I spied these beads the other morning while walking my son to the nursery. It was a bright hot day and sunshine glinting off the bright blue caught my eye. The beads were nestled in a collection of old leaves on the edge of a playground, and they seemed to me to be the kind of find I would have been very happy with as a child, making me think of treasure.
Some of the great stories and movies that I liked as a child started off as a hunt for treasure, and I still have a particular fondness for the Goonies. Most of the Indiana Jone’s stories involved the pursuit of some kind of treasure, for a range of different reasons. I think the pursuit of treasure can be a great device to use in a story, as it can reveal many facets of a character or a group of characters personalities.
What might a good treasure be?
Why does a character need or want it?
Greed?
Money worries?
It’s significance as an occult object?
I’m not a huge fan of creative exercises, so it’s not my habit to tell people what to do with these prompts. There are lots of options – a scene, some flash fiction, a short story, an idea for a short film or a physical piece of art. If you do have a go with this one and would like to drop the result in the comments please do so. I would be very interested to see what people make of these so please do link to blog posts or comment below.
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon Page.
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Have you ever spent hours working on a story, only to read it back and find it feels like a formulaic series of events that happen to your characters, who don’t even seem to care that much, bolted together with some dialogue? Have you read a story with almost the same series of events, told a little differently, and find it so deeply moving that it stays with you for weeks afterwards? As writers we are aware that we are writing something that feels flat and fails to push any emotional buttons, but sometimes we struggle to understand why that is.
There is some insights from psychology that can help us with that: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation Theory by Keith Oatley. This was described in his paper ‘Why fiction might be twice as true as fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation.’ This peer reviewed paper was published in the academic journal Review of General Psychology in 1999, and can be accessed for free here. It is also the source I have used to write this article.
Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation
The core idea of this theory was that fictional stories and poetry, particularly the kind of stories that get badged under the term ‘literature’, could provide readers with a kind of virtual simulation through which to explore their emotions. This happens when a reader becomes wrapped up in the emotions of the characters as they make the journey that their particular story takes them on.
Fiction as a simulation
In his explanation of the first core element of his theory, that people may experience a story world like a computer simulation, he suggests that fictional stories do not try to create a perfect imitation of life. Instead, writers create a convincing simulation by describing scenes and events in a way that include the necessary contextual information about the goals and motivations of a character, and details about the setting and how those events occur.
This extra information allows the reader to construct a mental picture of a characters interaction with their story environment and with other characters within it. In doing so they may understand how actions taken may lead to consequences, and the emotional fall out that follows.
In his work he described two forms of information that the brain uses to create a simulation of a fictional world:
The event structure — the series of events that happens in a story.
The discourse structure — which I interpret as the creative and artistic decisions that a writer or artist makes which tell the reader how those events will unfold.
I like to think of this as a good way of understanding how, while they say there are no new ideas under the sun, we still encounter stories that feel new because of the way the particular writer or artist decides to tell them.
Fictional simulations as an emotional laboratory
In the second core aspect of his theory, he suggests that the simulations fictional stories provide us are so involving that they may allow readers to experience some form of personal truth, that may lead to personal insight.
This is because readers are likely to flesh out a story world with material from their own memories and experiences, and so build a personalised version of whatever story is put in front of them.
His main argument, which he describes in far more detail with than I have space for here, is that fictional worlds provide a kind of emotional laboratory in which people can experience emotional responses to a range of simulated events. Through that process they may experience both expected and unexpected emotional responses to things, and may come to understand themselves, and other people, better.
He suggests that there are three different ways in which stories evoke emotions in readers:
Identification — Where the reader identifies with the protagonist of the story, takes on their goals and effectively feels what the character would feel as if the emotions were the readers own.
Sympathy — Where the reader doesn’t necessarily identify with the character, but is none the less moved by their journey as it is described in the story.
Memory — Provoking the reader to recall their own emotional memories in response to events occurring in the story.
Why does this matter to writers?
At the beginning of this piece I asked why some stories were convincing on an emotional level, while others were not. What this theory does is direct us to pay attention to how things happen to our protagonists, and how they respond to those things while we are crafting our stories. Do events happening to the character feel consistent with the story world? Does the character have reactions to those events that feel authentic to them?
