Cornelia Fick's Blog, page 2

The Power of Story II

Recently I attended the Global Anti-apartheid Conference for Palestine (10-12 May) in Johannesburg, South Africa, as part of a delegation from our local writers association.

There was a workshop dedicated to the topic “changing the narrative”, a subject deemed necessary because negative stories were circulating about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for example, that the Palestinians were beheading babies.

Palestine officials emphatically denied this at the conference and mentioned that some media outlets had already issued a retraction.

Now, I don’t know enough to argue the case of either of these protagonists. The only reason I’m mentioning it here is because it reminded me of my earlier blog entry The Power of Story, in which I advocated that writers in South Africa should tackle the apartheid narratives that still have a firm hold on the populace.

Many speakers at the conference pointed out the similarities between South African history and Palestine. For example, land was divided into small pockets and allocated to each ethnic group – the so-called Batustans – during apartheid, which correlated with the current fragmented nature of Palestine.

The power of story should never be underestimated. In your communities you may find certain stories that are repeated. Their repetition may result in an idea or belief system gradually developing around the story. Once this happens, the idea or belief tends to become so deep-rooted that before long it enters the popular view among a community that “this is our culture”. This is our way of doing things.

As writers we should be vigilant and observe what really underpins some of these beliefs.

“Voice” in writing

During the MA Creative Writing degree at Rhodes University a few years ago they asked us to read widely. The aim of it, the lecturers explained, was to identify where your interest and talent lay as a writer. Ideally you would discover what type of fiction you wanted to write in order to find your own niche. I found this exercise very helpful and discovered that I like to experiment.

I wrote about ten experimental stories, allowing my imagination to run wild. One story was without punctuation, Running A Stop Street. Written with no full stops I inserted two horizontal lines where the text jumped over the lines.

Needless to say I had great fun.

In conjunction with all the reading, we had to emulate some of our chosen writers to find your voice. You had to study a writer’s way of writing to see what effect the writer achieved. After that you ventured out to find your own voice.

Feedback on my earnest efforts was that my voice was too strong and I had to tone it down. Imagine my surprise. And the deep deep doubt of a fledgling writer. If I could not write in my voice, which I didn’t even know I had to start with, what was I to do? Who was I? In the ensuing turmoil I started wondering: if I was a man with a testosterone-filled deep voice, would anyone dare tell me that my voice was too strong?

I tried my best to tone down my voice. Sometimes I succeeded and other times … well I tried. (As best as a strong-willed woman without a deep voice could).

In retrospect I wonder if emulating other writers to hone your own voice is a good idea. Do we all want or need to sound like Hemingway? Or any other published writer for that matter?

To me a writer’s voice develops as you write. Write, write, write more and more. In each story you write you will grow towards your unique ability and your “voice” will become a part of that growth.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Running A Stop Street
This story is in my collection Eye of a Neeedle: And Other Stories. Click here if you’d like to read it.

Show and tell

Recently my old supervisor asked me to look at a collection of short stories. The student had been deemed to be “weak”, and asking an outside reader was an attempt to get a fresh insight.

I read the student’s portfolio and right from the start his work had garnered comments like “too much explanation”, etc. After reading his stories it became clear that the problem was a lack of balance between show and tell.

Coming from a background of oral storytelling the student had applied that skill to his stories. They were good stories and I could sense his frustration. Although trying his best, he could not “fix” his stories. And as we all know, a writer’s ego is a fragile thing and once doubt sets in you are lost.

It took me back to my struggles as a beginner writer. “Show” and “tell” are pretty simple words that in the early grades of schooling is easy to understand. You show an object and then describe or tell about the object.

Applying the concept to a story is trickier. In the context of a story, what is show and what is tell? A Google search will bring many descriptions, some good and some not so good leading one to suspect that the author maybe didn’t have a good grasp of it at all.

I found that writer websites and books on writing provided the best descriptions. For example the book “Show Don’t Tell: A Writer’s Guide” by William Noble is helpful. A succinct description can be found on Jericho Writers website: “Show, don’t tell’ is a technique authors use to add drama to a novel. Rather than telling readers what’s happening, authors use this technique to show drama unfold on the page. ‘Telling’ is factual and avoids detail; while ‘showing,’ is detailed and places the human subject at the centre of the drama”.

