Digging Deep: Writing Character

'Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.'

C. G. Jung

Secrets are fertile ground for writers because they lie at the very heart of character. Conjuring images of dark musty cupboards rattling with bones, and of snakes slithering through wood piles, secrets are framed in silences. Adept at creating conflict, secrets are embedded within personal and family stories; the unspoken, the prohibited, the places we fear to tread. When these secrets are released they strike us at our core, but then most likely we will end up asking: So what? Was that all? You see, the danger of secrets so often lies not in their content but in their very existence. Secrets have a way of passing down from one generation to the next, growing, deepening, poisoning; the silences around them creating gaping chasms between people and between generations. Sometimes we accidentally stumble over a secret but generally it takes courage to chase one down and look it in the face. It takes a profound need to break free of a pattern and to take a close look at who we really are.

My first novel, Gathering Storm is about secrets, the corrosive sort that are passed down from one generation to the next, while my new novel, Flight is about the secrets we carry within ourselves, just out of reach of our memories, secrets that manifest in the forms of patterns of behaviour, unconsciously repeated over and over until we are forced to stop and face what we are evading. Mythologist, Joseph Campbell believed that the slaying of a dragon in a story is a metaphor for inner change, for facing those things within us that we are most afraid of. The plot then is a metaphor for character development. The outer passage of a story incidental, the inner passage fundamental. The outer passage the costume, the inner passage the essence. There is a tension there, because whilst the outer journey often follows a linear sense of time by moving into the future, the inner journey is often a series of movements into the past, not a straight line but a thematically choreographed dipping into memory. This inner journey uncovers the fragments that motivate a character's actions and creates an opportunity for the character to eventually heal a wound.

There are many metaphors for the journey of a character in a story. Alchemy is one; that fiery process of turning lead into gold. Or there's the symbolism of death and mystical resurrection, the shamanic descent to the underworld, followed by magical flight, the journey into the labyrinth to face the monstrous within us and the thread with which we find our way back out once again, forever changed. All of these are metaphors of transformation, something which begins to occur to varying degrees in a story when a character turns to face the unknown or the unremembered. But transformation is a process, not a product, it is perpetual and vital. As with life, in story there are turning points, moments of catharsis, of understanding, followed by periods of integration of that new knowledge.

In Flight, Fern's must retrieve and release lost memories in order to become whole again. Paralleling the quest of the hero in ancient mythology, Fern's journey through the wilderness is symbolic of the journey into the labyrinth, or the underworld. A place where fear is faced and inner change happens. Flight is a metaphysical novel in which the classic narrative patterns of the adventure story and the spiritual journey are intermingled. Since the time of humanity's first storytellers, the unnamed shamans, we have told stories that document the journeys of the soul, sending our characters deep into a literal or metaphoric underworld in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. In Flight, Fern takes her first reluctant steps in an odyssey, embarking on a dangerous journey that will eventually bring her face to face with her deepest fears. As Fern herself soon discovers, in order to fly, one must first be willing to fall. That is, after all, the nature of story, an invitation to journey, to adventure, to remember who we really are, something that is summarised so beautifully by TS Eliot in Four Quartets,

'We shall not cease from explorations

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.'

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/

A Book Excerpt From Flight – Part Two

 The Way of Love is

not a subtle argument.

The door there

is devastation.

Bird's make great sky-circles

of their freedom.

How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,

they're given wings.

Rumi, (translated by Coleman Barks), The Essential Rumi

As promised, here is the second part of the prologue to Flight. For anyone who hasn't read the opening of the prologue, have a look at the previous post first. And for anyone who is new to this site, as my novel is published this week I am being self indulgent and posting a couple of book extracts instead of my normal posts. If you want to see what I generally discuss in this blog, have a look at some of the earlier posts.

My apologies to those readers who are not based in Australia or New Zealand and who would like to read Flight. It seems that there will be some restrictions on its distribution for a few months yet. There are a number of online Australian booksellers who may send print editions to international customers: such as Dymocks, Fishpond, Borders, Boomerang Books and Booktopia.

Flight - Prologue (Part 2)

He was biding his time. My father wasn't an evil man but he had already done wrong, and this deed had set in motion others. Then it was only a matter of time, as the prophecy ate away at him, turning him into its slave. Perhaps the seeds of madness had already been planted deep in his heart, in this life or another. Or perhaps they were sown later; I am not sure, for it is hard to see the beginnings of things.

