Writing Between Worlds – Describing the Indescribable

‘The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn't run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it.’ 

Michel Adjvaz

Two months ago I arrived in Wales, a place of great beauty and wildness, a place laden with mystery and layered with history. Here it seems as if the veil between worlds is thinner than elsewhere, so that from the corner of my eye I see glimpses of other times - a flash of a man on horseback, the swish of long skirts. . . There are glimpses of other worlds too, as I discovered driving home one evening along a narrow country lane with a forest lining each side of the road. Ahead of me, I clearly saw a figure the size of a man yet not a man, moving across the road but high up, almost level with the canopies of the trees. Not wanting to make my children nervous, I decided not to mention it. Despite my precautions my son went strangely quiet and we drove home in silence. The next morning as we retraced the road through the same forest, I told my children that I had seen something the night before. My son stated that he had seen something too in this spot, but by the side of the road, just a little above the ground, a figure the size of a man yet not a man . . .

Real and yet not real. Imagination? Fantasy? It’s generally easy for others to rationalise these things away, as a trick of the light, a flight of the imagination, wishful thinking even. . . and yet when we experience something outside of the realms of what we consider normal or possible, then we know it with a deep and protective certainty. In my experience many people have seen or experienced something they cannot explain, yet most of them keep it to themselves in the knowledge that putting it to words generally reduces the experience, and in the fear that they will be ridiculed. In Weight, Jeanette Winterson wrote, 'Right now, human beings as a mass, have a gruesome appetite for what they call 'real'. . . Such a phenomenon points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic, of the non-material, of the contemplative.' Perhaps we carry this fear in our genes, stamped by the horrors of history into our ancestors and passed down generation after generation. This has been reinforced by the successes of scientific materialism and the relegation of the non-rational to the status of superstition. Inevitably, over time we have become detached from the natural world around us and lost our own connection with the magic and mystery of life, handing control of the spiritual experience to the priests of organised religion and handing validation of our own experience, to their modern equivalent, the technocrats of science. We have been taught to hold the fear at bay by seeking certainty in the rational, the measurable, the flesh and blood physical world of the five senses, and in so doing we have passively watched the colour seep out of life. Perhaps it is fear that has led so many of us to consider as virtues the deadening qualities of scepticism and cynicism.

The best of religion is not blinkered and nor is the best of science. One of our greatest scientists, Albert Einstein, once said that ‘the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,’ then went on to warn that ‘we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.’ In so doing we have found ourselves limited by the constraints of the five-senses which have come to define the physical world, and yet there is so much more beyond these restrictions, so many more threads which connect all things and such a thin membrane separating the physical world from the invisible world. I have always been interested in treading the line between worlds in my writing, of finding ways to transcend the boundaries of time and space. Not by creating fantastical other worlds but rather by slipping back and forth between our everyday world and the worlds which sit beyond or within. Yet I know from personal experience just how difficult it is to translate extrasensory experience onto paper without losing its vitality, and for a time this difficulty led me to stay closer to the ‘real’ in my writing than I wished.

Stories themselves are not ‘of this world’. As Haruki Murakami wrote inSputnik Sweetheart, ‘a real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.' With this in mind, I finally took the plunge and began breaking the rules of realism, playing with space and time, with cause and effect and with the line between life and death. In Eva Luna, Isabel Allende wrote that ‘reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying.” In a sense this is what I have done in Flight – taken my own experiences, many of which I hadn’t fully understood, and thrown them into the winds, letting them settle into place and form a story, whilst giving my imagination free reign to fill in the gaps. What eventually emerged was something more truthful than any material fact I could cite.

