Owning Your Shadow, Part 1
Here is the link and the script for the first episode of my new YouTube series on the Reluctant Phoenix channel:
Link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QGQz4PKGP20
Hello and welcome to the Reluctant Phoenix YouTube Channel. I’m Karen Nilsen, author of the Landers Saga, the Phoenix Realm series, and two standalone fairytale retellings. In this series, entitled Owning Your Shadow, I explore archetypes and creativity, particularly archetypes in written story telling, although I hope this exploration may also be helpful to those engaged in other types of endeavors, from the visual arts to music.
My two primary interests have always been storytelling and psychology, and as a result, I’ve participated in many writer’s groups, book clubs, and psychotherapeutic seminars over the years. I want to fuse these two loves in this series, especially in regards to archetypes. Linking dream-work and creative work has enabled me to overcome various blocks and complexes, and here I will give you some insights into my own process with the hope that sharing this may be of interest and perhaps even help some of you who may be struggling with your own blocks and complexes. I’m not a therapist, just a fantasy author, so please take what I say in that context. If you’re dealing with serious emotional issues, I recommend you seek out professional help.
To start, I want to share a blog post I wrote back when I started publishing my novels in 2010:
In writing classes and critique groups I’ve attended, questions that come up more often than you might think are “What is memoir? What is autobiography? What is creative nonfiction? How much can I as a writer bend the truth before I break it?” The answers are far more complex than first might be supposed. Well before Oprah confronted James Frey about his memoir A Million Little Pieces, writers I know have debated these questions. Even in a memoir where all the facts can be corroborated by outside sources, the slippery tricks of memory and the addition of dramatic tension can completely obliterate any objectivity. We don’t remember facts so much as we remember emotions, particularly when it comes to our personal past. An established fact can be portrayed in so many different ways, dependent on variations in tone, word choice, and whose perspective frames it. Just ask any student of history after he or she has taken a course in historiography.
In a sense, all writing is autobiographical. We can’t ever fully escape our own perspective–even us writers of fantasy and science fiction. When I started writing about the House of Landers in my mid-teens, it seemed like a welcome escape from my reality, the reason I suspect many teenagers read fantasy/sci fi and/or write it and/or play role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Adult reality doesn’t just overwhelm some kids–it terrifies them. It terrified me, and I didn’t even realize it had terrified me until I reached age twenty-five or thereabouts and started reflecting more on my life.
At some point, soon after college I think, one of my friends ( someone who devoured every early word I wrote about the Landers), said, “You know, Karen, I could tell you were working out your family stuff in that particular scene.”
I gaped at her. “But this is pure fantasy–it’s not about my family,” I said, and the conversation drifted to another topic.
For years, I’ve turned that offhand comment over and over in my mind, and in that process, I’ve come to some realizations about my writing and writing in general. Even though all the events in the Landers saga are fictional (for instance, I’ve never been in a sword fight or painted a picture or given birth or even sensed an aura, for that matter ), everything I write about holds some emotional resonance for me, or I wouldn’t write about it. The facts don’t matter so much in fantasy, but the emotional reality does.
I’ve studied psychology on and off for a long time, culminating in the dream group experience I had last fall. The ladies in dream group taught me about internal family systems theory and Jungian archetypes, to the point that I was inspired to finally read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves. I picked up this book when I was in my early twenties, but it’s one of those books you have to pick up at the right time or it doesn’t affect you in quite the same way. In my early twenties, I wasn’t ready to read it. Now I am. I imagine it’s one of those books to grow old with, as I’ll likely get different insights from it when I’m sixty than I do now. Interestingly enough, several people in my circle are either reading this book or have mentioned Jungian archetypes to me in the last few months. Serendipity can be cool.
Although internal family systems theory doesn’t rely on Jungian archetypes to explain the different parts of the personality, I’ve paired the two theories in my mind because I started seriously thinking about both around the same time. In internal family systems theory (developed by Richard Schwartz), the personality is comprised of manager parts, exile parts, firefighter parts, and then the self, the spiritual whole that can offer some connectivity among the various parts. If you want a better explanation than that without an overwhelming amount of detail, I recommend Wikipedia.
However, since Jungian archetypes are so personally powerful for me, I prefer to think of my personality parts and other peoples’ personality parts in terms of archetypes, not exiles, firefighters, or managers. And if you want to learn more about archetypes (and read some wonderful fairy tales in the bargain), I highly recommend Women Who Run with the Wolves.
Perhaps this has something to do with my love of fantasy. Fantasy novels are extended fairy tales, and fairy tales are a series of archetypes interacting with each other, archetypes that draw on subconscious drives and desires and the innate longing to understand self and others. In my writing, I feel I explore Jungian archetypes that represent mostly subconscious parts of self and how these parts support and conflict with one another, a major tenet of internal family systems theory. In a sense, my novels are my archetypal memoirs.
All right, now that 2010 Karen has spoken and provided some back story, 2024 Karen returns to close out this episode and outline where our archetypal journey will take us next. All artists must surmount creative blocks; however, I believe fiction writers confront particularly pernicious blocks because of how the human brain processes written and spoken language. There’s a reason it’s called writer’s block and not potter’s block or musician’s block or painter’s block. Almost everyone learns how to speak and write to some degree. Only a few of us, however, learn how to paint or how to read music or how to use a potter’s wheel. Because so much of our experience and learning gets processed through words, a writer is far more liable than other creative types to get snared in various traps.
