Notes on Psychological Landscape Part II

This is a sequel to my previous post Notes on Psychological Landscape Part I. 


In their paper “Utilizing Complexity To Change Psychological Landscapes,” Maryann Reese, MA and Dr. Miriam R. Tausner use the landscape metaphor to show the features of psychological landscape:

Figure I. Psychological Landscape

Psychological landscapes consist of horizons and basins of attraction. Figure I depicts a curved line with a high peak, which is the horizon, and two hollowed out tunnels, which are the basins. Horizon is a vista from which we observe our life and its surroundings.  Our outlook or angle of vision is skewed by our past experiences featured here as the deep burrows or our emotional life under the surface. A wide variety of events and sensory details make person access reference points. A reference point is a marker of an event, which is a gateway to external triggers such as (see Figure I) words, pictures, tastes, sounds, gestures, smells, etc. that propel a person to an attractor in a basin. Attractors are internal representations of original experiences; in other words the attractors pull us towards positive or negative place, depending of the nature of the original experience. Figure II illustrates this process:

Figure II. What is the process?  

How this relates to the soldier’s photograph and the war landscape framed in the bombed-out castle wall, and my psychological landscape?

Image (castle’s ruins, soldier) → access brain’s limbic system/the core of emotions and memory → trigger memories of war destruction and exile → evoke emotions → nostalgia, displacement. 

The image of the soldier and castle’s ruins sends signals to the brain’s limbic system, which is the core of emotions and memory. The signal accesses the reference point in my past experience of war destruction and exile and creates a sensation of pain. Thus, the photograph evokes emotions of nostalgia and displacement.

This is my mother in her kitchen in Sarajevo, just before the war broke out in 1992, following up the breakup of Yugoslavia:

And this is my mother's kitchen after the war:

Psychological landscape is the invisible landscape of our mind, a panorama of our past, present and future way of thinking, feelings and behavior. We could say that the psychological landscape of the character is the character’s vision of life.  In her comments on William Styron’s short story "The McCabes," Katherine Ann Porter writes:

"Human life itself maybe be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist – the only thing he’s good for – is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of meaning. That’s what he’s for – to give his view of life."

I thought that perhaps I could use Reese & Tausner schema of psychological landscape as my framework in writing about psychological landscape in fiction, because writers use the same reference points and sensory cues in their work to bring characters to life.  Similarly, the readers experience the text through senses in order to enter the emotional life of characters. Furthermore they draw upon memories of their own prior emotions to match the emotions of the characters. Reading too, is an emotional journey. It is not my intent to trivialize the work of psychology; my objective is to illustrate ways in which writers depict “what’s going on in characters’ heads,” the cause and effect between characters’ perceptions, emotions and behavior. By using the metaphors of landscape I intend to visualize internal and external manifestations of character’s landscape of the mind.

It seems to me that writer and reader are like two travelers. They are together undertaking a journey (that’s the story). The writer creates the character, charts the psychological landscape and setting of the story. The reader follows the map, reads the signs and symbols and learns how to experience the invisible landscape of the hero’s inner reality, or in other words to feel empathy. On the both journeys, the writer’s and the reader’s experience is based on their emotional landscape, their perception of the world, because we all identify the feelings and actions of others out of our own experiences.

Cynthia Ozicks writes in her essay “The Shock of Teapots” about the sharpened sensitivity of the travelers:

"What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen. Travelers regain this ghost-seizing brightness, eeriness, firstness. They regain it because they have cut themselves loose from their own society, from every society; they are, for a while, floating vagabonds, like astronauts out for a space walk on a long free line. They are subject to preternatural exhilarations, absurd horizons, unexpected forms and transmutations: the matter-of-fact (a battered old stoop, say, or the shape of a door) appears beautiful; or a stone that at home would not merit the blink of your eye here arrests you with its absolute particularity – just because it is what your hand already intimately knows. You think: a stone, a stone! They have stones here too!…For the vagabond-voyeur (and for travelers voyeurism is irresistible), nothing is not for notice, nothing is banal, nothing is ordinary: not a rock, not the shoulder of a passerby, not a teapot."

The act of reading or experiencing is as important as the act of writing.  When I compare the writers and readers to travelers, I am assuming that they possess childlike curiosity and imagination and willingness to play and roam free, even to get lost. In his book "Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer," Peter Turchi compares writer to an explorer and artistic creation to a voyage into the unknown.  I mentioned the word empathy earlier because it is an important aspect in both acts: writing and reading. Empathy is understanding and compassion towards other human beings; it means being able to identify with another’s person feelings. An Other is that voyage into the unknown.

When we embark on that trip into unknown we construct new worlds from our reading material; we envision the places and characters we read about or visually construct the new landscapes in our imagination; we see them with our mind’s eye. We inhabit the psychological landscapes of the characters and look out at the world through each character’s eyes. How do they feel about life?

Notes on Psychological Landscape Part III will focus on writers’ techniques of externalizing characters’ intangible feelings. How do we express characters’ emotional life using other methods than first-person point of view or going directly into characters’ thoughts? 

Meg Waite Clayton: In Praise of Writing Friends … and Publishing and Bookselling Ones, Too

The history of my writing starts with a purse. Like the character of Linda in my second novel, The Wednesday Sisters, my first writing teacher—at a college extension class—dumped hers out over the table and told us to write for five minutes about anything that spilled out. She swore we wouldn’t have to read (just as Linda does in The Wednesday Sisters when she’s pushing the sisters to write at the picnic table in the park). Then she called on me to read first.