Writing that explores these boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds tends to be called magical realist but more often than not this title is applied to or claimed by only South American writers such as Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In truth, its roots are much broader, including among others, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Salmon Rushdie, Franz Kafka, and  Haruki Murakami. For want of a better word, I will label my latest novel, Flight as magical realist, a genre I am drawn to for a number of reasons. Firstly, magical realism has a strong affinity with Jungian psychology, encouraging a sense of connectedness between all things and often drawing on ancient esoteric beliefs. Secondly, I believe that magical realism is a subversive genre. Whether or not we write directly about politics, our writing is always a political act because depending on our approach it defines, reinforces or rewrites our understanding of the world in which we live. To re-introduce magic into realism is a necessary political act, pushing back against the restrictive socially constructed boundaries of what is ‘real’. And finally, as Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris wrote in Magical Realism, ‘the supernatural . . . [becomes] an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence – admitted, accepted and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism’. In this genre, magic is a fundamental part of life, as ordinary and as necessary as the air we breathe. This gives us the space to write about our experiences without fear of ridicule, drawing on symbolism and metaphor to create the necessary bridges between one world and the other. In so doing we are finally able to describe the indescribable. 

Copyright (c) 2013 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Imagination And Memory: A Creative Tension

'Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.'

Henry Miller

I don't plan before I write. Instead I start with an image that haunts me and perhaps a theme or two then see what emerges. The word imagination comes from the Latin word imago, which means image. According to psychologist, Robert Johnson, in his book, Inner Work, 'the imagination is the image-forming faculty in the mind. . .it generates the symbols the unconscious uses to express itself' Imagination is vital for creative life, for abstract thought, for the development of the sciences, philosophy, religion and even language. As Catherine Ann Jones wrote in The Way of Story, 'images are the language of the soul', yet in popular modern terms the role of the imagination has been denigrated, coming to mean something fictitious or a daydream and often labelled as mere fantasy.

The word fantasy is derived from the Greek word phantasia which meant 'a making visible'. For the Greeks, phantasia was much more than a daydream, it was, as Johnson wrote, 'the organ by which the divine world spoke to the human mind'. For me too, the image making faculty is far more than mere fantasy. Einstein believed that 'imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand'. I too believe that the imagination is perhaps the greatest gift humanity has been given. Its only limits are the ones we place upon it and ourselves.

Imagination is what makes us human, enabling us to experience events and emotions we might not normally experience, to reflect, to find commonality with others and thus understand ourselves. As writers we can imagine fictional characters and in so doing, reveal and discover something about ourselves and others, for as Lousie DeSalvo explained in The Healing Power of Story, 'storytelling teaches us or reteaches us empathy. This trait is a prerequisite for treating others well but it depends upon our ability to imagine what it feels like to be another person. We do this through storytelling.'

Imagination is like the trickster gods of old - a powerful liberating force, cutting through what has been established, making strange what is normal, allowing us to step into the shoes of another, to break free of what we know and to fly. And yet, Carmel Bird says in Dear Writer, 'the worlds of the imagination are constructed from the things we find in the everyday world'. Bird distinguishes between this everyday world and the imaginative world of 'other possibilities' but says there is no conflict between them, that the writer must give permission to the imagination to 'rearrange the building blocks of everyday reality'. Therefore the writing process is about taking the familiar and making it strange, letting the imagination create something new from what is known and thus venture into the realms of the unknown.

Imagination is not solely responsible for the mystery and magic of writing. Memory too, plays an important role. The word memory, comes from the Greek word Mnemosyne. Born from the marriage of Uranus and Gaia, heaven and earth, Mnemosyne was personified as the mother of the nine muses and the patron goddesses of poets. Fiction writers spend a great deal of time inhabiting the world of the imagination, but also draw heavily on memory, for as Jones writes, 'memory is one of the primal sources for creative images'. I am fascinated by the memories we carry (often unconsciously) and the way they arise in the process of storytelling, make links between seemingly disparate ideas and provide significance and revelation. In the process of writing, a tension is created between the grounding nature of memory and the flightiness of the imagination. For me, the vitality of that tension creates meaning. It is the source of my stories. Trusting it, is an act of faith in the unfolding mystery of story. In The Creative Writing Coursebook, Lesley Glaister writes that 'memory is refracted through imagination, often unconsciously, into something new.' That, she says, is 'the real stuff of fiction memory blended, refracted, transformed.'

As I write, I work closely with the unconscious; In the process I take my own memories and recreate them, usually in a fictional way, finding links and themes and connoting meaning through metaphor. 'Memory is a poet, explains Patti Miller in Writing Your Life, it stores 'experiences in imaginative patterns. . . connections are made through imaginative association rather than logic.' Miller goes on to distinguish between the left and right sides of the brain, suggesting that when people try to write from the logical left part of their mind, their stories become dull and flat, whereas the right side of the brain is where the imagination and poetry lie. As Einstein once said, 'logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.'