Perfectionism is one such trap. I have witnessed talented writers get so caught up in finding the “perfect” words that they rewrite their first chapters over and over and over again and never get to chapter two before they abandon their un-hatched novels completely. In this futile search for the “perfect” words, they lose sight of the big picture. They can’t find the story in the forest of words. They lose touch with the emotional heartbeat of their stories.
Don’t get me wrong—word choice is important. When setting atmosphere in a fictional story, connotation is second only to definition when it comes to word choice. Poetry relies almost entirely on refined word choice for its effect. The best way to learn proper word choice is to read a lot and write a lot. Study stories obsessively, both your own and others’. Begin to notice when your interest flags. Begin to notice when you have to tear yourself away because the story engages you so much. Begin to notice when you feel an emotion while reading or watching or listening. Is the emotion you feel in accord with the characters or not? What do you think the writer intended in particular scene and how was that intention conveyed? And practice, practice, practice. Almost all of us who write novels have at least a million words of BS to wade through before we get to the good stuff. You wouldn’t expect a novice potter to sit down at a wheel and turn out a beautiful pot on his or her first try. To this day, I come across practice manuscripts of mine buried and forgotten in closets. As a teenager, I wrote constantly, and none of it was any good. I needed to get that million or so words of BS out of my system before I finally stumbled on a story that worked.
All that practice refined my sense of which words worked and which didn’t, depending on what I hoped to achieve in a particular scene in order to move the story forward. There are no right words or wrong words, no perfect words or imperfect words. Rather, there are the right words to strike as close as you can to the bulls-eye kernel of truth at the center of every great story. Before you start, swallow the bitter medicine that you will never succeed in hitting this bulls-eye. No one does. That’s the human condition. All of us see through a glass darkly in our current state of existence. However, as with actual archery, practice and more practice and yet more practice, will help you develop a sense of when you’re close to the bulls-eye and what might be wrong in your approach when you’re not.
Perfection is a myth, and any creative who pursues perfection will wind up blocked and unable to create. When I look over what I’ve written for the day, I certainly don’t expect perfection—ever. When I read others’ stories, I don’t read for perfection. I read for how the story makes me feel first and foremost. Do I want to keep reading? Do I care enough about the characters to concern myself with what happens to them? A distant second to my feelings are my thoughts. I may finish reading a novel that has an exciting plot or interesting ideas at the expense of character development, but it’s not a novel that I’ll likely ever reread. I don’t reread Animal Farm because of its themes—I reread Animal Farm because I care about the characters and want to explore every emotional and philosophical nuance of their predicament.
I seek authenticity in my work, not perfection. The best thing I can do in a story is show the truth about my characters and their situations. This is one reason I tell most of my stories filtered through several point of view characters. The truth is a sneaky trickster, and none of us has a handle on the whole of it. If you imagine humanity as a vast, multi-faceted crystal, then each individual gets a facet of the crystal, his or her own unique perspective. We are all of us unreliable narrators in some ways, and true objectivity is impossible. Accept that you will fail in this. Everyone fails in this. There is truth, objective reality, and our task as fallible humans is to seek it as best we can, with the understanding and humility that we may only get to hold it for a few precious moments before it slips away again. The postmodernists did make a few good points amidst all the bad, and the idea that we all struggle with escaping our own subjectivity is one of them.
I remember first studying postmodernism in my college literature and history classes. Specifically, in historiography class, I and my fellow history majors examined all the different lenses through which we could view the past. The feminist lens, the Marxist lens, the postmodernist lens. All of the lenses irritated me, but I particularly loathed the postmodernist lens for its denial of objective truth in favor of infinite relativity. There is no solid bottom to the postmodernist quicksand, no place to ground ourselves. Certainly, objective truth is a cagy beast, difficult to catch and even more difficult to hold on to. But I far prefer the endless hunt to drowning in my own subjectivity.
So this is where I offer you my lens for writing fiction—the archetypal lens. It’s a flawed lens, to be sure—they all are. However, for some writers, myself amongst them, I believe the archetypal lens could be a useful tool to break through creative blocks. When we study fairytales or dreams on the archetypal level, each character in the tale becomes a facet of an individual person’s psyche. For instance, a woman reading “Beauty and the Beast” could see the Beast as her own animus (the masculine part of her psyche) in need of rescue and reform from her more developed feminine parts. When I dreamt of a seven foot tall serial killer shaking me, I viewed the serial killer as a part of my psyche desperately trying to rise into my conscious awareness, an internal insight I had avoided up until that point. This archetypal lens tends to provoke curiosity rather than denial for me. I don’t know if it’s like that for others, but if it is, you can use this curiosity to break through creative blocks. Archetypes live deep in our collective unconscious, our shared humanity, and stories that draw on these universal symbols retain a hold on our conscious minds because they enable us to tap into the forces that guide us and be more aware of who we are and why we’re here. Used in a thoughtful and questioning manner, archetypes can help authors find the heartbeat of their stories, the emotional tempo that can lead us to the truth and deep self-awareness, if only for a precious instant.
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