Mrs. Gant always scared me. She’d race out of the temple at us kids, waving her mop like a scimitar. The fear meant I never did get to find out who they worshipped in there. I imagined stern priests, stone slabs, and human sacrifice.
It seems fanciful now, slinking past the bland block structure. Four decades since I walked the neighbourhood. Mrs. Gant long gone.
And yet. The iron railings carry wrought shapes. And those swirling shapes pull in shadows from the temple garden, plucking with lean fingers at the shades from the street. I turn and run like hell.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
What makes the inner world of a fictional character really sing? The author can, of course, have the character think ideas, speak, and carry out actions. But, besides and more interesting than this, is the way they respond to the world and understand things. After all, the universe inside every head seems magically different from the one inside my own.
Tropisms
I’ve just come across an author who tried to render that inner world, using an idea borrowed from biology. Plants grow towards the light. Biologists call this stimulus and response phototropism.
Encyclopaedia of Human Thermodynamics
The French writer Nathalie Sarraute used the metaphor of tropism to highlight the origins of actions, speech, and feelings in the momentary experiences on the fringe of consciousness.
In the first vignette in her 1939 book Tropisms, she writes
They seemed to spring up from nowhere, blossoming out in the slightly moist tepidity of the air, they flowed gently along as though they were seeping from the walls, from the boxed trees, the benches, the dirty sidewalks, the public squares.
This seems to be a plague of weeds or vermin. In fact, she is describing people staring into shop windows. But these are not people as characters. Rather, stripped of identifiable shapes and personalities they become sensations. Sarraute eliminated plot or character from her work, in order to explore the “impulses, desires, processes that exist before speech, before comprehension, before consciousness”, as Allison Noelle Conner puts it.
Nathalie Sarraute
Sarraute would devote pages to exploring the mechanisms that intervened between the stimulus and the response.
The objective correlative
Though I don’t buy into Sarraute’s analysis that plot and character are conventional masks that prevent us exploring mentality, I do find something intriguing in her approach. T.S. Elliot had a similar insight in his idea of the “objective correlative”—a sequence of things or events which creates the sensation the writer is trying to summon in the reader. He described this: “when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
Other techniques
This clearly has connections with the often tiresome writers’ dictum of “show, don’t tell”. But it takes this instruction further. It makes location, conversation, and events a means of conveying character.
It also might seem similar to Swain’s technique of the Motivation-Reaction Unit (MRU), which also works on a stimulus-response basis. However, these work on the basis of a chain from feeling to action to speech, whereas in tropism, all of these are preceded by a simple sensory experience. I wrote about my experiment with MRUs in a previous post.
A method for illuminating mentality
I’ve used the insight about pre-conscious stimuli to rework the opening chapter of my current book, The Star Compass. Robert, a bookish recluse, has come to the remote Pacific island of Yap. All his life he has avoided ever learning anything about the South Seas so he might believe there is one place on the planet where nature is bountiful and people are nice to each other. Now he is forced to have a confrontation with reality. The chapter begins:
He paused at the bottom rung of the stairway. Then stepped onto the tarmac and off the edge of the world.
Here all his maps ran out. Here be dragons.
The humid tropical night wrapped itself like a moist towel around his nose. The bulk of his body began to cook from the inside. Sweat pooled in his armpits, beaded his brow, and trickled down his spine. The perspiration felt clammy. He wanted to turn, run back into the plane, and get away from this island.
But he continued to shuffle forward towards the door of the tiny airport, keeping his place in the line of a hundred other passengers and urged on by those behind. The terminal complex was so small it lacked an immigration hall and they queued on the apron. Thankfully, it wasn’t raining, though puddles evaporating on the tarmac indicated an earlier downpour.
Things had happened here before he arrived. The island had its own hidden history. Anything might lurk here in the unknown South Pacific.
He reached the portal where souls were divided. One door for visitors, and the other for citizens of the Federated States of Micronesia. The sleepy official took his landing card, examined his passport. Robert Urquhart, UK citizen, fifty-one years old.