I know that personally, if I feel that a character has done something or said something simply to service the plot (or event structure), that seems a bit silly or out of character, I tend to put books down or disengage from a film or TV series. For me it doesn’t matter what genre this is happening in, it can be some deep fantasy or complicated science fiction, but if the characterisation feels insincere I’ll often switch off (if this rings a bell for you, you may also be interested in the idea of false notes, mentioned in this article).
This idea has been influential in the way I try to write now. I try to ensure that my characters, made up as they are, have some kind of emotional truth within my stories. Sometimes I miss this a bit on my first pass and need to give a story a bit of time to ‘rest’ so that I can come back to a story and really decide if I’ve made the right aesthetic decision, but I think they are better for it.
Final thoughts
Sometimes, on a bad day as a writer, it’s easy to think ‘I’m just making stuff up, it’s not like I’m doing anything useful’. What this theory suggests to us is that good writing is important, perhaps essential, to how readers may view and understand other people, and that may influence their relationships with other people in the real world.
Exciting stuff, huh?
A note on the source text:
The way this theory is described in the original paper is more complicated, and has many more implications than I have described here. On top of that, this paper was published more than twenty years ago, since then a lot more work has been done on this idea. I do plan going to circle back to these themes at a later date, but if you are interested in psychology, storytelling, reading and writing I suggest you may want to take a bit of time to read the whole thing here.
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you are interested in the process of creativity and want to get a copy of my free short book of creative prompts, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon page here.
Like my work but none of the above options appeal? You could consider a one off donation instead. I would really appreciate it.
I took this photograph in a small town in the Cotswolds in the UK. The sign sits high up on a wall that lines one side of a small road that provides an escape from the main high street. The entrance is enclosed on both sides and above by squat old buildings made from Cotswold stone, and the alleyway winds away from the shops through a mysterious series of corridors until you find yourself at the back of the town in the car park.
In the UK many of the street names in old towns and villages had quite literal names. There are a lot of Station Roads that now, or used to, lead to train stations. When I saw this sign I could not imagine how it got it’s name and some google adventures later I still do not know.
The local area used to be famous for it’s cloth trade, and there were many woollen mills in the district from as far back as the thirteenth century. I couldn’t find confirmation that this particular Rope Walk relates to that activity, although the connection seems sensible.
How do you think Rope Walk got its name?
What kind of mysterious things may have happened there?
I’m not a huge fan of creative exercises, so it’s not my habit to tell people what to do with these prompts. There are lots of options – a scene, some flash fiction, a short story, an idea for a short film or a physical piece of art. If you do have a go with this one and would like to drop the result in the comments please do so. I would be very interested to see what people make of these so please do link to blog posts or comment below.
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon Page.
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A few weeks ago I left my house to pop to the shop and found that someone had dropped a pack of playing cards all over the pavement down our road. I stopped to take a few photos of some of the cards where they lay, as I always think there’s something a bit mysterious about a solitary playing card, maybe because they have been used in so many murder mystery and super hero films.
As I was doing this I realised that there was a particular card that I wanted to find, and then set about looking for the queen of hearts. I eventually found her loitering by the wheel of a parked car in the middle of the road.
This card has a dual meaning for me in that it reminds me both of the irrational and powerful Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (this is an affiliate link – if you buy this book using this link I’ll be sent a few pence as a referral fee), and of the more generic archetype of the beloved queen or princess in many fairy tales.
I’m particularly drawn to the idea of a character who may be able combine the two different forms of representation, the caring and kind exterior, that may be disrupted at times by actions and decisions that carry power, and that may be unpredictable and make little sense.
Can you imagine such a person?
Who would they be and where may you encounter them in a fictional world?
I’m not a huge fan of creative exercises, so it’s not my habit to tell people what to do with these prompts. There are lots of options – a scene, some flash fiction, a short story, an idea for a short film or a physical piece of art. If you do have a go with this one and would like to drop the result in the comments please do so. I would be very interested to see what people make of these so please do link to blog posts or comment below.
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon Page.
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When I saw these three chairs sitting outside a house in the area where I live, they made me think of the line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “when shall we three meet again?” Three witches appear in the first act to deliver a prophesy to Macbeth, telling him that he will be the King of Scotland. This event is crucial in sending him off on his tragic way (for a full summary of the plot this website does a good job).