More wisdom from Writers Digest: “Both showing and telling are forms of description. ‘The baby drooled on her new dress’ tells you what the baby is doing. It also shows you what she’s doing, in that the sentence enables you to form a mental picture, a scene you can ‘see’. Because a description can be interpreted in both these ways, there’s a very large overlap between telling and showing. It helps to understand telling versus showing not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum. A sentence like the one above falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum: It both shows and tells.” https://www.writersdigest.com/improve-my-writing/show-and-tell

My own understanding of show and tell materialized when I thought of a scene in script-writing. There is dialogue and there is action. The writer’s eye is the camera and he or she tells the story with images or in the case of writing a story, imagery.

I hope this helps to clarify what is required to master this concept. Please let me know in the comments what show and tell means to you.

Almost accepted

Earlier this week I received news that I had been shortlisted for a residency I applied for last year. The email was from the Executive Director. He said that even though I wasn’t chosen he wanted to forward my proposal to the next upcoming residency programme at their venue.

I was so tickled at being shortlisted (I have never progressed so far in previous applications anywhere) that his generous offer didn’t register. When it did I labelled him a fan of my work (ego I know, but we have to find them somewhere!) and deducted that he liked my idea of writing a historical trilogy.

In my proposal I had given an overview of my project and in the “motivation” I had written that my wish is for the descendants of slavery in South Africa to produce a literature that rivals that of the United States.

During my research I had come across all these novels written by this slave “himself” and that slave “herself” while there is no significant body of literature written by slaves in our history, just a deafening silence.

That silence stretches to most of our ancestors who whispered and kept secrets from their children and grandchildren. There’s a saying in my family that encapsulates this sentiment, “muis drolle uit die peper uit” which translated means mice droppings out of the pepper.

I would venture to say that it was meant to protect the muis drolletjies but it did more harm than good. All the whispering and secrecy contributed to a feeling of shame among the ancestors that they were subjected to slavery.

And that shame was handed down to subsequent generations.

With the added censorship of slavery and apartheid in our history books to lionize the victor, there are only a few voices in the dark. The time has come to remedy it, I averred in my proposal. My modest contribution would be the trilogy.

I don’t know if I will be accepted for the next residency but the news has acted like an injection of enthusiasm. I must write this trilogy.

I hope God spares me to do that.

Celebrate normality

Do you sometimes think, “Oh I’m so bored. Nothing ever happens. Please, someone, rescue me from this boring life!”
If that is your reality then you have what is called a normal life – sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes mediocre. Welcome to normality with its ups and downs.

Which leads me to my catch phrase or topic for the week: Celebrate normality, you don’t know how precious it is until someone drags you into the twilight world of abuse. In this dark place everything you think you know will be inverted, good becomes bad and bad is your new normal, enforced by a sick person high on control.

In this world there is no space to just sit and relax with a cup of coffee and a good book, no opportunity to be bored. Instead you are hyper-alert, your whole being focused on pleasing the abuser, to survive. After a while it becomes your new normal and you forget that a different reality ever existed.

Getting out is difficult, and the act of leaving may endanger your life. If you are in this situation please seek help. But be careful. You are the only person who has the inside knowledge to assess your risk.

There are many government and non-government organisations dedicated to assist those at risk. Ask for help, abuse thrives in secrecy.

And when you are out you’ll have a new appreciation for a normal life where nothing ever happens.

Remembering a traumatic past

In my reading of slavery I came across an initiative called The Slave Dwelling Project where they provide prospective clients with an overnight stay in accommodation previously occupied by slaves.

Founded by Joseph McGill who wanted to feel closer to his past, the initiative has grown into presentations at universities and a yearly conference. McGill co-wrote (with Herb Fraziera) a book on his experiences called Sleeping with the Ancestors.

At first glance this idea seemed scary to me. Won’t one meet ghosts, real or imaginary, from a past that is bound to make one feel uncomfortable? However, after reading the objectives of this enterprise I could see the merits.

The aim is to:

Change the narrative of American history and address the legacies of slavery,
Preserve and sustain slave dwellings,
Promote education about slavery and the contributions of African Americans

Then I realised that in the current climate of finally facing our traumatic history of slavery this could benefit those in South Africa interested in examining and coming to terms with their past.

To my limited knowledge there isn’t really a focussed drive in our country to search for and preserve dwellings of the slave past, apart from officially preserved buildings like the Slave Lodge and various museums.

The desire to interact with the traumatic events in the past is fairly new here and there are still those (mostly descendants of the masters) who feel that the past should be forgotten and everyone should “move on”.

