Enduring Power

This Week’s Bit of String: A pleasant surprise

Sometimes it’s hard to remember in the chilly grey exhaustion of January, but my family had a great Christmas. My husband and I decorated the house all cosy, I cooked many yummy things, and we welcomed our kiddo and their partner for an extended visit from the US. We spent relaxed, happy days together, which became even lovelier when they got engaged. 

I didn’t see it coming. They look after each other and live together, but somehow I did not expect an engagement, even when they’ve been a couple for years. I suppose this naivete was largely down to my own self-perception: Hang on, I’m old enough to have an engaged kid?

The surprise has faded a little, but I’m still tremendously excited that my little family is slated to officially grow. Whenever I see someone who knew my kiddo when they were at school, for example, I update them with relish. And I’m not the least bit tired of it yet.

I’ve written before about the worry that a memory’s power might get used up or worn out. And I am thinking about this again, wondering whether I should guard the engagement news to keep it feeling shiny. Right now, I still get sharp pangs missing the kids when I walk past their empty room. Maybe that will fade, but does that mean the happiness about the times we had will too?

Keeping News New

This relates not just to the stories we want to pass on, but to what we take in. As an alarming presidential term begins in my native country, I’m wrestling with how much to let this consume me. Twitter is a mess of partisans either hyperventilating over or ogling Trump, very little use, whereas mainstream media talking about him like he’s normal nauseates me. 

This man lacking empathy, intelligence, and morals was elected president, partly due to a lack of information getting to people about him… or indifference of those people to the information that did reach them. When a leader seems constantly to be making things worse for somebody, often for one minority or another, it’s difficult to keep impressing that upon others who have the privilege of just getting on with their lives.

By definition, we can’t be shocked by the same thing in perpetuity. We all know a person or two who’s a last story freak; who always has a prevailing trauma or a story that tops all others. As a storyteller myself, I’m liable to fight fire with fire and hyperbole with hyperbole. Telling stories becomes a bit of an arms race. 

My plan for not getting caught up in it when actual current events feel like they’re escalating is to stick with the facts. Let’s monitor and respond to the ruling party’s actions, not their pervasive rhetoric. 

Capacity for Astonishment

Recognising that even a glimpse of the inauguration would be intolerable, I sorted myself some alternative programming for Monday after work. I watched one of my absolute favourite films: Spielberg’s Lincoln. It has a Tony Kushner script and a massive cast of incredible actors immersing you in 1865, when Lincoln decided it was time to amend the Constitution to ban slavery–even if it prolonged the horrific Civil War. 

Different from the 13th Amendment, but still very cool. From the British Library.

“Is this a hopeful film to watch today?” my husband asked.

“Well, it shows that even when our history was cruel and selfish, some people managed to overcome it.”

Although I’ve watched this film at least annually for a decade, it still moves me to tears several times over. From the first scene when a defiant David Oyelowo repeats the Gettysburg Address, to Tommy Lee Jones taking the freshly-passed 13th Amendment home to share with his partner, to the final departure of Lincoln from the White House. Watching this again, I know that sometimes, a retelling actually grows in potency thanks to our anticipation of the best bits. A passion for something can spiral, heightening enjoyment still more.

It also gives me another tip for keeping a story fresh: broaden the cast. The more voices we allow to speak about something, the stronger a story is.

What stories do you love to repeat? How do you maintain their power? 

Trouble of Our Own Making

This Week’s Bit of String: Saturday morning movies

One of our family traditions was letting Mom stay in bed on Saturday mornings, and we’d watch a movie. This sounds simple, but we had to choose from our videotapes, mostly random stuff recorded from basic cable, plus Disney feature cartoons. I’m the oldest of four kids, with five years between myself and my youngest sister. Certain parties objected to anything in black and white, and it couldn’t be too “mushy,” and one gets creeped out by films with talking animals.

Whenever I vetoed a movie, my siblings would roll their eyes and admit annoyed defeat. “Oh sure, because they get in trouble.”