Mother, Maiden, Crone
The archetype of three women, often witches, with supernatural abilities (sometimes referred to as the Triple Goddess) has appeared in mythology throughout history, and across many different cultures. While they may mean slightly different things in different cultures, it is thought that these figures were meant to symbolically represent three different phases of life for women:
Youth and innocence in the Maiden
Fertility and care in the Mother
Wisdom and experience in the Crone
Often the appearance of the women in mythology was linked to aspects of nature such as the turning of the seasons or the phases of the moon(for more information on this wikipedia has a longer and more detailed entry here).
I’ve personally been a fan of books in which the figures of three witches take a more central role than they did in Macbeth, like the subversion of those stereotypes in Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters (this is an affiliate link – if you buy this book using this link I’ll be sent a few pence as a referral fee), or the warmth of Mark Stay’s Witches of Woodville Series (full disclosure, I know Mark a little bit, but I think I would have found these books warm and lovely if I didn’t, also an affiliate link).
Back to my three chairs on the street
I actually walked past the chairs a couple of times before I had a quiet moment in which to take a photograph, and was lucky that they remained in place for so long. Perhaps they were waiting for me as two of them disappeared the next day. There is a sense of mystery around the arrangment of the chairs, as if only moments ago three people sat to discuss an urgent matter, before leaving to follow different paths.
What do you think they may have been discussing?
Where did those paths lead them?
I’m not a huge fan of creative exercises, so it’s not my habit to tell people what to do with these prompts. There are lots of options – a scene, some flash fiction, a short story, an idea for a short film or a physical piece of art. If you do have a go with this one and would like to drop the result in the comments please do so. I would be very interested to see what people make of these so please do link to blog posts or comment below.
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon Page.
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A few weeks ago my little family and I took a holiday by the seaside in the town of Worthing, East Sussex. While we were there I noticed quite a few little pieces of knitted art like this clock that we saw fixed to a lamp post. Most of them were fixed to various spots along the promenade at the sea front, which is a popular public space even when the air is cold, windy and flecked with rain.
I later found out that it was part of an art project called Time and Seasons by the local knitting group Make and Munch (for a nice article about the project read here). I really loved the quiet humour in these pieces, like the little mouse hanging on the pendulum.
It is inspiring to see people use slightly subversive artistic tactics in public spaces to prompt people to stop for a moment and maybe reflect on something important for a moment. Here the juxtaposition of the soft, ‘indoorsy’ feel of the knitting against the raw elements of the sea front caused me to stop and take a photograph, and to wonder what the piece was about.
Public spaces can often feel like they are corporate spaces, simply maintained and organised to sell people things that they probably don’t need. Art in these spaces can do the opposite, especially pieces that are as enigmatic as this one, they can invite people to spend time simply collectively looking and thinking and feeling. Sometimes they can induce a feeling of beloning, that these spaces may be ‘for us’ after all.
If you were able to reclaim a local public space with art, where would that be? What would the project look like?
I’m not a huge fan of creative exercises, so it’s not my habit to tell people what to do with these prompts. There are lots of options – a scene, some flash fiction, a short story, an idea for a short film or a physical piece of art. If you do have a go with this one and would like to drop the result in the comments please do so. I would be very interested to see what people make of these so please do link to blog posts or comment below.
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon Page here.
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When I saw this bike in the mud of the Thames I immediately thought of the references made to Mother and Father Thames in The Rivers of London series of books by Ben Aaronovitch (this is an affiliate link – if you buy this book using this link I’ll be sent a few pence as a referral fee). I’ve been a fan of the series for a long time and these books are definitely an influence on my own work.
I took the photo while out on a day trip with my family, so it was taken a little hastily. It’s also a little fuzzy because I was hanging over a wall a bit, looking down from quite a height while the tide was low, but I’m pleased enough with the monochrome feel of the snap.
The city of London marks a site of settlement that goes back until at least the Roman times, and in Pre-Christian times it was common for people to make votive offerings (Wikipedia has a nice entry on this here) to the local deities of the land and the water. It’s likely that the river will have received many, many offerings over the years for the local spirits from people seeking luck or protection, or giving thanks for a piece of good fortune.