In her novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels writes that 'the memories we elude catch up to us, overtake us like a shadow. A truth appears suddenly in the middle of a thought, a hair on a lens'. This is how my memories arose while I was writing Flight; spontaneously, from the right side of the brain, overtaking me with sudden revelations. At first the memories seemed random and out of context, so I was tempted to ignore them. Instead I decided to trust the creative process, so I took the bare facts and used my imagination to expand each memory and link it with my protagonist, Fern. Only then did I receive the gift that always comes with this connection, the hidden revelation, an understanding of its significance. For it is memory that helps us identify the patterns in our lives and imagination that helps us to interpret them. 'How we remember,' writes Jones 'is how we give meaning to a life lived.'.

As more of my memories arose and were given to Fern, I wondered if by giving my memories away I was in a sense emptying myself and in so doing, might in some way lose myself. In his book, Creativity, Osho distinguishes between psychological and factual memory, stating that factual memory is necessary but psychological memory is not. 'Factual memory,' he says, 'is not a problem, it is pure remembrance. When you become psychologically affected by it, then the problem arises'. I realised then, that this was the essence of the journeys many of us take when writing, particularly about trauma or pain. The result is a clearing of our emotional attachment to these memories. We still have them, and yet in writing them we release ourselves from their spell or 'curse' and thus the identity they had constructed. In writing about memories in this way, we evoke our imaginations to transform them and thus liberate ourselves from them, not lose ourselves in them. In the end though, whether it be fiction or memoir and no matter what reasons we draw on memory in our writing, memory is a rich and authentic source of material for writers, helping us to create credible characters, settings and back story. It is memory that grounds our stories, while imagination gives our stories the wings they need to soar.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Reading Between The Lines

'Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.'

James Russell Lowell

It was a timely decision to designate this year as the National Year of Reading. Literacy is fundamental to living in our society, to meeting the demands of everyday life and to discovering the magic contained within books. Yet even when we are literate, we run the risk of losing that magic. In this increasingly fast paced, hi-tech society we have become impatient, finding ourselves drawn to abbreviations rather than elaborations. Facebook and twitter reduce our news to paragraphs and sentences respectively, micro-fiction is blossoming, the pace of our stories is increasing, as is the speed with which they are delivered, until there is little time for contemplation, for pausing over a beautiful passage in a story, for allowing stories to seep into us and change us from within. And yet stories are vital. More than mere entertainment, they tell us who we are and they help us to find ourselves.

As Ralph Waldo Emmerson once said, 'I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.' Each of us is the product of the stories we tell ourselves, the stories our culture, our society, our family, our friends, our teachers, our filmmakers and our authors tell us. Story is what forms our identity and our opinions. But stories can do something else too. They can be truly revolutionary. When we read heroic myths, or novels which tell of the coming of age of a character, then we find that these stories can also help to free us from an identity that has been constructed by others and to see through the ideology in which we are immersed. Reading can and should help us to learn how to live as individuals within society, by encouraging us to reach inwards and explore ourselves and showing us how to reach out and connect with others.

Our imagination is a vital part of each of us. It is what makes us human, enabling us to experience events and emotions we might not normally experience, to reflect, to find commonality with others and thus understand ourselves. And most importantly, our imagination is what allows us to step into the shoes of others and so develop empathy. For as Joyce Carole Oates once wrote, reading helps us to 'slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul,' A tool, a toy, a gift and a responsibility, the imagination is something which must be developed and nurtured, not ignored or stifled. Reading is a collaborative effort between the author and the reader, allowing the reader to use his or her imagination to bring a story to life. Hence, our frequent disappointment with film adaptations of novels, which rarely come close to the extraordinary world or the characters we have already created in our imaginations from reading the novel. For as Stephen King wrote in On Writing, 'description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