This movie’s still a nope from me. But the local vet’s window display was very cute!

It’s true, I was super sensitive about misunderstood characters in kids’ films, from Anne of Green Gables to Pete’s Dragon. Lady and the Tramp—I couldn’t bear that one (plus, it had talking animals so it was out anyway). It was the same with books: Curious George, for example.

I was petrified of getting in trouble for something I didn’t do, or even worse for something I did. I was the oldest child in a religious family, sensitive by nature, also traumatised by abuse. My dread of getting in trouble was so severe I couldn’t read or watch things where that occurred.

Causation vs Correlation

Lucky for me, in quite a few children’s films, things just happen. We ended up watching Peter Pan a lot (not the cartoon, but a slightly fuzzy tape of Mary Martin performing the lead in the Broadway musical). Plenty happens in that without the characters necessarily causing it.

It’s different as you get older. Characters must be autonomous, reflecting our quest for independence. This means everything that happens stems from protagonists’ decisions, overreaches, and failures.

Every crime-busting film from Miss Congeniality to Hannibal starts with the heroic detective disgracing themselves, and they must salvage their reputation. Every superhero film first establishes them as fallible; their powers are their only shot at redemption.

We love wonky, flawed characters. But do we have to make them responsible for everything?

Recently while I finished retyping my entire novel with new edits, I streamed Paddington and Paddington 2 to get through the copying. When I mentioned it to my youngest sister, she was like, “Wait, how do you watch those? Paddington gets in trouble all the time!”

Yeah, I kind of got over that. I had to, or else I’d never read or watch anything. Nor would I be working on my current novel, about possibly the most famous Character Who Gets in Trouble of all time: Eve, the original sinner.

As I edit the book, I’ve been reading about story structure. John Yorke in Into the Woods presents the prototypical story structure as a process of awakening. Initially, the protagonist does not deal well with revelations and things continue going wrong. I just finished Nikesh Shukla’s Your Story Matters, in which he emphasises the importance of causality: the plot springs from a main character’s action or deliberate inaction when faced with new knowledge.

In other words, the main character is SUPPOSED to make it all happen. It’s all their fault. They have to fall a long way in order to teach us how to get back up. Every protagonist, in a sense, is the author’s sacrifice.

Agency vs… Real Life?

Now that I recognise how it works, it’s stressing me out and reviving my aversion to characters getting in trouble. I put a film on and wait for the character to completely blow it. I’m anxious while reading because I know the protagonist is destined to screw things up.

There are a lot of things bigger than our characters and us.

I do like a domino plot, though, where each detail causes another; the way John Irving or Margaret Atwood spin massive tales of intricate characters and everything’s interconnected by the end.

As I go through my Eve book yet again, I’m wondering how to cohere the trajectory, Eve’s actions (or inactions) and their consequences. This is a myth retelling, so not everything is strictly in Eve’s control. She has God, Lucifer, and most chaotically, other humans to deal with. Plus, part of my reason for writing this is to repudiate millennia of condemnation. Maybe bucking the traditional structure is acceptable, or am I a bad writer if Eve doesn’t trigger every consequence herself?

I noticed that in Dune 2, the protagonist never fails at any new trick he tries. The developments in the plot are not of his own making—different from a Marvel film. Indeed, Nikesh Shukla notes that the character-triggered consequence story structure is a Western tradition. It makes sense, I guess, that main characters from other, more faith-based cultures have less agency to affect the plot.

We Westerners are obsessed with individuality—the downside being we can be persuaded that any trouble is our fault. In real life, it’s not. Not every time. How tightly do you like your plots linked to your character’s actions? Does it ever cause you anxiety, knowing a character is destined to get in trouble?

Make ‘Em Laugh

This Week’s Bit of String: Personification of ants

Our neediest Year 9s have been treated to a poet-in-residence course. The poet wears bright-patterned shirts and hipster glasses and leads the troop outside to find objects for personification practice. My dynamic duo choose an ant, and assign it a “he” pronoun. 

