Transcript: Episode 22
Hey friend, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.
This month, sort of in honor of Halloween and sort of just because, I want to share and explore a single metaphoric phrase about writing that has been feeling especially powerful and inspirational to me lately. And then I’m going to zoom out a little to talk more generally about the practical utility of drawing from this type of symbolic, abstract concept when you write—even when it might seem a bit overly sentimental.
Even in the realm of creative work, there can be some discomfort or even disdain around ways of thinking about writing that feel a bit too precious instead of practical—there’s a feeling that while of course art is magical in its way, your perspective on your own work better not be, or you risk being naïve and unserious. And it’s not like there’s zero truth to that; when we get too precious about every word that hits the page, we can’t work through projects when they get messy, and we can’t keep improving.
But magical thinking doesn’t necessarily have to lead to precious thinking—and I’d actually say that in the creative life, you have to find ways to maintain a strong dose of magical thinking if you want to thrive. And in that sense, magical thinking can be practical magic.
(Heey, see what I did there…)
So with that context for where we’re going today, here’s the Halloween-y inspirational metaphor: Your characters are your ancestors.
I can’t take credit for this magical little phrase; it came out of a discussion in a writers’ group I took part in earlier this year. Although, it’s actually possible that this exact wording is the result of me mishearing something somebody said – at the time I was so struck by the words that I sort of spaced out for a minute, and then eventually some other part of my brain started to be like, “Waaait, is that actually what we heard? Also you might want to come fully back to consensus reality before we do or say something super odd.” And of course at that point I felt way too awkward to cut into the conversation and ask what had actually been said 60-90 seconds ago.
Anyway, whether the phrase “your characters are your ancestors” was an especially lovely moment within that group dialogue, or if it was an auditory processing glitch on my part – either way, it’s been simmering in my creative self ever since. And this seems like an appropriate time of year to share it, when those of us in the Christian-influenced world are approaching the triple festivals of All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day.
(My use of these traditional religious names for the holidays is not really intended to directly bring in Catholic theology here, although, heads up that I will be referencing the overall meaning of the feast days a bit later. But I’m not going to be taking the metaphor in any sort of specifically religious direction.)
I think the idea of your characters being your ancestors kind of rubs against many of the ways we often talk about writing. Fiction writers more often tend to talk about characters either just as, you know, fake people they directly created; or maybe as alter-ego versions of themselves; or as completely external personalities they sort of encountered and captured on the page (this is the “this character found me and I just wrote down what they said and did” school of fiction writing). But none of these descriptions of how writers relate to their characters is quite the same as relating to them as an “ancestor.”
In creative nonfiction, when your characters are representations of real people, there’s maybe something especially weird about calling those representations “ancestors.” (I mean, sometimes in memoir you might be writing about a literal ancestor, but you get what I’m saying here.)
And at least in my experiences with studying poetry writing, I don’t remember ever even really talking about “characters,” per se, unless it happened to be an overtly storytelling kind of poem. But I do think poems can be said to be peopled with characters, even if the poem’s not telling a narrative kind of story with a human cast. So for the purposes of this podcast, your poems can be your ancestors, too.
(The good thing about magical metaphors is that they don’t have to be strictly accurate to be true.)
Even setting the issue of genre aside – it’s more common to hear writers describing their work with metaphors about descendants rather than ancestors. Somebody might say they’re “gestating” or “incubating” a project. And of course there are the phrases “book baby” and “book doula” that I see a fair amount online and have sort of mixed feelings about.
Overall, I think there’s a general sense of writing being a kind of offspring of the writer – of creative work being birthed into the future, at least for a while, and maybe even left behind more long-term as a legacy for future generations.
So I think my initial fascination with the image of characters as ancestors is that this metaphor flips the more standard construct on its head. I mean, it’s not uncommon to frame writing as being inspired or nurtured by creative ancestors, as being part of a cultural lineage. I talk about that myself pretty often. But there’s a whole different flavor to the phrase “your characters are your ancestors.” There’s an immediacy and intimacy of relationship there that goes beyond a rational and linear sense of cultural tradition.
When a character is your ancestor, that means they are creating and giving life to you, not the other way around. They are the place you come from, the ground you’re growing from. So in getting to know that character and writing their story, you’re not inventing or recording something new that didn’t exist before. You’re not projecting something into the future out of thin air. You’re excavating something that’s foundational to where you find yourself in the world, something immanent that has a hand in making you who and what you are now.
Before I get into the practical side of this metaphor (which I will do later!), there’s another symbolic or archetypal angle that’s been surfacing when I think about characters as ancestors. And it has to do with the current season of Halloween (a.k.a. Samhain, a.k.a. All Saints and All Souls.)
