Transcript: Episode 2

Hello, friend and listener, and thanks for being here for today’s episode. This is the second episode of the Inspirited Word, and if you’re coming to this without hearing January’s inaugural episode, I’m actually going to suggest you hop over there first. I’m aware that someday there will be too many episodes of this podcast to always be a stubborn, self-referential completionist and suggest folks go back to the start. But hey, it’s early days here, and I think today’s topic will have a lot more impact if you’ve heard Episode 1.

If you have listened to Episode 1 (or if you’re just contrarian), then let’s get straight into today’s exploration: writing in right relationship.

Last time on the pod I talked about how writing and storytelling can be so much more than craft mechanics like dialogue, plot, character arcs, or even themes. Storytelling craft is more than a series of rules or interlocking parts. Storytelling craft is a living relationship between you, your story, and your reader. And as writers, it’s our responsibility to cultivate right relationship at each of these points of the storytelling web.

In this episode, I’m going to first come at this framework of writing in right relationship from the angle of relationship with readers, because it’s a bit more self-explanatory than the idea of relationship with story (at least on the surface). We all know that our story will be read by an actual reader—hopefully by actual readers, plural. But this reality usually gets talked about in ways that strip the tangible relationship out of the storytelling exchange.

Storytelling isn’t a static, passive hand off of ideas and images. It’s really an act of mutual, multi-layered encounter—first you encounter the story through the process of writing it down into a book. But then even once the writing is done, the exchange isn’t finished. The story goes on to have new encounters with every real, individual reader who picks up the book.

I’m using the word “encounter” here to convey a certain type of experience when we’re moved into a different level of awareness or consciousness than our typical baseline. The easiest examples of encounters in this sense are interactions we have with other human beings: a really engrossing and surprising conversation with a friend, watching a live performance, dancing in a crowded club. Any experience that makes you aware of both your own being and the being-ness of others in a heightened or clarified way. But encounters don’t have to just be experiences with other humans. You can have encounters with animals, with plants, with objects. In the first episode of the pod, we had an encounter with a favorite story.

If you did the exercise we walked through in that episode, think back on the feeling you had interacting with that story. That’s the kind of encounter that can come from a story being in relationship with a reader, and vice versa.

But when we writers and editors talk about “readers,” we’re often not talking about individual human beings at all. We’re usually actually talking about one of two things: the current bookselling market, or writing mechanics. We’ll say “readers just aren’t buying zombie love stories right now” (sadly). Or we’ll say “readers will expect the protagonist to use that loaded rifle to shoot their zombie ex-lover by the end of this chapter.”

I mentioned in the first episode of the pod that I’m not proposing we stop talking about things like writing mechanics. And even though I’m not exactly what you’d call an enthusiast capitalist, I’m extending that disclaimer here: you can’t completely ignore marketing if you intend to sell your books in a publishing marketplace. So it’s sometimes very good and necessary to think about the potential paying audience for a book.

But it’s easy to get too focused on the idea of “readers” as an abstract monolith, and then using that abstraction to justify some marketing or mechanics decision. Which means it’s really easy to stop thinking about readers as the very real, individual humans who will experience, encounter, and perhaps be deeply transformed by our stories. And that’s when we stop writing in right relationship with readers. We shut down the deeper possibilities for encounter by forgetting that storytelling is a relationship at all.

This can manifest in a lot of ways. It can look like spending more time tracking a potential market niche than you spend actually getting in touch with the story you’re writing. Or it can look like adhering too strictly to whatever outline model was touted in the last “plan your bestselling novel” book you read, because that type of plot is what “readers” will “expect.” (Picture some air quotes and a capital R on “Reader” in that sentence.)

And more experimental writers, don’t think you’re off the hook here. Even if you’re not interested in fitting into an established or emerging market niche, and even if you don’t use any of the more standard story models to plan your drafts, you can still fall into trap of writing for abstract, lifeless Readers. Experimental books always run the risk of becoming more about the experiment than the storytelling.

What I mean here is that no matter what genre you’re writing in, you might end up with a book that’s more about imposing a series of emotional or intellectual responses than actually *telling a real reader a true story*.

Okay, I can imagine some of the objections now: Stories are supposed to make a reader feel and think, right? Isn’t that basically the whole point of storytelling?? Sure!… and yet, maybe no. Or at least, maybe that’s not all of it. I’d argue the most powerful stories actually do more than evoke specific thoughts or feelings—and this is what makes them so deeply transformative.

As an example, let’s imagine a hypothetical novel with a very suspenseful scene. Let’s say it’s a scene in which one character is threatening to expose the protagonist’s deep, dark secret unless the protagonist does something truly awful. But then—plot twist!—the confrontation is interrupted before it’s resolved.

If the writer is approaching this scene with the primary goal of evoking a target feeling, they might focus on making it as nail-biting as possible. And assuming they succeed, a real reader encountering this scene might indeed bite their nails. If this reader enjoys suspenseful stories, then they’ll probably enjoy this scene. Sweet, job done, the writer accomplished their goal of evoking dread and suspense.

