Is any advice harder? To delete your most treasured and self-indulgent passages for the betterment of your manuscript. I’ve been mutilating, if not killing, one of my darlings, and I can tell you, the deed was done with a heavy heart.

The passage in question is from my book, The Golden Illusion. This is a mystery story with a difference, where the detective is a hapless conjurer who believes he’s on the track of an ancient Egyptian illusion. I’ve been summoning up courage for months for the revision. I love the words, naturally. But reader after reader has said the scene drags and slows the story down (there was one fan, but only one of ten). Only when I advised another writer to delete a cherished passage, a product of diligent research, from her book did I know I had to do the same.

Research is my Achilles heel. I guess that’s because I was once an academic. You put your back into excavating some fascinating truth, you wash it clean, and reassemble the pieces. How could you not love it? How could everyone else not be entranced by it?

In the scene, the main character, Ruairi McNair, gives a lecture to psychology students about how suggestibility works, and unmasks the tricks of fake mediums. I laid everything out, just as I’d researched the topic. Dammit, I’d put a lot of work in. I saw myself giving that lecture.

And that, of course, is the trouble – it’s self-indulgent. One reader told me “you’re giving a lecture, not telling a story”. The scene prepares the ground for another, towards the end of the book, where he unmasks a psychic fraudster. But there was just too much stuff. I’ve slashed 500 words from the passage. Even this may not be enough, but I had no stomach for more carnage at the time.

By the way, I did some research for this post. I wondered who had first offered the “kill your darlings” advice. I had always vaguely believed it was Stephen King. And he did say it. But so did many others before him. The earliest known source seems to have been Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1914 lecture, “On Style.”

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

Maybe I should delete the last paragraph before I post this.

I thought I’d try to describe the process of working on a story. I belong to an online writing community, at Webook. Every month, they offer a story challenge. Unless I’m busy with something else, I enter the challenges. Not always because I like the subject, but to hone my skill and hear the criticisms of other writers.

Last month’s them wasn’t to my taste – giving inanimate objects a voice. It lends itself too easily to Disney cuteness – friendly toasters, and malevolent cell phones. This month, it’s much more interesting. This is the challenge:

Angus is a vegetarian. Angus doesn’t like many people, but everyone seems to like him

Sarah ran away. Someone is looking for her, but she keeps outwitting them. Sarah loves the colour blue and ribbed sweaters.

Jake is a magician with a big secret. He likes poker and winning. Sometimes he tells lies just to get a reaction out of people.

Peter is having a very bad day. Peter has never loved anyone, but he would like to

Alexis is on a journey. Alexis hates sand and loves it when other people suffer misfortune

Carmen likes electro-swing and dancing. Carmen doesn’t like it when people tell her what to do
• Select a minimum of two characters from the set
• Place them in a scene of your own choice – the scenes do not have to relate to the photos in any way, although you may use them if you wish
• You must use all of the points shown on the character description within your story
• Tell us what happens in 1,000 words

I guess a greater focus on character is what I took away from the creative writing course last year, so this appealed. As the challenge says, “Talent will get you in the door, but character will keep you in the room”. Working with someone else’s characters is very different than developing your own. When a character springs from your soul, they share a part of you – they whisper their stories in your ear. It takes analysis to get to know a stranger’s characters.

The first character who piqued my curiosity was Alexis. Why did she hate sand? Why did she like it when other people suffer? And what was her journey? I decided to build the story around her. Angus and Peter would have offered an interesting dynamic, but that would probably have needed more words than my allotted 1,000.

Alexis’ hatred of sand made the choice of setting obvious – a desert. Alexis is crossing a desert. She hates the sand because it’s uncertain, slipping underfoot, and she’s searching for secure bedrock. This brought me an image of a shimmer on the horizon, so far away it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a mountain range or a great city.

Why does Alexis love others’ misfortunes? I had to puzzle over this for quite a while. I rejected the obvious answers that kept crowding in like naughty schoolboys peering round the door and demanding admission. No, she hadn’t been bullied and damaged as a child. No, it wasn’t revenge for her isolation. Then the answer came to me. Her schadenfreude was love. Alexis believes that suffering is essential for making you a whole human being – pain carves out the bowl which contains joy. She rejoices at others’ misfortune because she loves them.