Here’s my quick and unexpert primer on the traditional meaning of these celebrations. All Saints’ Day, or the Feast of All Saints, is a Christian holiday that comes out of the Catholic tradition, and it’s basically exactly what it says on the tin: It’s a feast day to honor all deceased saints, celebrated on November 1st. And one of the old names for the day is the Feast of All Hallows – hence, the night before being All Hallow’s Eve, and eventually Halloween.
I imagine I’m probably not blowing anybody’s mind with utterly new information there, but here’s a little more nuance. All Saints’ isn’t just a feast day for like, everybody whose face you can get on a prayer card or a novena candle. Technically it’s for all members of “the Church Triumphant,” or all the dead who have actually made it into heaven and exist fully in the presence of divinity. It’s for all the dead who get eternal life.
That’s why one of the early names for the day is the Feast of All Hallows – the term “hallowed” essentially means “holy,” which in turn derives from a word that means “whole.” So a soul that’s hallowed is a soul that’s become whole, and that’s ready and able to experience universal wholeness.
The day after All Hallows is All Souls’ Day – that’s the feast for “the Church Penitent,” or all the people of faith who have died but are in purgatory, essentially waiting to be ready for hallowedness. And here is where I’ll draw a little ~end scene~ on the Catholic theology, because that’s not really what I’m talking about and I confess that purgatory never really made a whole lot of sense to meeee.
(Somewhere my profoundly and perpetually disappointed guardian angle is making a note like, “Years in purgatory: +900.”) (Yay, religious trauma!)
What I do want to pull out of that theology is the idea that hallowedness (or lack thereof) is something that’s often associated with ancestors – whether literal ancestors, or ancestors as a symbolic archetype. So another potential meaning of “your characters are your ancestors” is that your characters are imaginal embodiments of hallowedness – they’re people who have something to teach you about what it means to be whole.
And not in an abstract or universal sense, but in that directly personal sense that I was talking about earlier – the sense that these characters are woven into and out of everything that’s made you who and where you are right now on this earth. That’s why you’re the one to tell their story.
So, if these ancestral characters are teaching you how to be whole – that framing is easier to apply to some characters than to others. Like, there are some characters I’ve crafted stories or poems with who very overtly fit that archetype: they’re an elder who specializes in dying cloth with sacred herbs; or, they’re someone who lived in a previous century and also wrote stories; or, they’re a tree older than my actual grandparents. They’ve just got that ancestral gestalt going for them.
But at first glance, the metaphor starts to feel a little strained or overly precious when you begin holding it up against characters that lack the overt cozy-grandma-in-a-cottage vibe (or the quirky-hag-in-a-dank-cave vibe, if that’s your speed). Like, for example, a character who is on the run after committing an unjust crime – less apparent as an archetypal ancestor. Or let’s say you’re writing a poem about, I dunno, a literal piece of trash on the sidewalk. Something very not picturesque, any character who is generally just sort of proverbially messy. Or even just a character who is a young child, who is not beyond you in life experience – they might not seem to fit with the ancestor archetype.
But the reason I think this metaphor has stuck with me so much is that it’s useful for maintaining a sense of intimate connection to our characters as we write, whether those characters seem like picturesque, craggy, wise kind of souls or not. No matter what a character is up to on the page or how you’re currently feeling about the project – there’s a reason you are the one writing their story.
You’re related to them. Your shared ground with them is preexisting and immanent. It’s part of your wholeness as a storyteller. So you don’t have to fight for it, you just have to find it.
And going back to the theme of hallowedness – there’s not just a sacred holiday for the ancestors who’ve already attained it. There’s also a holiday for the ones who aren’t there yet, but who have faith that it is attainable.
(I never thought I’d be putting any sort of cuddly, inspirational spin on the concept of souls in purgatory, but here we are, I guess… maybe years in purgatory is now -25??)
My point here is that not every character is going to be the sort of figure you’d want to take actual life advice from. And not every story is going to have a clear-cut moral or lesson about wholeness. I think the power in the metaphor is not to take it too literally, but rather to allow it to change the way you relate to the process of discovering the story your characters are offering you.
So, thinking about characters as ancestors is all well and good, but how do you actually find that sense of common ground on the road toward wholeness – especially when the writing isn’t flowing easily? If you’re a newsletter subscriber, I’ve sent out some specific prompts for you to play with to generate ideas from this metaphor, so check your inbox for that.
But I actually want to spend the rest of the episode talking about how this sort of magical, abstract, archetypal notion like “your characters are your ancestors” can be more generally applied to your writing—and why I think it matters to do so. Because while I do think these notions can help break you out of practical blocks in your work more quickly, that’s not always going to be the case.
This kind of thinking isn’t always going to seem to have immediately measurable results—it’s not always going to directly lead to more wordcount in the manuscript. So basically, what’s the utility of thinking of things this way, besides just getting a sort of warm-fuzzy feeling? What makes this kind of thinking practical as well as magical?
