Beginnings
Let’s write some beginnings!
This will be fun, because the stakes are so low. We’re just trying something out, playing around, keeping it light. We have to, because not only is that the only way we’ll get anything good, but, also, I’m a writer who believes you can’t (often) write the best beginning for your story until you know what your story is about, and therefore