“Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don’t want people to know.
“White Oleander, for example, was so much about loneliness, and I was revealing something about myself. You have to work as deeply as you can to give the reader something worth reading, but you’re also showing things about yourself that you’re not pleased with.
“It’s your flaws, not your strengths that go down in the depths of your books. You’re exposed, like dreaming you’re naked in a public building.
[HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE DARK PLACES YOUR CHARACTERS HAVE BEEN?]
“I’ve been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I’m an optimist. I’ve never been in that extreme a state, like my suicidal character Michael Faraday in Paint it Black. I have to tell myself, Life can be good, and I can get through this. This will pass.”
Janet Fitch - from interview by Mary Curran-Hackett, Writer’s Digest
Related Talent Development Resources pages:
article: Creativity and Depression, by Douglas Eby
Depression and Creativity section
depression relief: products / programs
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04.19.07 | Share This
Her novel The End of Alice is “a tale told by a pedophile in his twenty-third year in a maximum security prison. He is intelligent; he is witty; he is profoundly dangerous.
“Beyond the reality of his stark cell and the violent perversion of the other inmates lies his imagination, which he turns to his past, to an ‘accident’ with a little girl named Alice, and now to the erotic life of a nineteen-year-old suburban co-ed who draws him into a flirtatious epistolary exchange.” [Summary from her site amhomesbooks.com]
A.M. Homes admits in an interview that “Alice” is “a profoundly disturbing book. It’s a serious book, an upsetting book… Writing fiction, to me, means being inside other people’s heads. But this head was so completely unfamiliar and dark…
“It was really, really hard. I remember feeling awful by the end of it. I was depressed and sad. I went into a bookstore to do some research, looking up stabbings and forensic reports, the details of these sorts of things, and I remember standing in the bookstore, literally crying.”
She adds, “I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They’re four or five years long - that’s not so bad. They’re serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who’s not so crazy and peculiar and demanding.” [From A. M. Homes Is a Big Fat Liar, by Dave Weich, Powells.com]
In an Elle magazine interview [Crimes of the Heart, by Randall Kenan], she responded to a question about people describing the novel as shocking: “It scared me sometimes when I was writing it; at times I had to stop—I frightened myself. I don’t know that shock’s such a bad thing… but I thought intellectually and artistically that this was the most ambitious book I’d tried.”
Her new book is The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir
[Photo of Homes by Marion Ettlinger.]
Some actors also talk about being deeply and intimately engaged with a character, and how that can be dangerous for their mental health and equilibrium.
Nicole Kidman, for example, once commented, “Unfortunately the thing that makes me want to be an actor, in terms of wanting to be consumed, is also what can destroy you because it becomes almost too hard.”
Related Talent Development Resources pages:
emotion: resources : articles books sites
emotional IQ resources : books sites/programs
nurturing mental health : writing
nurturing mental health: writing : articles books
nurturing mental health : sites / programs
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04.02.07 | Share This
Random House: PURPLE HIBISCUS is your first novel. What inspired you to write this book?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: It came about organically and slowly; it was sparked by a mélange of things: my homesickness after first arriving in America to attend college (and the way I stubbornly romanticized my memories so that everything became fragrant—rain, sand, insects, grass!), my interest in religion, the way history lives with us, my fascination with the kind of sweet-sour melancholy in some of my favorite books, Nigerian politics and how it trickles down to the personal.
By the way, it isn’t the first novel I wrote. There are manuscripts languishing in dusty drawers which were poorly conceived, to put it kindly.
Random House: Although Purple Hibiscus is not autobiographical, how much of your protagonist, Kambili, do you see in yourself?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Very little. Creating her as she is was very conscious. I was aware that I was dealing with huge, complex issues—religion, politics, history—that are easy to lapse into polemics about, and so I wanted a narrator who would be able to tell the story as unobtrusively as possible.
Kambili fitted well. She is not only young and sensitive, but she is also traumatized and that lends a kind of detachment to her telling.
She is voiceless in a way that I, thank Heavens, am not, but I think that hushed quality of hers serves this particular story well. I do sometimes see the careful way she observes her world in myself.
But I generally never model a major character after myself. I think that would stifle the creative spark; I need to be able to see my characters as being apart from me, creations that I can observe, because only then can I let them grow and free them to take risks and free myself to let them take those risks.
From Random House Author Q&A
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977.. and briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins.
Photo [by Avery Cunliffe] and bio from official site for her book Half of a Yellow Sun, a 2006 National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist [website].
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03.18.07 | Share This
Author and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. explains the idea of archetype as a “predisposition that contributes to our personality, helping define our strengths, difficulties, and meaning.”
She says the common forms “are based on the gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. People are complex, there is a pantheon of these archetypes in each of us. They act from within us, and the more we know of them, the more conscious we can be about ourselves, the better.” [She is author of Gods in Everyman; her quotes are from Myth & Story : page 2]
In her article Archetypes for Writers, Jennifer Van Bergen writes about exploring these “underlying pre-existent patterns, or archetypes, in people’s behaviors and actions. Eventually, you see not simply the behaviors themselves but an entire ’secret life’ going on, and from that you begin to discern a whole ‘invisible world’ where these secret lives interact, interweave, and form into stories.”
