Into the body of the protagonist

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Via Futurity, researchers  at Emory University’s Center for Neuropolicy are exploring what happens to your brain when you read a novel.

It’s a small study, but intriguing — and reinforces my sense that what we experience internally is, in some respects, indistinguishable from what we experience in the 3D world:

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” Berns says. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

Read a book, and the protag becomes your avatar :-)

On pheromones

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smoke pic (533x800)

Pheromones are not scents. They are completely odorless. But any time you’re near another human being, you’re being exposed to them . . .

One of the big “what if” questions that got me started on my current novel-in-progress, Dark Chemistry, was this:

What if a bad guy figured out how to manipulate a woman using pheromones?

So as I started working on the novel, I did a bunch of research on pheromones.

It’s a fascinating topic.

For example, did you know that there’s a structure in the nose of mammals, called the Vomeronasal Organ (VNO), the purpose of which is to detect pheromones?

If you were to examine the human VNO with a microscope, writes Michelle Kodis in the book Love Scents, you would find that it is connect to a “tube lined with columnar cells.”

These cells are classified as pseudostratified columnar epithelium, and what’s intriguing about them is that they are not found anywhere else in the human body–they are unique to the VNO.

Caveat. Some scientists are less than impressed by the VNO and VNO lining. They believe that in humans, the VNO is vestigial.

But hey. Until a few years ago, scientists thought the appendix had no purpose, either.

And there’s no question that we humans respond to pheromones. Pheromones probably explain why, when women live together, their menstrual cycles synchronize. They’re probably one reason blindfolded mothers can identify their babies. They probably explain why we –instantly — find some people physically attractive, but not others.

Pheromones act on the subconscious mind. Spooky!

Pheromones have the potential to influence everything from your heart rate to your mood — but their effect is entirely below the threshold of conscious awareness. (Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Tallia22)

Something else that’s fascinating to me: our reaction to pheromones happens below the threshold of conscious awareness.

Pheromones, you see, act directly on the autonomous nervous system: the chemical signalling system pheromones activate delivers impulses directly to the hypothalamus — the portion of the brain that controls body temperature, hunger, thirst, sex drive, our moods — and the pituitary gland, called the “master gland” because it controls most of the body’s other endocrine glands, from the thyroid and adrenals to the testis and ovaries.

So think about it: when we’re near other humans, we’re reacting to chemical signals — and we don’t know that we’re reacting to them.

Kinda spooky, isn’t it?

But stay tuned . . . it gets spookier . . .

;-)

The Strong Female Character, con’t

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Fact of life: when women assert themselves in Real Life, we generally do *not* look like this.

Fact of life: with rare exceptions, when women assert themselves in Real Life, we don’t look *anything* like this.

Writing in The New Statesman, author Sophia McDougall makes some interesting observations about “The Strong Female Character:” that what passes for strength, on the movie screen at least, is often an act of unjustified (or barely justified) physical violence:

[T]here are characters who’ve clearly been written with SFC-compatibility in mind, who nevertheless come at least halfway to life.  Captain America’s Peggy Carter, along with Iron Man’s Pepper Potts, are much the best of the Marvel love interests. Peggy shoots Nazis. She never has to be rescued or protected by Captain America or anyone else. She has a decent amount of screentime. Her interesting status as a female British soldier in World War Two is not actually explored, but implies a compelling back story and an impressive depth of conviction and resilience, and her romance with Captain America is never allowed to undermine this. While her role is clearly ancillary to the male hero, it’s not so much so that she feels defined by his presence; it’s possible to imagine a film about her – a woman determined to overcome everything in her path to fight the evils of Nazism. Most importantly to the character’s success, she’s played by the superb Hayley Atwell.

She’s introduced briefing a number of potential recruits to the super soldier programme. This is the scene clearly written to establish Peggy’s SFC cred, and it unfolds like this: One of the recruits immediately starts mouthing off at her, first insulting her accent and then, when she calls him out of the line-up, making sexist, suggestive remarks.
She punches him to the ground.

McDougall also points out that male protagonists don’t have to be “strong.” (She offers Sherlock Holmes as an example: his “physical strength is often unreliable… His mental and emotional resources also fluctuate. An addict and a depressive, he claims even his crime-fighting is a form of self-medication. Viewed this way, his willingness to place himself in physical danger might not be “strength” at all – it might be another form of self-destructiveness.”)

She concludes her piece by calling for

. . . a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness. Badass gunslingers and martial artists sure, but also interesting women who are shy and quiet and do, sometimes, put up with others’ shit because in real life there’s often no practical alternative.

I suppose you know where I’m going next: right back to my experience with poor Libby: a woman who spends an entire novel putting up with others’ . . . stuff.