But if there’s nothing deeper in that scene, nothing inviting that real individual reader into a more nuanced encounter with the story, then they might thoroughly enjoy the book… and then never think about it again once it’s cycled off their Kindle carousel.

By focusing on imposing a response of nail-biting dread on “the reader” (air quotes and capital R there again), the storyteller has created a very specific emotion. But that specific emotion ultimately has a vague, ephemeral effect. It’s the book equivalent of a Hallmark channel movie where you’re hardcore rooting for the big city lawyer to get together with the small town artisanal chocolatier, and then twenty minutes later you can’t remember any of the characters’ names.

Put another way: If there’s nothing to be curious about except whether or not a Bad Thing will happen to a character, then odds are good the only real readers who will be truly, deeply affected by the scene will be readers with a personal history with that Bad Thing. And they’re not going to be pleased you made them bite their nails for no deeper payoff than feeling trauma and dread.

So, let’s assume we want to write something that does go deeper than just making people feel a certain thing. (We are disenchanted-yet-hopeful, visionary writers here, after all.) What if we let go of thinking stuff like “I want readers to bite their nails when they read this scene”? That thought is a thought with no real relationship inside it—it naturally leads to imagining readers as an abstract concept, rather than individual humans. And it flattens out the emotional possibilities of the story rather than deepening them.

So instead, what if we start asking, “How is this scene inviting a real, living reader into a deeper encounter with this story”?

I’m going to take you back to that example of the hypothetical suspense scene, and let’s pretend you’re writing it. Let’s also say you’ve released the goal of making people bite their nails. If instead you’re writing with a goal of relationship and encounter, you might uncover an opportunity in this scene to reveal something deeply surprising about the antagonist’s motivations (and if this is during your first draft, maybe this revelation will surprise you as well).

That kind of unpredictable, organic revelation invites a reader to revise their understanding of the antagonist—without actually telling them how that new understanding should make them feel. You’re not telling them “this scene should make you bit your nails.” You’re asking them “How does this scene make you feel? And why?”

Each real, living-and-breathing reader can then fully engage with the story on their own terms—and that’s how the act of storytelling becomes a relationship.

Framing storytelling as an encounter allows us to be constantly discovering ways to deepen and complicate the emotional landscape on the page (rather than writing a scene that’s a nail-biter, but nothing else).

When I’m editing, one of the clues I see pointing out where an opportunity like this is being missed is when there’s a lot of solid craft happening on the page, but all the threads are working toward the same goal. The dialogue is compelling, there are a good variety of physical beats revealing the characters’ inner thoughts, the setting is visceral. But if you were to summarize the most basic story content being conveyed, it’s the same takeaway for a whole page, scene, or chapter. Something like “Will the bad guy hurt the good guy, and just how much will it suck? Stay tuned to find out…”

Another way of describing it is that the story tapestry holds together well, but it’s all one color.

I want to say here that this type of scene isn’t actually bad writing, per se. But there’s always the potential for a scene to be more, to have a real life and spirit inside it. If we look deeper into the story, there’s always potential to uncover new colors: unexpected hesitations or knee-jerk reactions or pieces of dialogue that fully enliven key moments in the scene. What was initially straightforward suspense has become a moment as complex and full of nuanced flavors as an encounter in real life.

When this kind of story encounter emerges, the storyteller doesn’t have as much direct control over exactly how a reader will interact with it. They’ll still be feeling suspense—the basic nature of the scene hasn’t changed. But the more alive the tapestry of the story is on the page, the more alive the reader’s interaction with the story becomes. Maybe they become a bit sympathetic to the antagonist because they see this character as more human. Or on the other hand, maybe their dislike and mistrust of the antagonist becomes more personal. Either way, there’s enough room and depth for true connection between the story and each one, specific, living reader who discovers it—a connection that has its own agency beyond what you might have planned or imagined.

And that’s when a story evokes more than a strong but canned and ultimately shallow emotion. When you impose a strong reaction, a reader comes away saying, “Whoa, that was a nail-biter, and I loved it” (or maybe “Whoa, that was a nail-biter and I absolutely hated it”). When you capture a living encounter on the page, a reader might say, “Wow, my spirit just got cracked open a little.”

That’s right relationship in storytelling. That’s when you’re offering something to a reader that fully acknowledges and calls forth their individual humanity, instead of just punching their buttons to get a predictable response.

It’s one thing to be able to recognize those missed opportunities for depth in somebody else’s work, or to notice when another writer has created an especially powerful scene. It’s another to be able to apply that lens to your own writing (especially without it turning into a little hyper-critical downward doom spiral that tanks yet another writing session). Especially when you’re working on an early draft, if you spend your energy thinking about trying to create the most powerful, enlivened version of every moment in the book, you’re probably going to end up in over-analysis mode.

So, how do we apply this to our craft? I think the key to this is a core mindset shift I’m going to refer to as “unlearning mastery.” I should make clear that this is not my phrasing—I’m borrowing and adapting that wording from writer Bayo Akomolafe, who is a psychologist and philosopher creating work in the fields of decolonial thought and post-humanist ecology.

Those fields might not sound especially relevant to thinking about the creative writing process, but stick with me. His concept of unlearning mastery is deeply generative and creative in a way that I think can be incredibly powerful for any disenchanted writer prone to downward doom spirals.