If the stories we tell ourselves, and the way in which we use our imaginations play a role in creating who we are, then it might not be enough to simply encourage reading, we might also need to consider what we choose to read and how we read. At present, many of our stories, across much of our media, celebrate violence and cynicism, anger and betrayal. A premium, it seems, is placed on ugliness, and stories that 'tell it how it is' receive accolades from critics. There is much that is ugly and violent in this world and much of it needs telling, but from chaos and pain it is possible, through story, to create harmony and peace. Why are we so afraid to tell stories that explore love and compassion and hope? Why do we so often deride them? If story can change us, then it can also change the world, so perhaps we should be writing and reading stories that are optimistic, that 'tell it how it might be' instead of 'how it is'. Franz Kafka once wrote that 'a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us'. These are the kinds of stories that I search for as a reader and the ones I seek to write. Stories should stay with us, should linger in our conscious and unconscious selves, working their magic even after we have finished with their writing, or their reading.

And as to how we read? Perhaps it's time to once more step beyond the limitations of the predominant story of science and rationality. Instead of insisting on the distinction between fact and fiction, or denigrating myth as false, we might then allow ourselves to read more deeply, exploring the nature of truth rather than fact. For not all truth is measurable. As Maya Angelou writes, 'There's a world of difference between truth and fact. Fact tells us the data. . . but facts can obscure the truth.' Stories can be unifying, building bridges between people but often it depends on how we read them. There are many stories that build fences, creating dangerous 'us and them' distinctions but this only happens when stories are read literally rather than metaphorically. Religious stories are sometimes an example of this. They are too often read literally, which misses a good deal of their beauty and wisdom, whilst creating fences that divide and divisions that kill. It happens too when we skim the surface of a story rather than peer into the depths; when we criticise or value a book for it's language and miss the beauty and purpose of its story; and when we dismiss a memoir because it is not entirely factual, missing the powerful emotional journey the writer has taken us on. In this year of reading, we must remember once again that truth is not fact. That, as the great Sufi poet, Rumi wrote, 'a tale, fictitious or otherwise, illuminates truth'.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Coming Unstuck

'Creativity needs freedom – freedom from the mind, freedom from knowledge, freedom from prejudices.'

Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within

In the previous post I explored the obstacles that prevent us from accessing or making full use of our creativity but there are also factors that help us to reengage with the flow of life and hence with creativity. In The Way of Story, Catherine Ann Jones defines the creative act as an 'act of liberation, the defeat of habit by originality', something which is echoed below in Osho's four keys to creativity:

Become a child again - A child sees the world in a special way. For a child everything has significance and wonder. Having children was a gift for me in many ways, one of which was the opportunity it brought to see the world once again through the fresh eyes of a child, something I explore in Passing Time, a non-fiction short story.

Be ready to learn - We need to let go of beliefs that stop us from learning more about the world and instead try to step outside of conditioning and ideology and trust in our own experience as a guide. In Osho's words, we must keep learning but never become knowledgeable.

Find Nirvana in the Ordinary - Look for the mystery and the magic in the every day world, then every form of work becomes a meditation from the heart.

Be a dreamer - Imagination is a vital part of creativity so we need to unleash it. Imagination is like the trickster gods of old. It is a liberating force, cutting through what has been established, making strange what is normal, allowing us to step into the shoes of another, to break free of what we know and to fly.

These four keys link closely to playfulness, something which many writers find difficult to access in the writing process and many of us find difficult to embrace in our lives. In archetypal terms perhaps we need to make friends once again with the wild child within ourselves, fearless and playful, intrigued by life and most importantly, not squashed by formula and conditioning. It's not an easy thing to do this because from early childhood onwards we are told the right and the wrong way of doing things, which is useful in some circumstances, but it can also make us close off our potential. At the age of nine my son was told by his teacher that his stories were wrong and so were his drawings. Over and again she made him redo them the 'right way' until he began to think himself stupid and became so anxious and depressed he was unable to go to school. It took us a year to convince him that his way was the right way, the way of discovery and creativity; a year to induce him to write and draw again, and a year for him to be ready to return to a school environment.