“A male ant,” I say. “That would be an uncle!”

It’s the last lesson of the day, and very hot. We are all tired. I start to chuckle at my own joke.

My student, who takes stairs three at a time and is so bouncy you could easily interchange him with Tigger (although the constant involuntary shouts and bird chirps might give him away), stills suddenly and gives me a stern look. “No.”

I’m not generally sadistic, but the poor reception of my pun makes me laugh even more. The kids are disgruntled, and that’s hilarious. I try to apologise, but I’m not very sorry.

In search of comedy crumbs…

A couple weeks ago I attended my first in-person workshop or course since before covid. It was about writing with humour, hosted for Evesham’s Festival of Words by Fran Hill, whose memoirs including Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean? are brilliant examples of warm humour and efficient prose. We went over different kinds of funny scenarios and set-ups, including wordplay like my awful hot-afternoon pun, and read and created lots of fun examples.

Because we don’t do this often enough, I thought I’d dedicate this post to comedy. So, in case you’re a bit tired and world-weary, here’s a little compendium of things I find really funny. Don’t worry, they’re higher quality than my ant joke.

Early Years

In my family we watched a lot of vintage comedy. My father passed his own father’s love of the Marx Brothers and Spike Jones down to us. The humour that often stays in my memory is musical. Here’s Chico Marx’s piano routine in Animal Crackers–and Groucho’s annoyance with it. “I can’t thinka the finish!” – “That’s strange, and I can’t think of anything else.”

Often what makes us laugh is an element of surprise. It’s characters who we expect to be straight-laced suddenly subverting stereotypes and doing something outrageous. Growing up (and this is still true for me), my siblings and I loved musicals and Disney animated films. I’ve got examples from both showing characters doing something hilariously unexpected: Fagin’s entrance in “I’d Do Anything for You” from Oliver!, and Kronk, the beefcake boytoy, creating his own theme music in The Emperor’s New Groove.

As we got older, we became fans of irony and understatement. We loved the Anguished English books, collecting the most egregious and uproarious written mistakes often from professional settings. We liked the absurd. Here’s a scene from the Beatles’ film Help, because Ringo’s flat-toned reaction to nearly having his finger bitten off in a vending machine tickled us: “I thought… y’know, I thought she was a sandwich.”

The Music Plays On

Given that the family I’ve raised is also quite musically inclined, I continue to enjoy that type of humour. Comedy increases its impact when it uses cultural references that people can further relate to. Bill Bailey is great at this. My husband and son and I love his Belgian jazz version of the Doctor Who (Docteur… Qui) theme song. Or, if you prefer, he also does a terrific reggae rendition of Downton Abbey.

Bath Carnival last weekend… get happy!

Talking of unlikely combinations, here’s a fabulous mashup my son created, of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, and the Tetris theme. How awesome is it when your own kids make you laugh?

I also love an ensemble piece. For me, that’s what makes shows from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Office to Stranger Things to The Good Place so fantastic. You adore and rely on every cast member. Here are prime examples of ensemble comedy from each side of the pond, that have me laughing more with each character adding to the piece: The Muppets covering “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and several incredible British actors and actresses attempting Hamlet’s soliloquy together. You’ll love both of these from the beginning… but the endings blow them out of the water.

In literature, Dickens’s descriptions of people make me laugh, and Louisa May Alcott’s quick action tags like saying a boy exited “with the graceful gait of a young giraffe.” An especially memorable (partly because I was on a bus full of dour commuters at the time) laugh-out-loud passage is from Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union:

“Reunited in their parents’ bed, the Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and a blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of maneuvers, a kung fu of slumber, that drives Landsman to the very limits of the bed…”

Most of all in my reading and writing, I like to celebrate surprising alliances, to build little bands of misfits, so maybe that’s why I enjoy odd pairings in comedy too. My humorous short story “From Newcastle, With Love” appears in the Stroud Short Stories anthology, and you can hear me read it (and hear the audience laughing at just the right places, too).

What are some of your favourite funnies?