If there’s a desert, of course there has to be an oasis, a place where travellers gather to rest and swap tales. I populated the oasis with Sarah, her daughter Carmen, and Jake – all trapped there by the fear of setting out again into the wasteland. Each tells their tale. But Jake is not all he seems to be. Alexis wonders if he mightn’t be the one pursuing Sarah.
Jake says there is a city across the desert, called Rasoul. He pronounces it Rasool, but Alexis translates it as Ra Soul, the pitiless soul of the Sun God? He says he knows the way to Rasoul and leads them in singing “we’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Rasoul”. Alexis thinks he may be the wizard of Rasoul.

Now all I needed was a plot line, which of course had to be determined by Alexis’ journey from suffering to joy, from the oasis to Rasoul. I’m still working on that, though my hunch is that Rasoul doesn’t exist, and may turn out to be another oasis, or perhaps even the same oasis. First attempts suggest that I have too many characters to make the story work.

I worry though that it may end up pretentious, freighted with trivial meanings. We’ll see.

A story may be simple, making its way logically like a river to the sea, beginning, middle and end.

Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy back again.

But a more complicated story may loop in time, with flashbacks and jumps.

Girl meets boy, girl remembers being hurt before and is frightened, girl loses boy, girl faces her fear and gets boy back again.

I find stories with complex structures more satisfying. But then, I’m a structure freak. I like stories where the ending is foreshadowed and where elements mirror each other.
And even more intricate structures are possible. Words can create illusions. They can bridge impossible gaps allowing magical connections to be made between unlinked things. This is the stuff of fantasy, but also the stuff of poetry and of magic realism. Imagination can stitch together things never connected in the real world.

Girl meets monster, girl remembers being hurt before and senses the monster’s hurt. She feels him a kindred spirit – they are both monsters. She kisses the monster, and he is transformed into a handsome prince.

Princes may become monsters in fiction, and metamorphose back through the power of love. Of course, as Marge Piercy says in her take on this trope “Though courtship turns frogs into princes, marriage turns them quietly back.”

Recurring words and images can stitch together these magic connections. Salman Rushdie employs this technique playfully in The Moor’s Last Sigh, by using different meanings of the same word. The superhero theme recurs in the novel, and he segues from Batman to bats in the belfry.

Metaphorical links join with mirroring to allow the leaps.

Girl meets monster, girl remembers being hurt before and senses the monster’s hurt. She feels him a kindred spirit – they are both monsters. She kisses the monster, and her spirit dances on air. A few tentative steps on the air and they have learned to fly, soaring over the towns and fields, the valleys and hills.

You see? From the (admittedly hackneyed) dancing on air metaphor, we have segued into flying. Cross-stitch a little more back and forth between love and flying, layering metaphors and repeat words. That’s all it will take for the two to be united seamlessly without the reader being able to see the join.

In the novel I’m working on now, the main character, Vincent is a man entirely invented by himself. He is whatever story he is telling at the time. This allows his story to intertwine with that of Don Vincent, a fifteenth century Spanish student. Once in the realm of the imagined, it is easy for Vincent/Don Vincent to encounter a pair of merchants, one of whom sells time and the other luck. I’m aiming for a nesting of stories within each other, self-similar as fractals, so it becomes unclear whose story we are reading.

Vincent has a secret, which I will not tell you. But I think I will reveal it early in the book, so that the mystery becomes, not the secret, but how he reacts to having to carry it. The end, in a sense, will come in the beginning. That was one bit of advice I gleaned from a creative writing course I recently did – if you have a secret, spill it early. Another nugget is that causality runs backwards in fiction. Whereas in our world causes produce effects, in the world of fiction the reverse is true – everything that happens is determined by the ending.

Building-in these ideas has taken me further than I have ever gone from a linear structure. My plan for the structure looks more like a mandala than a story. I’m not sure how much it’s really going to guide the writing.

I have only written two chapters of the book. It’s probably going to be the hardest thing I’ve written to date. I still have an incredible amount of research and mapping to do, even though the basic tale can be told In 1,000 words.

In particular, in the research vein I’m looking forward to reading Pedro Paromo by Juan Rulfo, which is already sitting seductively on my shelf calling to me. A mere 143 pages, some say it is the most complexly structured novel ever written. I understand it’s several ghosts telling their stories, each interrupting the other as one says something that triggers another. Perhaps, in that book, I will learn some secrets about how to spin bridges made of words over the abyss of impossibility.