People always say that children can't remember. That babies have no language and therefore no memories. That an abandoned baby can't be traumatised. They are wrong. There are many ways of knowing. The memories we carry in our consciousness are not the only ones. There are others, ones we can't relate in words, and yet their scar tissue builds up so that we live every day of our lives in reaction to them. I have learned first hand that we carry memory in our cells. Unresolved trauma acts like a cancer, scarring, mutating, warping our cells until they become sick. Remembering is implicit in the decision to enter the labyrinth, to look inside ourselves, at our wounds and our carefully buried strengths. It's there in the patterns we identify in our lives. And there too in the truths we discover and recognise as having always known. I know these things because I have looked deeply into myself and seen what needed seeing.

I was born in Adelaide on January 2^nd 1989. From the beginning, life for me was a serious matter of survival, but it was also something I did not relish at all. There is a contradiction in this, I know, and one that tugged me this way and that, making me strong, yet fearful; determined, yet too ready to give up. A contradiction that for many years trapped me in a half-life, a twilight world of muted colours. A prison I didn't even know I was in until I made my escape.

I entered this world wearing my mother's blood and carrying the marks of my father's fist on my back. Within minutes of my birth an ambulance arrived, its siren sending my heart thumping too fast all over again. There were danger signals everywhere and I could no longer distinguish between what was safe and what was not. But I was a tiny baby, born a month early, and the hands of those men were gentle as they carried me to the relative safety of the hospital.

He tried one more time, in the hospital ward, his large hand grabbing me by the leg and swinging me up and out of the plastic crib and head first into the wall. One swing, but he hadn't built up momentum yet. My mother's loyalties were torn, but for that one crucial moment the hormones swilling through her body put her on my side. She screamed. Just once, but there was a tone in it, enough to bring people running. Before the next swing a nurse appeared in the doorway and, reading the madness in my father's eyes, pressed the alarm.

Already a master of disguise, my father recovered quickly, cradling me in his arms, uttering comforting baby noises while I stared mutely up into his eyes, my heart thudding.

'I slipped,' he told the nurse. 'I almost dropped her. My God, they're so fragile.' Then, as a nurse took her from him, 'She's alright, isn't she?'

Uncertain now, the nurse looked at my mother lying there in the crisp white hospital bed, wearing a white hospital gown because there'd been no time to pack, sobbing, milk leaking from her nipples.

My mother looked at each of us in turn, seeing the threat in my father's eyes, the bewildered fear in mine and the question in the nurse's. Then, stony-faced, she turned away from us all. She had made a decision. 'It was an accident,' she said. 'He slipped.'

But she did sign the adoption forms. To keep me safe.

Then she wrapped me tightly in a white blanket, placed me back in the plastic see-through hospital-issue crib and wheeled me into a room full of other howling cribs, setting me loose into a sea of indifference with no anchor and no oars, with only the sun, the moon and the stars to navigate by, and no lessons to help me decipher them.

On my original birth certificate there is a blank space next to Father. My mother's name is listed as Joan Childe. My name is listed as Erica. On my second birth certificate my father's name is listed as Richard Parsons, my mother's as Grace Parsons My adopted parents called me Fernanda after an evangelical missionary they favoured at the time. I called myself Fern. More than anything I wanted to fly. But in order to fly, one must first be willing to fall.

This is the story of my journey, following the clues back through the twists and turns that made me into what I was, searching for the moments of definition: the overheard sentence, the intention in another's eyes, a boy seducing a girl, a fist, a beating and a mother turning away. I had to go deep into the underworld and enter the labyrinth, with no guarantee of return, seeking the threads that I could weave into a rope thick enough to haul me out again.

In this story there are those gifted and cursed with the power of prophecy. There's a young man haunted by the past and an old man haunted by the future. There is death and corruption and injustice. There is love and passion and hatred, all carried across lifetimes. Occasionally there is compassion. But more often, as in real life, there is fear.

I am there too. Haunted and hollow. An outline, waiting to be filled in. Poised trembling before the entrance to the labyrinth. A shadow of the self I should have been. A shadow of who I am now as I sit here looking for a beginning when there isn't one, when there never is, because life is simply not neat, and one story hardly ever ends before another begins. Instead they span time and space, reaching back into a past that extends beyond our first breath and into a future that extends beyond our last, through a multitude of lives and tied only by the threads of souls and their patterns.

In the absence of a clear beginning I will draw an artificial line through time and begin on that stiflingly hot afternoon, in the attic room of a run-down terrace in the inner suburbs of Sydney. . .

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/