She says by “working at the archetype level.. your writing will never be the same.”
Her book Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious, according to summary by the Writers Store, notes it provides a step-by-step method, using specific exercises and coupled with detailed, in-depth explanations of the meaning of each step, to enable writers to find the characters they already contain within themselves but do not know exist or know how to access or develop.
Archetypes, as the Wikipedia entry says, “have been present in mythology and literature for hundreds of years. The use of archetypes to analyze personality was advanced by Carl Jung early in the 20th century.
“The value in using archetypal characters in fiction derives from the fact that a large group of people are able to unconsciously recognize the archetype, and thus the motivations, behind the character’s behavior.”
Jung also developed ideas about exploring and using our personal shadow - “the negative side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.”
He said the shadow “also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.”
Many writers and other artists realize how valuable it can be to explore and make use of these concepts of archetypes and the shadow self.
For example, director Wes Craven: the image is from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Craven said in an interview that during the years while writing the fillm, he was reading “a lot of Eastern sort of esoteric knowledge. There’s a Russian philosopher who wrote about levels of consciousness and equated consciousness with being awake - which I did throughout this picture.
“His theory was that consciousness is painful. To know really what’s true, to know the truth in any given situation, is painful, often uncomfortable, and it’s not pleasant. So most of us, most of the time, will go out what he called ‘doors.’
“He listed sex, eating, sleeping, being out in a crowd; today you could add television and drugs. Those things ease the pain of consciousness.”
Craven adds that the hero - an archetypal figure - is “the person that remains conscious, remains awake, up to the point where it’s so painful you want to kill yourself. Most people, if they get near that level, turn around and go the other way; some people actually kill themselves, and some people break through to a sort of clarity where they’re truly conscious. That became the framework for the film.” [Quotes from the shadow self : page 3]
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03.06.07 | Share This
Karen Moncrieff worked for ten years as an actor, then became a screenwriter. In a Writers Guild magazine article, she notes “Writing felt so comfortable in a way that acting never really did. With writing, I was using all parts of myself, all of my skills.”
She wrote [and directed] her powerful film Blue Car in a way as “a reaction to films I had seen, like Stealing Beauty, a very idealized view of a girl’s coming of age. I wanted to get inside the woman’s experience and tell the story from her own perspective.”
But, the article notes, writing the script “became a wrenching, emotional experience for Moncrieff, who often, drained after composing a scene, would curl her head in her husband’s lap and cry.”
“I let my emotions and feelings be my guide,” she says. “I find the things that trouble me the most, the things I wish I could change, are what I need to explore. And it’s always good to start with something that scares me.”
[From article "The Facts of Life" by Shelley Gabert, Written By, Jan 2007; photo by Mark Hanauer]
Fear is a simple label for a variety of experiences, some helpful for artists, but others - like anxiety - can be limiting or corrosive.
Psychologist Robert Maurer, PhD thinks fear may be indispensable for creative expression. “Fear is good,” he has declared. “As children, fear is a natural part of our lives, but as adults we view fear as a disease. It’s not a disease. Children say they are afraid or scared, but adults use the clinical terms anxiety or depression. A writer should not view fear as something bad, but as essentially doing something right.”
But another psychologist and creativity coach, Eric Maisel, PhD warns, “Only a small percentage of creative people work as often or as deeply as, by all rights, they might be expected to work. What stops them? Anxiety or some face of anxiety like doubt, worry, or fear. Anxiety is the great silencer of the creative person.”
[Above quotes are from my article Fear and Creativity]
Related Talent Development Resources pages:
fear .. articles: anxiety / fear / courage
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02.14.07 | Share This
In her article The Fatal Flaw – The Most Essential Element for Bringing Characters to Life, Dara Marks, PhD describes the fatal flaw as “a struggle within a character to maintain a survival system long after it has outlived its usefulness.”
She says, “Identifying the fatal flaw instantly clarifies for the writer what the internal journey of the character will be. This is no small thing, because once the writer is clear about what the protagonist needs in terms of internal growth it will clarify the external conflict as well.
She adds, “Most importantly, a fatal flaw is not a judgmental verdict that a writer places on a character, nor should it ever be a moral judgment. For example, if a sixteen-year-old has sex or gets drunk, it doesn’t mean he or she is fatally doomed… A sixteen-year-old who is completely dependent on his or her parents to make all decisions may be in far more jeopardy of not maturing than the teen who casually experiments with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
“This is not to say that a teen who exclusively uses artificial stimulus in place of developing real self-esteem isn’t in jeopardy as well, but it depends on the degree to which any system of survival is out of balance to everything else.”
The photo is from the book: Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture - it just seems to me [from the outside] that Goth could be a rich culture to look at in terms of teens trying out different identities and expressions, and taking internal journeys that might be flawed - or productive.
Of course you, the writer, may be the prime source for exploring character dynamics and psychology. There are a number of pages on the Talent Development Resources site which have quotes and ideas on self-exploration, including: depth psychology and the shadow self.
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02.01.07 | Share This