To dig into this, I’m about to take you on a little side quest that does not immediately seem to have much to do with all the archetypal ancestor stuff, but I promise it’s going to loop back around. So, here we go.
I recently took this online assessment test that’s supposed to measure and identify your core strengths as a person—you know, the kind of self-discovery questionnaire you sometimes have to take at work or that a therapist might have you do. And actually I’m just going to name the test because it drove me absolutely bonkers and I feel like publicly shaming it a bit; it was the VIA [vee-uh] Inventory of Strengths. (That’s spelled with a capital “VIA,” but the website proclaims that it’s supposed to be pronounced “vee-uh,” like some sort of made up Italian carmaker.)
It’s one of those tests that is just like engineered to piss me off because the statements you’re supposed to be evaluating yourself against have absolutely zero nuance or specificity, and it made me go into a little stress spiral trying to figure out how to respond… like, for example, one of the statements you’re supposed to agree or disagree with is just “I am a brave person.”
I mean… what context are we talking about here? What kind of bravery?? How often and universally do I have to do brave things in order to qualify as a brave person?? Who wrote and edited this test and where can I reach them to lodge a formal complaint, and would doing so be brave or pedantic and annoying???
The fact that I reacted this way to the test was actually way more instructive than the results I got, so taking it did end up serving some kind of purpose…
Anyway, two of the personal strengths that one can receive as a result of this test are “an appreciation for beauty” and “creativity.” The questions testing for “an appreciation of beauty” were pretty straightforward—basically a lot of variations on “do you like and notice pretty things??” But the questions that were clearly testing for “creativity” as a trait seemed really fucking head-scratching to me.
For starters, there wasn’t a single question on the test asking if I enjoy creating stuff, or if I have any artistic or creative hobbies. There were, however, questions asking if I am “always coming up with new and more efficient ways of doing tasks,” and if I “pride myself on being original.”
(I won’t even touch on the brain loop that latter example got me stuck in.)
Needless to say, according to this test, I do have an appreciation of beauty, but I am not creative (or at least, it’s not one of my primary strengths—or even one of my secondary strengths, for that matter).
Sometimes when I’m working on this podcast, I start to get worried that each episode is just saying the same things over and over in slightly different wording. I have this idea that circling and spiraling around the same core ideas is inherently bad and boring—that in order for the pod to have value, it has to keep feeling “fresh,” whatever that means.
But I’m realizing that it’s actually okay to keep returning to the same overall concepts here each month, to keep exploring the core value of relational, living, life-giving storytelling. Because I think creatives need places where we can hear that value affirmed over and over again, in both familiar and new ways—because there are so many places where we continually hear that creativity has no inherent value, unless it’s being used to do serious things like “innovate” and “problem-solve” and “come up with new and more efficient ways of doing tasks.”
There are so many places where thinking creatively and seeking beauty and wholeness in the world aren’t even seen as having anything to do with each other. And if that’s not screwed up, I don’t know what is.
So, here’s that core value again, the one I’m always circling around:
You’re allowed to write and be creative in ways that center your growth and your discovery and just your deep, pure appreciation for the beauty of language and character and story. You’re allowed to prioritize all that. And if warm-fuzzy inspiration like “your characters are your ancestors” helps you sustain your connection to that truth, then that is a practical, valuable result.
Thinking this way about your creative work doesn’t make you an un-serious writer or a naïve writer or an overly sentimental writer. It doesn’t even make you an unprofessional writer, if writing professionally is one of your creative goals.
I mean, what’s more serious, when it comes down to it—assessing your creativity like a transferrable resume skill, or relating to your creativity like it’s part of what makes you a whole and hallowed human?
This is the magical way of seeing and being that opens up when I come to the page as if my characters are my ancestors. It doesn’t mean I expect that the drafting will always be easy and precious, that I won’t write crap drafts that need to be revised, that I won’t have to consider the practical angles of where and how to share my work.
But it does mean that I can meet my characters and my stories as my full and whole creative self—or at least, as the version of myself who has faith that this kind of hallowedness is real and possible.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode of the pod, I want to thank you for sharing space with me today— and I also want to ask you to take one of two actions to help support the show. If you’ve got a couple minutes, take a look at whatever pod app you’re currently listening in and give the pod a rating and a review—it really helps new listeners find the show. Or, if you know a friend who might also enjoy this episode, please share it with them and ask them what they think about it!
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If you’re already a member of the newsletter circle, check your inbox for the prompts that go along with this month’s episode—I’m sharing a couple ways to bring the idea of characters as ancestors into your current writing practice (and in keeping with the month’s theme, one of these prompts is practical, and the other is decidedly magical).
No matter where you currently are in your creative life or what you’re working on and exploring, I’ll be wishing you some potent magical thinking during this season of pumpkin spice and hallowed connection. And as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.