 

Oddly perhaps as an ex-scientist, I haven’t written much sci-fi. Don’t get me wrong. I grew up with sci-fi; it’s in my blood; and I always thought I’d write sci-fi when I started writing fiction. Things just haven’t panned out that way. I’ve published one sci-fi story , about the “grandfather paradox” in time travel.

But keeping up with advances in science and technology is a rich seam for story ideas. Just in last week’s New Scientist alone, I read a story about neurobiological research on free will, and on the use of plants to store information.

Free will, it seems, may not be what we thought it was. The brain shows intention to act before we are consciously aware of it. Free will may just be about the decision not to carry out the action. Aficionados of religions that see us as surrounded by temptation will, no doubt, see their views as vindicated. The fictional potential is obvious. If free will turned out to be an illusion, how, if at all, might we behave differently?

The story about plants was even more bizarre. Dr. Karen Ljubic Fister stored data in the DNA of a tobacco plant instead of a hard drive and retrieved it again. She imagines a future:

“walking through a park that is actually a library, every plant, flower and shrub full of archived information. You sit down on a bench, touch your hand-held DNA reader to a leaf and listen to the Rolling Stones directly from it, or choose a novel or watch a documentary amid the greenery.”

Your imagination is the limit with this one. What might happen if you cross-bred two plants, each containing a different novel?

I recently read Carlo Rovelli’s delightful best-seller Seven Brief Lessons in Physics. The discussion of quantum mechanics contained an insight I hadn’t had before into Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. Not the normal view that everything in the universe has to be observed to take up a definite state. But rather that everything in the universe has to interact with something else to take up such a state. For the briefest of moments I contemplated writing a literary application of this in which everything was an action, a process, rather than an object. In other words, in which all nouns were replaced by participles or gerunds (“the catting sat on the matting”).

After a moment of consideration, I realised how utterly tedious this would be to read. But the fact remains, there are strange and wonderful fruits of inspiration to be plucked at the frontier of knowledge.

I was reading an article in the Society of Authors Bulletin about “The Author Brand” and it got me to pondering. We’re all admonished these days to think in marketing terms and to “brand” ourselves. There’s something in me that just reacts with repugnance to that, so I didn’t expect to find much in the article. But I did.

The author, Damian Horner, points out there are some authors who are “brands”. In other words, they are recognised names with a loyal following. But many more characters are better known than their authors. Not surprising, he says, because the reader engages in a relationship with the character, not the author. Character brands are those that can be rebooted after the author’s death, like James Bond or, more recently, Lisbeth Salander.

Of course, most of us are neither author brands, nor the creators of character brands. What then are we to do? Horner suggests many of us rely on genre brands. These are generally recognisable by their cover designs. Red, black and white with shadows and empty streets signals to the reader this is another comfortable member of the crime family. An illustration instead of a photograph says “literary” (yes, literary is a genre too). Genre brands allow writers who aren’t well enough known on their own to piggyback off the genre as a whole.

The problem comes when and if you try to step outside the genre. Horner suggests we need to develop, at least for ourselves, a rough author brand. We need, he says, to work out what kind of writer we want to be – “What is important to you? What are you aiming for? How do you want to be perceived?” The answers to these questions should guide a writer’s career development. They should influence decisions like what events we participate in, what we talk about in social media, they style of covers we want, and how we describe ourselves in our biographies.

That got me considering what I stand for as a writer. It’s something I’m going to ruminate over for quite a while – the fact I don’t already have a worked out answer is illuminating in itself. But, so far, I think I know that I care about ideas and yet want to write cracking good tales, not turgid literary fiction.

Perhaps, like Yeats, I aim to think like a wise man and speak in the language of the people. I’m not sure I do either very successfully. My ideas may be too poorly formed, and my love of words too great. But certainly I tried. In A Prize of Sovereigns I used the historical fiction tropes of conflict, revolt, and betrayal to explore ideas about how power works. The Golden Illusion, the novel I have just started pitching, uses the mystery story format to situate love, desire and search. In both, the ideas are (hopefully) secondary in the reader’s mind to the story and the characters. Because, fundamentally, I write for readers – I want to entertain. The first draft is always just for me, but all the revisions are for readers. So, I guess my ideal reader is someone who likes to root for the main characters, but who wants to be left with something to muse on.