The first step of unlearning mastery—again, as Akomolafe frames it—is becoming aware of “mastery” as a framework that shapes pretty much all aspects of mainstream European thought, whether that’s scientific thought, Western religious thought, or whatever. (And I’m using “European” here to mean all cultures that descend from post-Enlightenment Europe. So settler-colonial folks, this is us.)

Essentially, all creative, spiritual, and intellectual endeavor in the modern European worldview is organized around the idea of increasing levels of progress toward mastery. This framework maps onto individuals, but it also shapes the way the culture views entire fields of study and experience.

So, scientific discovery leads to more and more mastery over nature. God rewards the faithful and gives them mastery over all beasts of the Earth. A great work of art is the literal “masterpiece” of an individual, highly skilled genius. (And if the only people who seem to understand or like that masterpiece are people who learned to appreciate art through a university department, then so much the better.)

(Full disclosure, I’m saying this as somebody with a writing degree from a school whose biggest sports rivalry is based on two colonial-era bros stealing library books from each other… so I’m pointing a finger squarely at myself here.)

So, to recap: the first component of the standard Western worldview is that all endeavors can and should progress toward mastery. The second component of this framework is that it requires a fixed, objective world that is basically “fully cooked,” and can therefore be controlled and understood if you just apply enough skill or intellect or inspiration. Humans act on this fixed world with an intellectual intent, and when we have enough mastery, we create our intended result. (You may be noticing that this sounds a lot like the writing example of the scene intended to make readers bite their nails.)

In the framework of mastery, not only do humans have the potential for complete agency over the static, fully cooked world, we are the only ones who have real agency in the world. Humans are the only beings with high enough intellectual capacity to really exercise agency, to act on the fixed world. Akomolafe calls this “the ability to Do Stuff” with a capital D and S.

But his framework of “unlearning mastery” invites us to think about the world in a much more expansive, enlivened way. What if the world’s not fixed? What if all systems are always evolving and acting and interacting and emerging as a collective creation? Humans don’t act on the world—we’re embedded in the world.

In this kind of living world, mastery becomes impossible. But our encounters with the world and everything in it become deeper. To quote Akomolafe again, the world becomes “archetypally active.”

Okay, sounds cool, Mary. But what the hell does this have to do with writing?

When we unlearn mastery of writing and storytelling, our entire way of being storytellers changes. It has to change. That idea of the “masterpiece” bestowed by the singular genius upon abstract “readers” who either understand his intent or don’t becomes… well, sort of silly. Instead, stories become evolving experiences that the writer is embedded in, but does not fully control, or complete, or create out of nothing. Stories are never finished, never experienced the same way twice, and are inherently collaborative encounters, at every step along the way.

You’re writing the story. The story is also writing you.

I talked earlier about finding opportunities to invite each reader into a deep, personal encounter with the story. But those invitations appear first as invitations the story is making to the writer. Our work as writers, as storytellers, is to be open and available to what the story is telling us. That’s the foundational relationship that puts life into our words, that makes storytelling transformative.

This takes me to one of the other key points on that web of right relation I mentioned at the start of the episode—the point where you as the writer are in relationship with the story. Because while we should think about that connection with readers at some point along the storytelling journey, the relationship we experience in the initial drafting process is our own relationship with the story.

What can our stories recognize and call forth out of us, and how can we nurture that kind of transformative creative encounter?

I think being in right relationship to a story as the writer has a lot more to do with our mind than with the components of our writing process. I’m not going to tell you that you can’t work from an outline if you want to be in deep creative encounter with story. I’m not going to say that you need to write every day, or write only when inspiration strikes, or insert whatever specific process advice you’ve heard here. I think the first step to right relationship with story is right relationship with our storytelling selves.

So to unlearn mastery, to wash the crusty scales of colonial-era bro philosophy from our visionary eyes, to bring forth transformative writing—the first thing we have to unlearn is the way we think about ourselves as somebody who “hasn’t mastered the craft,” somebody who is failing all the time right up until we someday, finally, hopefully get it right. We have to stop seeing the page in front of us as a mirror showing us whether we’re good enough and smart enough and talented enough. No wonder our stories can’t reach us; when was the last time something spoke to you through a mirror?

(Okay, depending on what you’re into, maybe you do talk to other beings through mirrors on a semi-regular basis. It’s happened to me on occasion. But you get the metaphor I’m going for.)

So, this episode has been a bit sprawling, but to bring it down to something for you to stick in your pocket, a little conceptual worry stone for you to walk away with: What’s the first thing you want to unlearn when it comes to your relationship with your storytelling self? And what’s a real action you could take to start unlearning that?

If you want to dig a bit deeper into those prompts, head to the link in the show notes and join the Inspirited Word newsletter circle. You’ll get some tips on how to unpack what we talked about in the episode (and some pointers on how you can approach taking some steps toward unlearning mastery in your writing practice).

And if you’re digging these first episodes of the Inspirited Word, please write a review of the pod in your app of choice to help more disenchanted but visionary writers find this space. I’ll really appreciate it, and the spirit of the pod will too. Keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.