Among the core values of the Slave Dwelling Project that I think will be useful to us at the southern tip of Africa are:

Uplift the voices of the enslaved
Tell the truth, keep it real – no sugarcoating
Accept psychological and physical discomfort in service to our Mission
Tell stories that help us learn and connect
Ground our work in researched history
Collaborate and work as a team

You can find out more about this project by following this link
https://slavedwellingproject.org/

The power of story

I’m currently reading Patric Tariq Mellet’s The Lie of 1652: A Decolonised History of Land. Near the beginning of his tome of 429 pages the following caught my attention: the “imposed ideological framework” of apartheid’s strategy of divide and rule was bolstered and carried by the “narratives” chosen to underpin it.

One of the myths that was created was the story of “empty land”. To make this history more palatable and less bloodthirsty, when Jan van Riebeeck and his ship mates arrived in 1652 they found a few indigenous Khoi and San roaming at the Cape. Then “a mass invasion of black alien people swooped down from Nigeria, Cameroon and the Great Lakes and tried to wrest the land from the San, Khoe and Europeans”.

As a writer I appreciate the wonderful drama inherent in this tale. In my mind’s eye I see horses thundering, swords flashing – a real action movie. Automatically there are heroes and villains, and I leave it to your imagination to sort out who is a hero and who is a villain in this tale.

Although we have ostensibly left apartheid behind for almost 30 years, these stories are so deeply embedded that they cannot die. The division that they created between black and brown people, for example, has been difficult to eradicate.

What would break this? I want to postulate that there is much work to be done for the writers in our country. They should roll up their sleeves and study the “narratives” that acted as a scaffold for the ideological framework of slavery and apartheid and counter it.

As Mellet states “The year 1652 has been presented as the genesis of social history in South Africa, and of human advancement and civilization of Africans. Our history was relegated to the realm of the natural history framework of Iron Age and Stone Age hominins” (p7).

There are many versions of history and we have to find a way to tell our own stories in fiction and non-fiction. According to an African proverb, “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.”

I’m so grateful Mellet wrote this book. I met him (during my PhD research) before the book was published and I was impressed and a bit intimidated by his zeal. He asked me who my ancestors were and I had to meekly confess that I don’t know…

Dear readers, that is something we all ought to know! Who are your ancestors?

Plan to write a trilogy

I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking around the topic of what I really want to do with my life. What do I want to accomplish or achieve? Thus far my goal has been quite vague: to be a successful writer.

Okay. But what does that mean for me? Money? Fame? I won’t lie, money and fame does have an attraction. But then I look at famous or almost-famous writers discussing their craft on the various media and I cringe.

My introvert DNA shudders at the thought. Do I really want to sit under a bright light and sweat through highbrow questions? No. Being in the limelight — why that might just kill me.

As an introvert I mostly avoid drawing attention to myself. I prefer to sit quietly and study the ones who are drawing attention to themselves and the ones that don’t. Writing 101: Thou shalt study human nature. Most writing books will tell you something to that effect.

Yet the time has come to narrow down and fine-tune this lofty concept of being a successful writer. Sometimes one gets bogged down into doing what you think you should be doing instead of what you want.

If money and fame doesn’t get me too excited what is left? And for me what is left is to do something useful. In South Africa the history of slavery has been suppressed during apartheid but there is a resurgence of people wanting to reclaim their history. It’s a cause that resonates with me.

That is when I started thinking of writing a trilogy. I still have to iron out the kinks but for 2024 that is my plan.

Finding readers

Most writers struggle to find their readers and I’m one of them. Now, I’m not going to make a passionate speech of ‘pick me’ as Meredith does in Grey’s Anatomy (quoted below) but maybe a consistent effort will net me more readers.

So, in my list of new year resolutions I promise to write regular entries for my blog. To that end I’ve constructed a plan. Watch this space…

What Grey’s Anatomy Taught Me About Finding My Readers

After blues

After finishing my thesis I feel a bit lost. It took up so much of my time: I didn’t read newspapers or watch the news, I didn’t read for leisure (a loved past-time), I didn’t watch my favourite television programmes and I didn’t participate in the skinnering and fighting so prevalent in a big family like mine.

Now I’m not clued up on who did what. Now when I hear a story it’s already old news and lacks the zest and intrigue of a freshly minted story…

Countless stories pranced by without my input or scrutiny. Sob.

How do I feel about it? I don’t know. It certainly kept me safe from developing conflicts. But now I have lost touch with the vein of intrigue and boisterous laughter that punctuates most of our conversations.

Consisting if nine siblings, seven women and two men, and their partners and children, my family is a very good antidote to depression. After visiting with them the world looks brighter.

I feel myself smiling when I think of something somebody said. There are raconteurs of note in my family and a prevailing viewpoint that recognizes the absurd and the outright funny part of struggling with this thing called life.