It’s a truism that writers love words. Words are our tools. How do you write a good fight scene? A good love scene? There are lots of elements to writing a scene, but part of the difference between scenes is the pacing, the rhythm of the language. Consider this excerpt from a battle scene:

“Reuven drew and fired, drew and fired tirelessly. The runners refilling the quivers could hardly keep up. The Lorradians fell and died in their hundreds, but still they came on. Reuven was shooting now at point blank range. Each mighty arrow punched through armour as if it was cloth. The enemy was so tightly packed they had no space to swing their swords. The advancing forces behind pushed those in front so they lost their balance, and perished on Ceweth blades.The front rank of the attack was forcing its way through the hedgehog of stakes now. Reuven dropped his bow, searching for a weapon to defend himself. The only thing to hand was the mallet he had used to pound the stakes in.

A foeman closed on him, swaying as if drunk. The man was exhausted by his trek through the mud, burdened by his armour, and uncertain on his feet. He waved his sword ineffectually in front of him.

The whole world narrowed down to Reuven and this Lorradian, the tumult and clash of arms and cries around him fading. He wanted to turn and flee. Heart pounding, he ducked under the swing of the sword, and brought the mallet up with a huge swing into the man’s helm. The foeman tottered, fell, crashing in a heap of metal into the mud. He struggled to rise, like a beetle on its back. Reuven crouched. Smashed the mallet into the head again. Then he snatched the enemy’s sword just in time to parry a fatigued blow from the next foe to make it through the stakes.”

A fight is energetic, full of action. And energetic staccato language helps to convey the mood. Short sentences carry immediacy, like a rushing river. Two-thirds of the sentences here are fourteen words or less, and only three of them are longer than twenty words (some variety in sentence length is helpful and avoids boredom).

A love scene, on the other hand, can be slow and languorous, with meandering sub-clauses.

Rhythm isn’t just about the length of sentences, but also about the words you chose. This is where writers of prose have much to learn from the poet’s toolbox. Alliteration (repeated consonant sounds) and rhyme create an enjoyable rhythm, and can help to set a mood. And even the shape and sound of the words themselves are vital. Consider these lines from John Masefield’s poem, Cargoes:

“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine.”

And

“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.”

Picture by Rachel Marwick

I learned this poem at school when I was about ten. I remember the teacher pointing out how the words evoked the image of the different ships. The word “quinquireme” rolls languorous around the tongue like a fine wine, as does its exotic destination. While the “dirty British coaster” is an altogether grubbier craft. The quinquireme rows calmly in the sun, while the coaster butts in wintry seas.

How does Masefield achieve these effects? The words are longer for quinquireme lines than for the coaster lines, both in letters, but more importantly in syllables. The quinquireme is three syllables to the coaster’s one. And the weather for the coaster is a machine-gun burst of three one syllable words – “mad March days”.

Do you need to remember wordcraft tricks like these while you’re writing? No, of course not. Nobody could. But when you’re revising, they’re invaluable. Let the rhythm help you tell the story.

In 2011, I wrote a book, still unpublished, about how stories work called The Scheherazade Code. This series of posts draws on that book. The last post discussed the way stories shape our sense of the world. This post describes why we are so susceptible to stories.

Stories are powerful because our brains are narrative engines. We are ‘hard-wired’ to make and respond to stories. According to neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, the left hemisphere of the brain houses what he calls ‘the Interpreter’. The Interpreter’s job is to make sense of all the impressions and stimuli we constantly receive, as well as of our actions, even where they are prompted by unconscious stimuli. The Interpreter weaves this together into a coherent narrative about why things are happening as they are. Our brain hungers for pattern and meaning. When there are gaps and facts that don’t fit, the Interpreter keeps the story seamless, even where necessary inventing memories of things that never happened.

Many brain areas are required for story-making. Studies of brain injury that affect people’s ability to construct or understand narrative have identified three distinct areas in addition to the brain’s language areas. Like the Interpreter, the language areas are in the left hemisphere. Narrative seems to involve the limbic system, particularly the amygdala and the hippocampus, (involved in emotion and memory). It also involves parts of the frontal lobes (involved in assigning meaning to events) and prefrontal lobes (involved in regulating impulses). People with damage to these different areas experience different impacts on narrative.

