Novels...and Other Lies

by Connie Berry

I've always been a story-teller. A good thing, right?

Well, not when you're a child and the stories you tell are actually fibs (lies, if you insist on accuracy). I loved making things up—not to get out of trouble or cover some misdeed, but to get a little excitement going, to embellish the truth just enough to make the story wonderful. 

In department stores, I would slip away from my mother so I could tell a friendly sales clerk I was lost. This created loads of excitement and fun things like dramatic announcements over the loud speaker. And sometimes candy. Frequently when my mother's friends would gather for a coffee morning (women did stuff like that then), I would announce she had a baby in her tummy. She didn't, but wouldn't it have been wonderful?

I told my Sunday School teacher once that my father had broken his leg that morning. When the story made it around to my grandmother, who had her whole Bible class praying for him, I knew I was in trouble.

Another time I insisted I'd seen a tiny elf-like man peek out of a miniature door hidden in the base of a tree near my house. I wrote a story about that one, which my parents must have considered a step in the right direction.

To encourage me toward truthfulness, my mother bought me a
book, The Most Wonderful Doll in the World by Phyllis McGinley. The story is about Dulcy, a little girl whose memory of a lost doll becomes more wonderful and exaggerated each time she tells about it. Like me, Dulcy was a child with a run-away imagination and a nature that found it "hard to be satisfied with Things As They Are." My mother was right. I was always wondering "what would happen if…?" Adding in a few extra details made Things As They Are so much more interesting.

Now I'm all grown up. I know the difference between telling lies and creating fiction. But the love of stories has never left me. In fact, possessing an over-active imagination is an asset to a writer. I can make up as many tales as I like, and asking "what would happen if…" leads to some great plot twists. One of the things I love best about writing mystery stories is the freedom to create new worlds, populated by interesting characters in unusual settings who find themselves facing unlikely situations. 

We make it all up and call it a novel.

Are you a storyteller? What aspects of your childhood predisposed you to reading or writing fiction?

           

Better Than Brawling

by Tina Whittle

I got into a Facebook kertuffle this 4^th of July. It started with the usual ingredients (politics and identity and contrasting ideas about symbology) and ended in the usual place—with neither party having shifted one inch in their opinion.

It almost makes me want to stop sharing material that I know will pull some person who disagrees with me out of the woodwork and into an online spat. I mean, the fact-checking alone took up more mental bandwidth than I wanted to give something that was destined from the start to be an irreconcilable clash. The emotional cost was high too—I'm still treating the cracked molar I got from stress-grinding my teeth.

In the end, I kept asking, is this how it has to be? Is it at all possible to have a reasonable exchange of contrasting ideas in a social media context? And if the answer is no—and I think 90% of the time that's going to be the answer—does that mean we should nip the bud of such debates? Should we self-censor what we share, curate our feed so that it's more puppies and sunsets and fewer lightning rods and vinegar?

Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think misinformation should go unchallenged. But I also don't think we need to place any investments in the outcome of such challenges. And perhaps we don't always need to indulge in a protracted back-and-forth that is always going to end where it began—with two people disagreeing.

Here's what I think we need to learn to do—we need to learn to listen. I'm not talking about conversation, or dialogue, or debate. I'm not talking about words that are back-and-forth. I'm talking about deep, active listening to another human being's story.

A story is not a mutual exchange. It flows one way. One person gives, and another receives. Our brains are story-making—and story-processing—machines. It's how we first begin to understand our world, how we first begin to perceive our own place within it. Stories provide our greatest meaning-making tool.

All of us here at this blog are writers (and of course, readers). With every story we participate in, whether in the telling or the receiving, we strengthen the empathetic muscle of the world.

I wish I could sit in a big circle with everyone on this blog, with everyone reading this, and have each person tell me a story. Such an event would take logistics beyond my pay grade. In the meantime, however, perhaps a snippet of your life will do.

Care to share something about yourself or your world? Something big, something small, something unusual, something true?

Tell me a part of your story.

*     *     *

Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver mysteries. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and has served as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.

Telling Stories and Storytelling

Image courtesy of Roke from Wikimedia Commons

My grandmother always told me, “Now don’t you be telling no stories.”

She meant lies and other nefarious fabrications, not flights of fancy. The word “story” could mean either in her mind, and she frowned on both. Anything that wasn’t factual was suspect because non-facts had no foundation and therefore couldn’t be trusted. Stories were like gathering clouds—dangerous in their potential.

My husband would agree with her definition if not her assessment. He’s an engineer, suspicious of the frayed edge that all stories have, the place where facts start unraveling. He says that fact and truth are the same thing. He says that if he started writing equations based on my ideas of truth, planes would fall from the sky.

It’s a point.