Yap International Airport
In making this revision, I hunted for small sensations in the draft and considered these as stimuli. I then checked that there was a response for every stimulus and a stimulus for every response. For example, the action of stepping onto the tarmac provokes the sensation that he’s stepped off the edge of the world. Or the stimulus of the humidity makes him want to turn and run. And the realisation from the rain puddle that the things have happened here before he arrived, triggers a fear that anything might happen here now. I aimed to render Robert’s profound unease through these small almost pre-conscious moments. Sometimes, it involved taking a small moment and expanding it.
I’d love to hear whether you’ve tried or come across anything similar.
Reflections were no longer perfect. The above ceased to mirror below. Below the meniscus the granite cliffs and great purple bruise of a damaged sky were gone. Down under, a gentle surf lapped the peaceful strand, and fishermen cast their nets on a sea pulsing with cod and bream.
“Tis the devil’s work,” Molly declared, needles clacking as they wound the soft strong wool. “Paradise be above, and below, a vale of tears.”
Nothing could convince her. Heaven below must be hell.
“The sky will clear,” she said, “and we’ll go back up. When I’ve finished my Jeb’s new jumper.”
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
I wanted to say I’m sorry. But she wouldn’t listen. She ran. She fell and didn’t move. I was frightened. So, I never got to say sorry, and I never got to be forgiven.
Do you see? You are my second chance. That’s why I had to hurt you. So I could say sorry, and so you could forgive me.
You do forgive me, don’t you? You must.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
It was the kind of place you expected to see a ghost walk. A tragic heroine, perhaps, throwing herself from a tower in the despair of a forbidden love. Shadows lay deep, and the fresh morning air, scented with mountain pine, carried a shiver.
It was the kind of place that primed you for belief. When the cowled figure, silver-shadowed in the dawn, floated towards me, it seemed to fit.
I don’t expect you to believe me or the message I received. But, unless you release me, I know terrible things are going to happen. The message must be delivered.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The light was failing. And it grew cold, so cold. Hoarfrost crackled on dying limbs.
“How can this be? How can the sun abandon us?” Frank was shocked by how reedy and tremulous his voice sounded.
His granddaughter put a hand over his. “It’s just the way of the universe. Everything has its season, comes into existence, lives and dies. As with people, so is with stars.”
“Great,” Frank muttered. “Philosophy.”
She was wise enough to remain silent, knowing she could say nothing. When a grandparent dies, she knew, a world dies with them.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Effie, crawling beneath the gnashing machine, tried to remember soft rain pattering on their turf roof. But the great shaft frames of the weaving hall had a different song: implacable, voracious. The noise and the odour of oil and cotton dust choked Effie. A frame scythed just above her squirming back, rattling the heddles. The sharp shuttle flashed athwart.
“Mama,” she called through the clatter. “I have it.”
She lifted the trapped bale.
In the din, nobody heard the scream as the shaft took her hand clean off.
“How will we survive,” she thought, “without my daily tuppence?”
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The man behind the municipal desk looked municipal. Stanley knew the look—bored, unimpressed, implacable.
“Leave this with me,” the man said. “I’ll put it before the Council.”
He meant he’d shove it in a drawer and have a cup of tea.
“Listen,” Stanley pleaded, “it’s important. My giant fan will blow the miasma away. The city will be safe.”
The official straightened his cravat and nodded.
“Or we can all choke to death, I suppose,” Stanley added. Bitterness filled his mouth.
The man shuffled his papers and looked over Stanley’s shoulder at the next in line.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
No mind is certain of the purpose this exhibit fulfilled. Our best analysis shows it to be a fusion of organic materials from both the sessile and motile sets, part shaped biologically and part industrially. The device lacks obvious outputs.
Since all trace of the planet’s dominant life form has vanished, we are forced to conjecture about many of the excavated artefacts. Most authorities believe this was a mechanism for food production though some hold that it was involved in social bonding rituals.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The first package arrived on my eighteenth birthday. In brown paper tied with string, as butchers used to wrap meat. A printed copy of Dermot Callaghan’s The Lighthouse. Surprising, because Callaghan drowned before he finished the novel. There was no return address.
I sniffed the aroma of fresh printers’ ink, then set to work, copying the whole thing out and submitting it to Callaghan’s publisher.
Every birthday, a new parcel. And every year I published a new sensation.
Now, a lifetime on, my steps falter in the sand by the lighthouse. I walk into the sea, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Neil MacDonald Author 