As Picasso said, 'every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up'. These days rote learning is valued more than creative thought. Formula more than imagination. We are taught to repeat and reproduce and in so doing we quickly lose our freshness of vision. We are told that this is the wrong way and that is the right way. We tell ourselves: 'I can't write' . . 'I'm no good at drawing' . . . 'My voice is terrible'. . . creating stories of dysfunction within our lives, stories that have often been triggered by people in authority: parents, older siblings, teachers, employers, religious leaders. . . I have heard the same story from many students over many years and I have carried my own stories with me too, allowing them to solidify into fact and become part of my identity. These are themes I have explored in Flight, as the protagonist, Fern, finds herself forced to rewrite her own life, gathering up the parts of herself that have been lost and rescinding those promises she has made that have weakened her.

As I see it, one part of the solution is to rediscover our playfulness, stop worrying about the consequences and realise that creativity is not an intellectual exercise. As Jung wrote, 'the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity'. Creativity is about stepping over a line and taking risks. All my life I have had a sense of that line and the need to step over it, knowing that if I did I would be moving beyond my limitations and hence be capable of anything. After many years I've finally approached it and occasionally I get a glimpse of what it might be like on the other side. I'm beginning to unravel those stories that don't serve me, peel away the scar tissue from wounds that I didn't even know existed and in the process discover something more fundamental; an essential self that is not disfigured by experience.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Sticking Points

'Nature gives everybody energy which is creative. It becomes destructive only when it is obstructed, when no natural flow is allowed.'

Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within

Sometimes it seems that as soon as we start a creative project, circumstances and duty step in to bring it to an abrupt halt. Perhaps it is an elaborate avoidance technique, designed to stop us from facing the possibility of failure. A version of writer's block. Or perhaps it is simply because life gets in the way and a project must be put aside for a time. It isn't always easy to distinguish between the two, and either way, it is sometimes difficult to return to a project at a later date. We fill up our days until there is no space left for it, putting everything else first and not giving our creativity the value it deserves.

Like good food and exercise, creativity is fundamental to our health. We should find the time to value and nurture it, not place it at the bottom of our 'to do' lists. In his book Creativity, the author, Osho, lists five obstacles to creativity which he has written an entire book on and I shall attempt to summarise in a few lines and perhaps expand on in later posts:

Self-Consciousness - Osho calls self-consciousness a disease, describing it as a blocked, frozen state, a state of self that takes in but doesn't give out. 'A nonsurrendering attitude.' Whereas consciousness is free of ego, has no boundaries and is abundantly alive. Perhaps the state of self-consciousness relates to our wounded selves and the way to overcome it is to let go of resistance and tune into our unconscious selves.

Perfectionism - in order to find our way back to our creativity we only have to lower our standards and keep lowering them, until eventually the flow resumes. Perfectionism is dangerous because if we seek it we never arrive. And if by chance we did reach it then we would most likely be afraid to ever set out on the journey again. Osho associates perfectionism with ego, describing a paradox 'the real creator knows that he has not created anything. Existence has worked through him.'

Intellect – Creativity comes from the heart, not from the head. There are times when we use the head; possibly during our research, though even then we follow a strange intuitive sense that takes use to just the right places. We also use the head in the editing process. But in the writing process we write from the heart, drawing perhaps from memory but transforming it with imagination.

Belief - Many of the beliefs we hold, limit our imagination because beliefs tend to be carved in stone, rigid and unmoving. When we create we are drawing from our own experience and experience is ever changing. In the process we need to be open, not closed, seeking universal truths not rigid mind beliefs.

The Fame Game - the need for fame and monetary success acts as a hindrance to creativity, a block to the free flow of the imagination. We write what we think we should write not what we need to write for ourselves. And instead of immersing ourselves in the trials and joys of writing, we wish away the process for the end product. If fame and money comes (and they rarely do), then that's great but it shouldn't be the only factor that determines our desire to write or we will only be capable of composing, not truly creating, a distinction that Osho makes emphatically in his book.