Here’s part of the comment I left on McDougall’s article:

I happen to think that putting a hapless character in a situation where he/she is overwhelmed by outside circumstances makes for humorous situations. A great example most of us can relate to is Hugh Grant’s character in Four Weddings & a Funeral. He was funny and loveable in his haplessness. He “got the girl” in the end only because his brother stood up for him.

But swap genders and make Grant a woman, and you’ll earn the Wrath of the Mob.

I know firsthand. I pubbed a novel with a woman who gets pushed around by family members and strangers.

I thought it was comic that she did things like sneak out of a window of her own house to avoid people who were camping on her yard.

My readers were not amused . . .

The fact is this: it’s complicated.

The Strong Female Character is something of a sacred figure. It may not be conscious, but writers use her because they know she is what readers/movie goers want and expect.

She’s also a SAFE figure.

Take that. And that.

Take that. And that.

It’s also likely that readers — and by this I mean female readers — want SFC because of their own ambiguity about strength and power.

In our personal lives, power is a double-edged sword. As a rather simplistic example: a woman who asserts herself can easily be perceived as unattractive. We’d like to think we can be powerful in the overt,  masculine sense and come across as sexy at the same time, but in reality, that’s not so easy to pull off.

In movies/novels, otoh, the SFC does pull it off. And guess what: readers want that.

One of Libby’s 1-star reviewers wrote:

[I]f I wanted real life, I wouldn’t be reading this book.

Exactly.

People read novels and go to movies to escape from “real life.”

They don’t want characters who mirror life’s uneasy ambiguities.

They don’t want books that are realistic about the trade-offs we all have to make between being loved and being powerful . . .

Chick lit, Women’s lit, and Fiction’s Dark Arts

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moon

“It is no longer a passion hidden in my veins: it is the goddess Venus herself fastened on her prey.” — Racine

One of the odd pleasures about writing fiction is that you don’t always know what you’re doing until after you’ve done it.

There are parts of the mind (the parts that Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson refers to as the Shadow) that meddle with your fiction behind your back.

You have little or no awareness of the meddling as you write.

You’re too focused on all those conscious tasks that require your attention. The characters, the plot, your deadlines, your typos . . .

But then you re-read what you’ve done and there it is, like the smudgey remnants of an alien footprint — an alien footprint that also seems disturbingly familiar. Continue reading →

The Eight Stages of Short Story Writing

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egg1. Excitement. Something has popped into your head–an idea, a hook, a scene. You’re positive that a terrific story will unfold around it. You sit down and commit your idea to the page. Yep. This just might work . . .

2. Fear. You realize that everything else about the story except your original idea is — oh no! — utterly invisible. What you have written so far isn’t nearly enough — but it’s impossible to know what else might be there or how you’ll ever find it. You fight an overwhelming tendency to avoid the story altogether. You almost wish you’d never started it in the first place. Failure seems like such a sweet option . . . Continue reading →

Come join my DH Lawrence group on Goodreads

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461px-D_H_Lawrence_passport_photographEvery once in a while I get interested enough in a writer that I decide to read “everything” he or she has written.

(No literally everything, perhaps, but a lot!)

This started in college, when I discovered that the college library often had volumes of letters or collected essays written by novelists that I was studying. I remember reading a collection of letters by Dostoyevski over one Christmas break, and a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf. It gave me a sense of connectedness with the novelists — with the human beings behind the novels. Continue reading →

Rev it up

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Cover, Loose Dogs by Kirsten MortensenSome of you know that I have had, for some time, another novel in the works.

The title is Loose Dogs. The protag is an animal control officer. And I finished writing it in 2004.

Except that I didn’t.

2004 was an eternity ago in publishing history. The launch of the Kindle was still three years away. There was no such thing as an “indie writer.” Self-publishing was a euphemism for vanity publishing, and vanity publishing was the crazy aunt in the attic. She’s there, everybody knows she’s there, you feel sorry for her, you sure as hell don’t want to be her. Continue reading →

Are you afraid?

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weird cloudsMany years ago, a very wise person who was listening to me talk about some problem I was wrestling stopped me and said, “Why are you holding your breath?”

I’ll never forget that question. It was a pivot point in my life — one of those moments which mark the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. I had, before that day, believed that I was a brave person. But the moment I stopped holding my breath, feelings I’d been pushing down for years suddenly rose up in all their demonic magnificence.

I was terrified. I was a quivering coward. Those “brave” acts of mine — the time I’d quit college, the leaps I’d made into relationships — they were covers, they were things I’d done not because I was brave but in order to hide my fear from myself.

I’ve had throughout my life what I refer to as moments of bravado — a sudden urge to push myself beyond my fear in some big way.

That’s from a lovely and insightful essay on fear (and also btw on love) by Jana Richman in the New York Times.

I would add this: fear is a function of the physical body, in many ways. Many of us tend to live so much in our heads that we forget this. It’s important to pay attention to the body, and to calm it the way you would a child or a pet. It helps . . .