With modern scanning technology, it is possible to watch a brain listening to a story. Different brain regions light up when a new character enters the tale, when an action is performed, when a cause is described and so on. We use many of the same parts of the brain when we listen to a story as we would if we were performing the action ourselves. The brain areas that would be involved if we kick a ball are active when someone kicks a ball in the story.

We understand a tale by mentally simulating events of the story world. This is true whether we are reading a book or watching a movie. The narrative machinery, which must have evolved before we invented written language let alone motion pictures, seems to underlie any kind of story-telling. Whatever way it is presented to us, in an important sense we become the protagonists in the tale. Moreover, when we hear a story, our patterns of brain activity become aligned with and mirror those of other listeners and of the speaker. The simulation of the events of a narrative that we run in our brains is not simply a passive inner movie. We construct it actively and predict what we think is coming next.

The narrative machinery of our brain may be linked to our ability to recall memories. Most of us have little or no memory of events before we were around age two or three. This may be linked to the age at which children are able to organise their memories into a narrative. Research shows that the age of first memory seems to be related to how complex the conversations are between mother and infant. Interestingly, while the average age of earliest memory is around 3.5 years in Europeans, it is 2.7 years for Maoris, and 4.8 years in East Asians. Might this be to do with the observed fact that Maoris have a rich story-telling tradition? And also that East Asians discuss feelings about the past with their children less frequently than Europeans?

Why and when did humans evolve this capacity for making and telling stories? The most obvious reason is that it evolved along with language to allow people to share skills and information and to forge social bonds.
My own speculation is that the narrative brain was built on the machinery that predators use to hunt. A predator has to be able to recognise its prey and to navigate rapidly the space that separates it from the prey to make the kill. To do this, predators make mental maps of their environment. A predator can kill faster and more efficiently if it doesn’t have to process information about everything it sees. Instead, its brain creates a model of what it is looking for, and only when its eye sees something that matches the search image model are the hunting routines activated. Other things in the environment are ignored.

This emphasis on important things, and ignoring of unimportant things, is exactly what stories do. Exactly the same thing happens with expert observers. Trafton Drew, a psychologist at Harvard medical school, asked radiologists to inspect chest scans for signs of lung nodules, a possible sign of cancer. Unbeknownst to them, he had superimposed on some of the scans an image of a gorilla. Astonishingly, he found that 80% of these highly trained observers missed the gorilla. Radiologists’ search image is geared to cancer growths, not gorillas.

The gorilla is in the upper right.

The brain region seems to be involved in both navigation and in narrative. This structure is the hippocampus. It is involved in making long-term memory and storing our mental maps. When the hippocampus is damaged, we have difficulty remembering where we’ve been or how to get where we’re going. London taxi drivers are required to master “The Knowledge”, a detailed grasp of the road layout of London, before they are licenced to drive the famous black cabs. And fascinatingly, they have a part of their hippocampus enlarged compared to the rest of us, perhaps as a result of all that studying of maps. The hippocampus and amygdala are involved in our ability to create and relate to stories. It is a fascinating speculation then that our story-making ability evolved from, and still shares features with, the much older machinery for making mental maps.

I have just sent off my entry to the First Drafts Competition run by Myriad publishers. Five thousand words of mayhem. The 2016 competition, open to writers who never published a novel or collection of short stories, has a Crime theme. The prize is a week-long writing retreat in the luxurious surroundings of West Dean College near Chichester, as well as detailed editorial feedback from the judges and six months’ mentoring from a Myriad author.

My aim last year was to make 2015 the year I got some short stories published. I achieved that. Now my aim is that 2016 should be the year I find an agent or a publisher. Winning the competition would be a big step towards that. By the way, I didn’t get short listed for the Costa Short Story competition.

If you want to enter, the competition closes 31st March.

This week’s chapter of my serialised book  A Prize of Sovereigns  has the story reaching a turning point in the war between two rival medieval princes. And that turning point is technological. Technology has always played a major role in war.