These are obstacles which cause writer's block, though it's important to remember that they have an effect on all of our creative endeavors and by that I mean every part of our lives. More often than not, the obstacles that stop our creativity are self-generated internal ones like those that Osho lists. Sometimes though, the factor that stop us from writing are external ones, such as working long hours or school holidays or even tragedy. Sometimes we find ourselves in a kind of Catch-22 situation, becoming depressed or ill because our creativity is blocked and unable to access our creativity because we are depressed or ill. Grief has a way of stopping us in our tracks, though it can be a healing process to write our way through it as Isabel Allende did when she wrote Paula while her daughter was lying in a coma and eventually died; and Joan Aitken too, when she wrote A Year of Magical Thinking after her husband died suddenly and her daughter fell severely ill. However, there are times when we have to let go of a project and allow a space in our lives for healing or simply living, knowing that we can come back to it later, when we are ready. I agree with Catherine Ann Jones who writes in The Way of Story, that 'so-called writer's block is not a malady to be remedied but rather an opportunity to go deeper'.

For the time being I have been turned away from writing my new novel by the desire to spend time with my children during their holidays, a deadline to write a film script, the need to read my husband's first novel manuscript, a science thriller called The God Equation (there's a plug!) and my building excitement as Flight approaches its publication date. The trick is to let go of the writing of my novel without resentment and remember to apply that creativity to every activity in my daily life.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Finding Our Stories

'You are your stories. You are the product of all the stories you have heard and lived – and of many that you have never heard. They have shaped how you see yourself, the world, and your place in it.'

Daniel Taylor, Tell Me A Story

Since ancient times we have told stories. We sit around camp fires watching the flickering flames and exchanging tales, or curl up in bed with our books, or gather in front of a screen. We read newspapers, listen to the radio and browse the internet. We make up stories for our children, or meet friends for coffee and swap anecdotes. When we sit down at the dinner table and talk to our family, we construct stories from the events of the day, shaping our ideas into a satisfying structure with a beginning, middle and end, creating a narrative flow, an atmosphere, tensions, hooks and characters.

Stories are a natural part of us, deeply embedded in our psyche yet sometimes people tell me they have no stories to tell. For many years I had this same concern. I could write polished prose passages but I couldn't shape a story. I couldn't make characters move or events happen, I couldn't find endings, and more importantly, I couldn't find beginnings. I used to envy people who had real stories to tell, who grew up in families steeped in story, families whose lives had crossed continents, whose houses were filled with music and books and whose meals were accompanied by passionate conversation. My childhood was empty of these things. I was an adopted child, growing up in bland suburb with a family who were strict Baptists. Rabidly anti-iconic they rejected the exciting imaginative elements of religion and simply kept the rules, creating a regimented and sterile environment – without artworks, or music (aside from hymns), or dance, or even books. . .

When I discovered the library, books became both my escape from life and my way of exploring the world and myself. Then later, when I wanted to craft my own stories, I realised that the only stories I knew were from books. Where, I wondered, could I find stories in a bland suburban family like mine? But over time I began to realise that even bland suburbia was full of stories. I was full of stories. I just had to learn how to access them and to stop assuming they weren't interesting enough to share. In the end I discovered that it wasn't a lack of stories that was paralysing me, it was that there were too many stories to choose from.

'How to choose your story then?' asks Catherine Anne Jones in The Way of Story. 'Simple. Choose the one you feel emotionally connected with.' More often than not the stories we write are drawn from our own lives. These are the stories that are written with our hearts not our heads. Even when the plot is fictional, the themes are usually our own and hence we have an emotional connection with them. The short stories I have written have usually been about defining moments in my life, such as Impotence, a fiction story about the abrupt end of a childhood and the complex nature of a child's love for his mother. Or they're about small moments that symbolise something more universal, such as my non-fiction story, Passing Time which was inspired by my youngest child slipping into bed with me on a cold winter's morning and discussing the universe and time. My novels and the story or stories they contain are a blend of fiction and non-fiction, my memories handed over to a fictional character whose journey is to resolve them and/or to seek the universal within them. Sometimes these memories are replayed in my stories and sometimes they are transformed, reemerging as themes that mark and guide the lives of my characters.

We go inwards to find our stories, delving into the unconscious to find what has long been hidden; using our memory to rediscover it and our imagination to transform it. To write a story is to descend into the underworld or step into the labyrinth, with only a few clues and no guarantee of a way back out again. It is to step beyond our limitation, embarking on a journey with no known destination and often no ticket. These journeys are not always comfortable but they're generally rewarding. And in the process we feel truly alive.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/