I was going to skip a quarterly blog post, but hey: life gives you lemons and you make lemonade.
On Saturday I fell and broke my wrist! My first ever trip to A&E. I guess I should consider myself lucky to have lived so long without such a visit before, but it’s certainly tedious that I have to cancel and reschedule various plans, and will need to work one-handed. And it’s also tedious that my gardening plans for summer are scuppered. The irony is that it happened at the entrance to a rose garden on the day that we were taking a long-awaited trip to another rose garden at the peak of its floral display. Roses are my downfall – or maybe my falldown! And yes, it *was* painful.
It’s set me thinking about the tarot card the Tower, which represents the unexpected. In many decks, such as the Smith Waite one in this picture, the card shows some catastrophe with people literally falling through the air. (Which I now have experience of! Also: of having smashed bones reset. Which now qualifies me to write such a scene in, say, a western or a fantasy novel. Apparently, there was a bloodcurdling seven-second scream, then an audible sigh of relief, and then I said thank you to the wonderful nurses, one of whom has the best name ever, but I’m observing the Hippocratic oath of patients so shan’t reveal it.)
In tarot the Tower is often fearfully linked with conflict, disruption or violence, but my excellent tarot teacher Sue mostly stressed its associations with sudden change or unexpected events, and the subsequent upheavals or outcomes that result from them – which don’t always have to be terrifying. From Jessica Doré’s Tarot For Change:
the Tower can be understood as symbolizing the particular personality traits that function as a sort of buffer against the anxiety of living. And from this perspective, the Tower can go from being one of the most feared cards in the deck to a powerful blessing … The Tower falls when we realize that anxiety in itself is not dangerous. The danger comes from the intricate ways we attempt to outrun and escape it. These patterns of avoidance are what create problems for us beyond the natural pain of living. But there are simply better and more life-giving ways to cope with stress than building patterns that act like cement walls.
(Or in this case mossy stone steps, the natural pain and inconvenience of falling upon which I’d certainly rather have missed, tbh.)
So: the unexpected. There are often random things that arise in everyday life and take us in new directions. Reversals of fortune, new ways of doing, mossy stone steps, making lemonade from lemons. Learning to use dictation software more efficiently for writing this post. And to think: last week I had no idea what I was going to make my quarterly post about.
I do feel that writers are often quite hesitant about writing chance interventions or random happenings into their stories. They think, ‘That would never happen in real life.’ But perhaps they should be less cautious.
In A&E we saw a waiting patient with the mother of a kid who’d stuck something in his ear. I thought they were a couple, then I understood they weren’t. And they were definitely flirting … She even came back and chatted to him for half an hour after her kid had had whatever removed from his ear. Unexpected fortunes indeed.
As a writing experiment: If you are writing something and it needs something of a kickstart, invite something of the unexpected into your story – fall from a tower!
Find something random. Pick up a book, open a page, choose a word or a sentence that attracts your attention. An action, an object, a character. Or pick a tarot card. Or use the first thing you see when you turn on the telly. Or if you fancy something a little more abstract try one of Brian Eno’s oblique strategies.
Then incorporate this chance intervention as some meaningful turning point in your story.
What matters of course is how this random element is incorporated. A character’s responses will be unique to that character, will reflect and test and even change that character, and will lead them into further adventures – and that is what makes a story. Is the response Fight or Flight, or Moan, or Laugh It Off And Get On With It? (Though I’m usually very open in my writing advice, moaning can make for boring characters and thus for boring stories, so moaning characters might best be avoided, unless of course the moaning character is the whole point of the story and you can, e.g., do something funny with them.)
To repeat something I often use from Ursula Le Guin in Steering the Craft:
Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
This works for nonfiction as well as fiction. A random interception might provide the framework that helps you come unstuck.
And of sideways relevance, on the subject of pain, something from the excellent Spring Rain by Marc Hamer, which I just happened to read at lunchtime:
There are two kinds of old people. There are the old people who are in pain and miserable, and there are the old people who are in pain but who are lighthearted. All the old people are in pain. Only some of us have the skills to be able to laugh at it every day. Life is ridiculous and full of pain, and to be kind and happy is the finest act of rebellion I can imagine. Lasting happiness is a skill; it’s not an easy skill to learn, but once you’ve had a glimmer of it, it is impossible to ignore. To get it, I gave things up; stopped competing against others, accepted nature’s flow, handed myself to simplicity, accepted inevitability, change and meaninglessness, but most of all I had to forgive people. Time passes, things happen, nobody knows why.
Marc’s insight arrived like that lightning bolt from the Tower. Perhaps all stories are about learning the skill of living with the pain – the suffering – but also the joys of everyday life.
(Actually, now I think about it the joys require skills too.)
One final note: nurses are amazing. Like, really. Give them the pay that they deserve, which is probably a lot more than that of grifter politicians who should be in gaol. Let’s not forget some catastrophes are political.
And also, while we’re here some dates for your diary. I’m leading a workshop called Magicians and Fools: Tarot for Writers on the morning of Sunday 17 September 2023 at the Hastings Book Festival. And in conjunction with Words Away I’m planning a workshop in central London called The Four Elements of Revising for the afternoon of Saturday 14 October 2023.
More anon! Fracture clinic tomorrow.