When medieval England perfected the longbow, it transformed the nature of war. Armed with one of these long-range armour-piercing weapons, an archer could kill an armoured knight. The invention not only changed forever the military balance of forces between England and its adversary, France, it changed the code of war. A commoner could now kill a nobleman, a deep shock to the psyche of French chivalry. Until then, the most fearsome weapon of war had been mounted shock combat, the province of the aristocratic knights on their heavy horse.

Incidentally, mounted shock combat depended on another technological change: the invention of the stirrup. Until the stirrup, which braces the rider, any attempt to charge the enemy at speed with lances resulted in the mounted warrior falling off backwards at the moment of collision. Before stirrups, horses were only a means of delivering the warrior fast to the battlefield.

One of the rival princes in A Prize of Sovereigns, Aurthur, reasons that his army is at a disadvantage because it does not have longbows of comparable range and power to his enemy, King Byrom of Ceweth. He decides that he must again change the balance of forces, and warfare itself, with a weapon of even greater capacity. This passage shows the reaction of his chancellor, Gustaff:

“A new weapon? What is it?”

“Bombards.”

“Bombards, Majesty? The cannon makes a loud bang and frightens the horses, to be sure. But it is an unreliable thing, as likely to explode and kill our own men as the enemy. And it has not the accuracy of a bow.”

“And a bow once had not the range it does today, until Ceweth’s archers perfected it. I have engaged an artificer from the east who assures me he has a way of smelting iron of greater purity, and of more precisely casting and boring cannon. His demonstrations show me that we can make a cannon less prone to destroy itself; and one that will hurl a ball further and more predictably. All I need is time for him to perfect the cannon, and build enough of them. Cannonade will be to war in the future what massed longbows were to Byrom’s father. We will be able to destroy the Ceweth army before they can engage us.”

The role of technology in military and political change is a subtext of A Prize of Sovereigns. The chapter also illustrates another subtext – how power works. To succeed as a ruler, the scholarly Authur has had to learn to become as cunning and ruthless as his rival, Byrom. He shares with Gustaff his intention to betray Marta, the Joan of Arc figure in the story. Gustaff is astounded at the way the young prince has become a king. Aurthur responds:

“It may be as you say, Gods willing. But, just between us, I mourn the boy who has gone. He was gentle, and loved the creations of art and philosophy. He was innocent of the wiles of strategy, and the vicious compromises of statecraft.”

Kingship exacts a terrible price on Aurthur. Perhaps that is a choice faced by everyone who wields power – to gain it at the cost of their humanity.

In 2011, I wrote a book, still unpublished, about how stories work called The Scheherazade Code. This series of posts draws on that book. The last post discussed the way stories shape our sense of self. This second post deals with how stories construct our sense of the world.

Scheherazade told 1001 stories to keep herself alive. The king was entranced and fell in love with her. Spin doctors, marketers and hoaxers use this same story code. If we crack the code then we can’t be hoodwinked: even by ourselves.

The history of moral panics about children illustrates the pervasiveness of narrative.

‘Thus entertained and equipped, the wide army of the children of the poor are sent on their way to take part in the great battle of life, with false views, false impressions, and foul aims.’

So said the Edinburgh Review a century and a half ago, railing against the moral influence of the Victorian ‘penny dreadfuls’. These were serialised and often gruesome pamphlets, featuring retellings of crimes, arrests and punishments, along with romances of lawlessness, and Gothic horror tales. A hundred years later, in the United States, the book reviewer of the Chicago Daily News in 1940 raised the same standard against children’s comics, writing:

‘Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child’s natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the “comic” magazine.’

Modern readers will recall almost identical moral panics about the impact of satanic videos. Later came the contemporary scares about the corrupting effect of the Internet and social media on our children. The medium and the technology changes, from penny dreadfuls to the Internet, but the story persists through the centuries. We fear the way youth culture corrupts our children, and we fear the changeling children who succumb. This persistent moral panic is an example of a social narrative. The story lives a life of its own in our culture, morphing a little to fit the age, but essentially unchanged. Understanding how and why we make these stories has implications for everything from how we live our lives to how we run our world.

The rules for making stories are like a code. I call it the Scheherazade Code, after the famous narrator of the 1001 Arabian Nights stories. Decoded, it gives us critical distance and more control over the impact narratives have on us. There are many devices for structuring the meaning of a story. Among the most common devices are the ‘Alien’, the ‘Nudge’, the ‘Scales’, and the ‘Frame’.