And yet my brain can’t make sense of all the facts around me. Information overload sets in, so my brain begins editing my reality into something I can comprehend, erasing this, focusing on that. It connects my present experience to the other experiences folded and tucked in my gray matter, and by doing so, creates a chronology, a sense of past and future, effect and consequence. The human brain is wired for stories, and it programs our consciousness accordingly.

Not facts. Stories.

Memory is useful not for what it records, but for what it erases. For the vast majority of us, it is not photographic. It takes out the extraneous—however factual—and leaves us with essence—however slanted. And our recollection is slanted; it must be. No true and perfectly accurate memory exists. Certain details, by necessity, weren’t captured in the first place, and every subsequent time your consciousness touches the memory, it further alters it, even as the flawed memory is carved deeper into your brain.

Jonah Lehrer explains it more eloquently than I can in his Seed magazine article "The Neuroscience of Proust":

“Every time we remember, the neuronal structure of the memory, no matter how constant it may feel, is delicately transformed. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. So the purely objective memory . . . is the one memory lost to you forever.”

Criminal justice research shows how problematic this process is, revealing that even though juries value eyewitness identification as gold-standard evidence, it is actually the most fallible of testimony.

I think this is why I’ve always loved reading mysteries, why I eventually became a crime fiction writer. If my own memory was suspect, malleable, shaped by my subconscious every second of the day, then why not lean into that unreliability? Why not partner with it instead of fighting it?

And so I have. I’m hard at work crafting the seventh book in my Tai Randolph series, tentatively titled Prodigal Lies. Like me, Tai isn’t afraid of a little lie (white or otherwise). She spins them out of necessity, but also for the sheer fun of it. It’s one of the pleasures of writing her.

Sorry, Grandma.

*     *     * 

Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph mysteries for Poisoned Pen Press. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and serves as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.

Back to the Cave

When I was ten years old, I was attacked by baboons. Spoiler alert: I survived. But it’s one of those stories I tell when people ask me to share something interesting about myself. There are others. I once saw a UFO. I own two chickens, Onomatopoeia and Chicken Whittle. I know all the words to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and have recited both to my freshman comp classes. I box—very badly—but enjoy it very much. And I once prepared to fight a grizzly bear with my bare hands.

In isolation, each of these facts will tell you very little about me, but when they are placed together into a context, they create a narrative. A story. A report of connected events, real or imaginary, presented in a sequence. Your brain loves a narrative, loves it better than a list, loves it like bees love honey, with an instinctual affinity. This is why stories have been one of the sturdiest building blocks of our civilization, outlasting even castles and temples.

Storymaking is one of our oldest skills, going back over thirty-five thousand years ago to the Upper Paleolithic Age. One prime example of it can be seen in the cave paintings at Chauvet Pont d'Arc in France (you can read about them HERE).

During the dawning of our species, our ancestors eventually discovered that cave living was a fine idea. The world was a dazzling and dangerous place, and a cave kept out the larger hazards. Back then, every single day began with the same to-do list: survive until the next morning. Find food, avoid becoming something else’s food, don’t fall off a cliff, don’t step on a snake, don’t let the fire go out, don’t mess with that other tribe across the river because they will club you, don’t don’t don’t.

And yet, in those dark smoky caves, after what must have been grueling, back-breaking days of non-stop work and intermittent terror, we human beings made art. We daubed red clay on the wall and recreated what we saw out in that world: horses, mammoths, rhinos, lions. To our contemporary eye, these pictures may look primitive, childish even. The images blur into each other. The rhinos have six or seven horns, and the horses’ haunches overlap, as if someone were trying to draw a herd and just didn't have the skill to pull it off.

This would be an incorrect interpretation, however, a deception brought about by our modern eyes having grown accustomed to steady illumination. In the dark of the cave, lit by only the flickering glow of a fire, the images begin to move. In the dance of light and shadow, tails twitch, muscles ripple, and manes toss. The herd gallops across the plain, hooves and dust. The predator cat follows, fangs bared. These paintings were the world’s first virtual reality, and our prehistoric ancestors created them out of mud and memory.

Not just a collection of drawings. A series of connected events. A narrative. A story.

When you write or read, you’re participating in a human activity older even than writing or reading itself—storymaking. Stephen King called it an act of telepathy—two humans connected by neither time nor place, nonetheless together. A meeting of the minds, he says. Magic.

Consider this next time you pick up a book. Even if it’s too hot for a fire in the fireplace, imagine one anyway. Imagine that dance of light and shadow on the page. Invite your inner caveperson to move closer so that you can share the story together.

*     *     *

Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph mysteries for Poisoned Pen Press. The fifth book in this Atlanta-based series—Reckoning and Ruin—was released in April. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and serves as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.