It makes me wonder, in a different time who may have made such a valuable offering and what did they want or need?
Would the local spirit have been enraged to receive the offer of a stolen bicycle, or entertained?
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon Page here.
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I saw this ring box laying on the floor not far from one of the parks where I like to take my son so he can run around and say hello to the ducks. This little box evokes a sense of mystery for me, it could hold many different stories. The way the box gapes open on the grass, seemingly discarded, and is missing the little cushion that would usually contain the ring provokes a sense of loss or refusal.
Was the ring stolen, and the box discarded as a way of ridding the thief of the evidence?
When I first saw it, many possibilities came to mind:
Did someone buy a ring only to find their gift unwelcome?
Did someone discard the box and it’s contents after finding out that their love had not been true to them?
Was the ring stolen, and the box discarded as a way of ridding the thief of the evidence?
I’m not a huge fan of creative exercises, so it’s not my habit to tell people what to do with these prompts. There are lots of options – a scene, some flash fiction, a short story, an idea for a short film or a physical piece of art. If you do have a go with this one and would like to drop the result in the comments please do so. I would be very interested to see what people make of these so please do link to blog posts or comment below.
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon Page here.
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Like my work but none of the above options appeal? You could consider a one off donation instead. I would really appreciate it.
I’ve been thinking a bit more carefully in the last few weeks about some of the settings and locations in my fantasy novel series (working title Feeding Jasmine Valentine). I’m in the middle of a new re-write at the moment and have a chance to go back and really think about what I may need to build on the first draft, and how some of the key locations can be more useful in the narrative if I do some more substantial world building around them.
I’m quite a visual person (which may be a Dyslexic thing) and having pictures and diagrams tends to help me, so I spent an hour one afternoon last week on some ‘first take’ sketches of a key location in the first book. There are bound to be problems with my initial ideas, and I’m going to work on these a bit more, but I thought it may be nice to share my first messy sketch here, if only to show I’m still working on it!
I’d be really interested to hear from other writers who use sketches in their world building. How do you do that? Do you think it’s really useful or a form of procrastination?
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you are interested in the process of creativity and want to get a copy of my free short book of creative prompts, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon page here.
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Like my work but none of the above options appeal? You could consider a one off donation instead. I would really appreciate it.
When I started writing this post I had an idea that I would post it as part of my series about ideas from science that may be helpful to creative folks to know. However, as I was writing it I realised that my take on it was probably going to be a little more personal than I had in mind of that series, so I think it needs to stand a little away from that, although it will still be of interest to people who like those posts, I hope.
So here’s where it gets a bit personal. Up until the age of about 9 or 10, I couldn’t really read or write. I think I must have been pretty good at the performance of reading or writing because people (by which I mean teachers) didn’t seem to notice, but unfortunately for me, the products of these performances were not intelligible to anyone but myself.
Back in the 1980’s I don’t think dyslexia was a well understood thing in small country schools in the UK. My father has told me that it was at a parent’s evening, where a teacher had already told him that I was ‘doing fine’, where he encountered some of my writing that was so confusing that he determined that things definitely weren’t ‘fine’, at all.
I was lucky enough to have parents who understood that I was clever enough to be able to do these things, but some how I couldn’t, and I was luckier still that they could afford to employ a tutor to work with me on school evenings (apparently only acceptable to 9 year old me because he wore a leather coat and had an earring).
By the time I got to secondary school a year or two later, I could read and write well enough to keep up in most classes. In English however I was still considered to have a learning disability, and received the kind of ‘support’ that was effective in demonstrating to my peers there was something wrong with me, but not effective in actually helping with the problem as it focused on poor spelling.
Now we all have autocorrect in our word processing programmes, no one needs to be able to spell perfectly, but back then it was considered a big thing. So much so in fact, that any creative abilities in writing seemed to take a back seat to things like spelling, and I ended up feeling like science was a much better fit for me than the arts and humanities (our art department wasn’t exactly an embarrassment of riches either).
I wasn’t actually formally diagnosed with dyslexia until after I’d been in university for a year, and since then I’ve not done a huge amount of research into it, which is curious because it would probably have helped me understand myself better. Since that time I’ve been more and more drawn to creative projects, and have taken classes and taught myself all sorts of creative things while still keeping one foot in the sciences, and never quite settling to ‘specialise’ in anything, which probably hasn’t helped my career really. When I saw this paper I thought maybe the science on dyslexia can help me play to my strengths a bit better.