The demon children story, which I referred to at the beginning, illustrates a standard device: the ‘Alien’. In an ‘Alien’ story, the subject is rendered ‘other’, different from us, and makes no call on our sympathies. Wartime propaganda often uses the device to demonise the enemy. But it also recurs in stories about any groups we fear. The British media, for example, uses the ‘Alien’ to describe not only ‘feral children’ but also immigrants. A Daily Mail article in March 2009 about illegal immigrants to the UK talked of a ‘relentless rise’ and a ‘massive surge’. No longer people, these immigrants are now an inundation.

The ‘Nudge’ is a device beloved by the advertising industry in its narratives of hope and fear. The ‘Nudge’ works by loading a story with an embedded cargo of other stories. This cargo surreptitiously nudges our emotional response to the facts of the main story. The metaphor of inundation in the Daily Mail article about illegal immigrants functions as a ‘Nudge’. Car advertisers combine the technical facts about the vehicle, with a nudge towards the sexual prowess, the power, the freedom, and the lifestyle the car embodies. Antibacterial soaps and handwashes are marketed by nudging mothers’ fear of the dangers surrounding their children. ‘You may not see germs. But they are everywhere’ is how an advert for Dettol begins. Advertisers don’t just tell us that soap cleans, but that it protects us from hidden perils.

The ‘Nudge’ and the ‘Alien’ are obvious ways in which the meaning of facts can be put in a different light, changing the way they are read. The ‘Scales’ operates rather differently. This device appears to offer the reader fairness and balance. It is often used in news reporting to ensure coverage of both sides of a debate. Ostensibly nothing could be more balanced than that, and indeed it often functions that way. However, the device can also be deployed mischievously. A false scale may be used, to tip the reader’s impression towards one view. The easiest way of doing this is to pit a strong account against an opponent who only mildly disagrees. Or a controversy can be manufactured where one doesn’t really exist. This is particularly misleading in reporting on scientific issues. The false Scales device is often found in portrayal of the climate change debate. Among climate scientists there is now consensus that human activity is causing global warming. But when news reports give equal weight to the climate scientists and to the deniers, the reader is led to believe that the issue is still unresolved.

Perhaps the most subtle of the devices is the ‘Frame’. Stories, just like pictures, depend for their meaning on how they are framed. The photographer can change the way we read a picture by what is included in the composition and how it is cropped. A storyteller may do the same. So, it’s important how much of context we are given. This goes to the heart of how narrative works. It has been said that ‘facts are all things that objectively exist; truth is the connection between them’. By changing the framing of a story we radically alter the connections between facts and thus the sense of what that truth is.

Street Photography Composition Lesson #6: Framing

The public debate about the English riots of August 2011 provides a fascinating example. The mass media at the time described ‘an orgy of violence’ by ‘gangs of teenagers’. But the facts were perplexing and led to varying narratives afterwards. The liberal press, predictably, focussed on underlying problems of poverty and marginalisation. But if they were riots, what was the political grievance? Of those arrested, 45% of charges were for burglary and only 26% for violent disorder, not what would be expected in a riot. If they were simply criminality, ‘shopping with a crowbar’, as the conservative media suggested, why was there so little involvement of criminal gangs?

Press coverage of the disturbances, both liberal and conservative, largely focussed on the characteristics of the social underclass. This way of framing the story cast it easily into a variant of the ‘Alien’. The perpetrators were not people like us. But there were a few notable exceptions to this framing, which located the problem in a much wider context. Peter Oborne, writing in the Daily Telegraph on 11 August 2011, argued that ‘the moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom’. He drew into his frame the public outrage at bankers’ bonuses, Members of Parliament fiddling their expenses, and the misdemeanours of footballers and other celebrities. The acquisitive consumerism that fuelled the looting of trainers and wide screen televisions, according to Oborne was connected to the looting of the public purse by bankers and MPs. In his framing of the story, the subject becomes society at large, and the example set by those at the top.

Since we naturally turn everything we know into stories, we can’t escape their influence by an appeal to the ‘true facts’. But we can use the rules of story making, the Scheherazade Code, to remain critical and sceptical and to search out different, and perhaps better, stories.