Reframing the World

I’ve been doing a lot of reframing just recently. My health has taken a turn for the worse and I’ve had to evaluate what that means in terms of editing and teaching and writing. The health problems are not wholly unexpected. I live with a long-term illness and over the last five-and-a-half years the symptoms have developed an uncanny ability to worsen every twelve to eighteen months. I become more ill. What I am capable of becomes slightly less. I could rage at the universe about this (I often do) but ultimately that doesn’t achieve anything except letting more anger out into the world. Instead, I do my best to reframe the situation. If I’m no longer well enough to teach my #WriteBeyondTheLightbulb courses then the silver lining is that I maybe have more time to write. If I am temporarily too ill to take on editing work then maybe I can use the hiatus to simply enjoy reading rather the editor side of my brain always providing a background critique.

All of that is to say that my life has gone a little wonky (or it has gone even wonkier than it was before) and I’ve made the decision to take a sabbatical over the summer. This might be a temporary thing while I learn the new parameters of my illness or it might be a forever thing. It might mean that my newsletters become a little more sporadic, but for the meantime I intend to keep going with them as it is nice to think I am still doing something productive that might be of benefit to others.

Reframing our stories

All this leads me to the possibility of reframing things within our stories. Bad things happen. This creates tension. I’ve prattled on about tension before. Generally, our stories need a slice of tension and this tension should build upwards towards some sort of dramatic or emotional zenith. But what strikes me is that we can take the same notes of tension as a backbone and create very different narratives around them.

For example, imagine a ghost story where we move from a power cut to an unearthly chill, then a sudden rustling, a footstep, a shattered vase, a ghostly hand reaching out in the dark. For most of us, the first instinct would be to react to those points of tension by ramping up the character’s sense of fear, perhaps something like this:

I am alone in the cottage when the lights go out. A power cut. Never felt at ease in the dark. Not here. Not when a chill falls from the shadows and my thoughts are full of the poltergeist. Shhhh! It is just a story, I tell myself. There is nothing to worry about in this sudden rustling. It is just the wind. Or it is my mind playing tricks on itself. Maybe I invent the footstep. Maybe the teetering of the vase on the bookshelf by the window is caused by a tremor in the earth. I hold my breath. I tense my shoulders. Then crash! The vase falls in a great shattering that splinters outwards into the dark. As I back against the wall, I feel a slither like a fish against my palm, the clasping of fingers. And I freeze. I close my eyes. I scream and I scream and I scream.

That is far from my best work, but hopefully it provides a skeleton that might be reworked or reframed. What if I were to take the same points of tension but push the reaction towards excitement rather than fear:

I am alone in the cottage when the lights go out. A power cut. The world is different in the dark. It is magical. When a chill falls from the shadows, my thoughts are full of the poltergeist. My favourite story. That is all it is, I tell myself. There is no use getting excited about this sudden rustling. It is just the wind. Or it is my mind playing tricks on itself. Maybe I invent the footstep. Maybe the teetering of the vase on the bookshelf by the window is caused by a tremor in the earth. I hold my breath. I lean forwards. Then crash! The vase falls in a great shattering that ripples outwards into the dark. As I walk towards the sound, I feel a slither like a fish against my palm, the clasping of fingers. And I smile. I close my eyes. I laugh and I laugh and I laugh.

Most of the words are the same, but hopefully the effect is very different. Excitement rather than fear—I could keep rewriting the scene for anger or sadness or humour or disappointment. The same tension; a different emotional journey.

But how does this help us as writers? Firstly, I think it can be useful to consider the different ways the same tensions can unfold. Rather than leaning towards the obvious, can we give our characters a unique way of reacting to the world around them. I recently read Damn Good Listener (David Holloway | Abandon Journal) where the narrator reacts to a spider with sympathy / sadness rather than reacting with fear. The build of tension here isn’t necessarily the build of tension we might use for fear but it strikes me that it could have been, swerving from the expected reaction into something much more nuanced. Perhaps give that a try? Construct a story that builds up towards an expected emotion, but the character(s) react(s) against the grain.

Or how about experimenting with two or more reframed stories sitting side-by-side. Could you have a series of micros with each micro reframing the original scene? Could you make use of a choose-your-own-adventure structure like I’ve tried to demonstrate below:

Or how about a Venn Diagram where the overlapping section represents the part that coexists in both halves of the piece? Or a sort of Mad Libs or multiple-choice structure like we see in [No Audible Dialogue] (Remi Skytterstad | Bath Flash Fiction Award)?

Thinking about the different reactions we might layer around a spine of tension feels like a good writing exercise to have a go at, but it also feels as though there is the possibility in doing so to experiment with unusual structures and the philosophical question “what if” – what if rather than being afraid, we let our characters react with joy? What if rather than being angry, we let them react with absolute calm?

If you give this a go, I would be fascinated to hear how you get on. What effects did you conjure up? Was it an impossible challenge, or—to stick with the theme of reframing—was it a challenging delight?

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