What we now know about dyslexia
According to the paper, dyslexia is a ‘visual processing defect’ with an impact on literacy skills, and there are issues in sustaining vital attention which fits quite well with my experience.
Where it is spoken about publicly, it is typically discussed or written about as a disability or a problem, and in the mind of the public probably equates to ‘people who can’t read or write well.’ The central idea of the research paper, ‘Not all those who wander are lost’ is that dyslexia is not only a problem, it is also a strength, and not just a single strength, but many.
While I had been aware of the links between creativity and dyslexia for a while, I was surprised by the raft of things cited just in the introduction of this paper that people with dyslexia are good at (by which I mean better than the average person without dyslexia). This list of things both filled in some blanks for me about my personal experience, and pointed in the direction of what I may want to read next.
Here some of the things that the paper mentioned that people with dyslexia are better at, which resonated with my own experiences (and does not at all cover everything said there):
Better accuracy in processing three dimensional information – this includes being able to complete tasks that involve visual spatial skills such as drawing, mechanical puzzles and building models more easily. One of the things that really stuck out for me was the suggestion that we can be alert to lots of information at once, including detecting anomalies and being sensitive to changes in the environment. I’ve noticed that I tend to be very distractible, and don’t exactly flourish in open plan offices, and tend to be pulled in quite easily to ‘things’ that are going on, so this tracks for me. I also began to think that maybe there is a story there about an agency of dyslexic spies!
Interconnected reasoning – we can bring together many sources of information, some of which may be unexpected and make connections between things that may not occur to people with more typical brains
Narrative reasoning – apparently we have better abilities to remember information that is embedded in story, and it is common for people with dyslexia to enjoy creative writing despite difficulties they may have with writing.
Problem solvers – people with dyslexia can be good at problem solving as they are more likely to draw on ideas from different, sometimes unconnected, places. There is a high incidence of dyslexia in entrepreneurs, which I found kind of interesting.
Big picture thinkers – this may also relate to the way people with dyslexia connect different sources of information in ways that people without it may not, leading them to think ‘out of the box’. As I hinted at above, in my own day job career I’ve found myself roaming around research areas (including psychology, ethics, epilepsy, learning disability, mental health and more general social sciency stuff), rather than ever truly settling on one thing, and never quite fit into the academic mold that rewards people who dive deeply into one thing. My magpie brain is constantly picking up on new things it perceives as shiny.
Creativity – this wasn’t a surprise for me as I’m seem unable to comfortably stick to one medium, and am constantly picking up new creative projects
Unexpected (for me) skills:
Empathy – in my day job I have ended up in an area that really requires good interpersonal skills. It didn’t really occur to me that these softer skills may be a dyslexic thing, and that may relate to the way that the public story of dyslexia has been about difficulties with reading and writing!
Networking and team building – This is also something I found surprising. In person I am quite good at working in a team and do like to talk to people and network, but I’m actually finding these things quite difficult to do in the world of remote working and zoom calls, and wonder if this relates to the whole ‘good at processing information in 3D space’ thing, because the flattening of the world through a zoom screen has had the effect of flattening me too.
Memory and memory recognition tasks – I’ve always felt I had a terrible memory – and I do for names and dates, but actually not really for other things. It’s more that I doubt my memory and find myself checking even when I’ve remembers correctly – my narrative recall is good, as would be predicted by this work.
I realise at this point that I’ve not really talked about what this group of researchers actually did in their own research – I think I will leave that for a part two of this post as it’s already rather long.
I hope that this has been interesting for dyslexics and non dyslexics alike. If you are a dyslexic writer like me, let me know in the comments – do any of these things match your experiences too?
Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you are interested in the process of creativity and want to get a copy of my free short book of creative prompts, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see I also have a Patreon page here.
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Like my work but none of the above options appeal? You could consider a one off donation instead. I would really appreciate it.
Make a monthly donation
Like my work but none of the above options appeal? You could consider a one off donation instead. I would really appreciate it.
The Magpie at Midnight 