Which is the good news. If she hadn’t, I’d have ducked out before she could. It had taken all the nerve I had just to get to that class, to admit that, yes, I dreamed of writing novels.

To make a long story short from that point, I’m just going to say it: Ten Years. That’s how long it took me from dumped purse to first novel on bookstore shelves. The thing that kept me going: writing friends. Like the Wednesday Sisters in the book, none of my early writing friends was published when we started out, but we now count - as of the publication of The Four Ms. Bradwells yesterday - seven books between the four of us, and an eighth under contract. We’re a stubborn bunch—which, if you’ve read any of the guest posts I’ve been honored to host on 1st Books—seems to be what it takes. So it seems fitting that the first Four Ms. Bradwells sighting was by my best writer-pal, Brenda Rickman Vantrease.

It took me another five years to get a second novel published after my first, The Language of Light, sold "modestly." (I'm absolutely thrilled, though, that Ballantine will be releasing it in paperback for the first time this June.) In the interim, I learned the hard way that while just being published is lovely, book sales are important, too. I have come to see that booksellers are the front line in helping new voices find audiences, and I do my best to support the booksellers who support writers. Selling books is as much a labor of love as writing them is.

And so is publishing. I know the publishing world can seem impersonal. Believe me, I know what a form rejection looks like. But I also know that most people in publishing stay there because they love books, and work really, really hard. I feel incredibly lucky to have a wonderful team helping me negotiate the turbulent waves of these changing publishing days.

Which leaves me with readers.

C.S. Lewis once said, "We read to know that we are not alone." It's a funny thing to think that a solo activity connects us in ways that little else does. But I know reading has made me feel understood, and helped me understand myself in ways that nothing else does. I hope that my writing will make you feel understood, too. And I appreciate all the precious time you commit to reading. Without readers, there would be no books. - Meg

P.S. If you're leaving here to take a look at The Four Ms. Bradwells - thank you! And will you take a look at The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen as well? It came out yesterday, too, and is a wonderful novel. Thanks!

Masha Hamilton's Guest Post: Passion

Well-Read Donkey Bookshelf at Kepler's with guest bloggers books and their reading recommendations

Earlier this month, I had the good fortune to be on a panel in Chapel Hill, NC, with Robert LeLeux, who wrote The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy and is as moving and amusing in person as he is in his memoir. When I first got word of the pairing with Robert, I considered this another one of those mango-and-peanut-butter author mixes for which literary festivals are famous. For example, I was recently on a panel about the future of Southern Women Writers, though I was born in the Arizona desert, lived a decade overseas, now reside in Brooklyn, and have no more than passed through the South. (I like the South, though, and adore fellow panelists Janis Owens and Cassandra King. I sometimes imagine the people who create these panels gathering around a wooden table with a few dozen bottles of wine, a dart board, and all of our names on printed sheets, intent on getting a laugh somehow during the intimidating and grueling process of organizing a festival for writers and readers.

On the face of it, Robert and I are very different writers. My four books are novels, often on serious topics and with an international bent. His is a poignant American memoir and in some passages, a laugh-aloud look at life.

Yet our panel topic was passion, and its place in our work, and on this we found a lot of common ground.

Beginning and not-so-beginning writers are told to write what they know. Some have amended it to say: write what you’d like to know. But perhaps the adage actually should be: write what you care about. Deeply. Write what wakes you up at night, what you don’t understand, what makes you laugh so hard you cry, what you wish you could turn away from but can’t. Write to discover, not to expound.

The first reason to incorporate those deepest personal concerns in our writing, be it fiction, non-fiction or memoir, is that it invariably makes the work stronger. If this is the stuff that matters to us, we stand a better chance of getting our readers to care also.

But the second reason is actually more important, in my view, if more private. It is very old news by this time that publishing is in turmoil, uncertain what the future—even six months from now—will look like. Content has been devalued. Websites that demand writers to write deeply, or research broadly, or report diligently, still have no business model in place, and thus no way to pay those writers for their work, or even ensure their own continuation. In this climate, editors often find it safest to reject a manuscript. A good friend and dynamite literary writer recently told me she’s having trouble publishing her next novel because her “numbers aren’t good enough.”

And yet, many of us can’t stop writing. We write when happy or sad, we think in stories, we’re on the hunt for the subtext and telling gestures, and we feel compelled beyond our control to search for the fresh, well-turned phrase.

For some of us, in fact, writing—and reading—is spiritual work; it’s how we interpret our world, understand our lives, maybe even try to make ourselves better humans. To achieve that, we have to write about what makes us avidly curious or angry or frightened. We have to write with an unwillingness to settle for simple answers, an enthusiasm for embracing flaws, and the desire to see deeply and non-judgmentally into the Other.

This is what creates writing that is honest and authentic, perhaps with a shot at getting published, maybe getting read, maybe briefly impacting another life. And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, it draws us to others (like Robert, or my inspiring editor Fred Ramey at Unbridled Books who share our sentiments about the potential of words to take flight and connect.

It is also the work that can continue to feed us emotionally and psychically during the days and months of countless revisions or rejections, when the paragraphs buck us or our characters have fled underground or the computer eats a chapter or someone wants to discuss our numbers, when we’re distracted by loss or joy or fear and the only way forward, after all, is to write, write again, keep writing about what makes us passionate.