Learning From The Classics Podcast: Composing Our Story

This track is a recording of my weekly LIVE PODCAST - Learning from the Classics, dated January 24th, 2025.

In this LIVE session, I will relate prompts from Classic Literature to the challenges we face every day. There is a certain sense of security in understanding some struggles are universal and not personal to ourselves. In such novels, there is also a reconciliation to be had with souls we cannot and will not ever meet, but who teach us so much.
Today I will be looking at composition and how we gain objectivity when writing. My own writing process and 3 part writing course is referred to throughout.

Transcript

So yeah welcome to book club if you haven't been before welcome we talk about all things literary um if you haven't heard any of my tracks my tracks are i read classic literature i am a teacher by trade and an author vocal artist um much of what i write well i write a whole range of things i write screenplays radio drama um i'm constantly challenging myself but you will hear some of my um my stories on the track so have a look out for those latest one coming is Blethingwood Hall that's my big story i'm really excited to um share with you um but i've also got this course coming out and this course really is why i decided to do the lives because i thought i need to connect with those who are considering undertaking a challenge of their own i'm constantly challenging myself i know many of us challenge ourselves and i i want to share some of my experiences my knowledge and my my teaching with you so that's what i'm here for okay i'm going to start now it said on the live description i have a problem with writing the description because i'm a lateral thinker which means i have many boxes open at the same time and i'm i go off on tangents always coming back to the core message of what i'm trying to say um so i i struggle sometimes with the lives to hone that into one particular area so this live has been described as talking about literary devices we will be talking about literary devices um panicky not but i'm also going on a bit of a tangent it said take a notebook coloring pencils if you like and the reason for that is because we will be looking at a little bit of van gogh too what on earth you're thinking but i found um i was just leafing through some of my art books and i thought you know there are so many creative connections we can make as artists and um it seemed relevant to me it is relevant okay let's begin so the creative process we're talking about writing we're talking about writing our own story okay the course that is being published in a few days now i finally got the audio and the image right uh being published in a few days i'm hoping that you will undertake that with me for those people considering that's fantastic the more you interact with what i do um the more financially viable it is for me to carry on doing that right so courses listening to my original work that sort of thing really helps okay so let's begin the creative process okay we don't necessarily have to be a creative person to embark on something which will help us um come to terms with or make sense of our experiences but this course is approaching something in a creative way we're making order out of chaos that is my definition of the creative process right making order out of the chaos perhaps that we have experienced in our lives so we're living in the messy yeah and what we're trying to do is just straighten that up every now and then by honing in a couple of skills that we may learn along the way hopefully that you will learn from me in order to put down in words our original vision the way we see things and make sense of it so the purpose of writing our own story is to understand ourselves better to to have a more of an understanding of who we are where we're coming from minds are very powerful things and thoughts ideas it's quite easy to get those mixed up with truths they're not the same thing so you might say well you know is it right to share these stories why do i need to write that strangers can feast on the crumbs of what might have been in my life um but it's not for strangers this story is for you if you wish to share that well i've given you an out and your out is you're going to write this story this three-part story in the first person but as someone else so it's almost as though you're their shadow they're your experiences but you as charlotte bronte wrote jane eyre she was basically uh she created this character that was herself that shared her experiences but she could distance herself from it so that's what we're talking about today and you know what i want to say is if it's not heard are you really saying it so when you think about what happened to you whichever one moment it is you want to pinpoint and come to terms with and empower yourself with a resolution that is yours that you've chosen for that moment if you don't say that out loud if you don't write that down are you really saying you know if you're not reading it if you're not hearing it are you really saying it so just because we think things unless we put them down unless we say them out loud into ourselves are those words really being said are we really saying that that's the purpose of doing this that's the purpose of writing to be heard and not all of us were heard by our parents by our families by others around us and in order to be at peace with our experiences it's very empowering to write something down and be heard even if it's just by ourself be seen okay be heard okay so the purpose of the course is to say the words out loud you know i went through this this is what happened and i'm okay with it without erasing that moment in time without remembering a memory actually quantifying it giving it some quantifiable existence in this case in words without apologizing for it right and writing without malice it doesn't need to be a bitter experience just saying those words this is what happened this is how i felt okay so as i've mentioned i've been kind to you i suggested writing in the first person but about someone else and you might say well aren't i hiding behind them you know if i'm writing wasn't charlotte bronte hiding behind jane eyre why didn't she make an autobiography and think about it like this you're the shadow you're part of the experience but you don't feel the sting of the inevitable slap in the face when the bad news hits you can distance yourself from that and that's freeing in itself the poems i write a lot of poems um i produce them off app and when i perform them um my get out of jail free card is this is my alter ego that's performing this this is someone else and this is their words this is the words of one of my teenage students that they allowed me to write about their experience that is my i've distanced myself from that because my mission is not to make other people feel uncomfortable particularly family members but to allow myself to have my voice and that's the point are my thoughts real unless i say them unless i'm hearing them unless they are written down and i owe myself that i owe them i i owe the experience that we owe our experience that it's taken years for me to distance myself from from from some of the things some of my experiences and to be able to see it just as another scene in another story but i have realized by writing by documenting not in a journalistic format but in a narrative in a story format that i've been able to realize peace from that and that's what i'm wishing for you and that's why i'm hoping um that you get as much out of this course as i've got in writing it okay so to go back to um blackingwood hall which is just about to drop chapter one um is direct experience is an autobiography and the things in each chapter actually happened you can write your experiences and they can be painful but actually the more you read them over and over the less painful they become it's possible to get a bit bored of your own story and that's a good thing these messages these memories these memories of memories we repeat they're on repeat in our head and they go round and round and round it's not healthy to keep turning that over and over and over without some resolution and this is why book club my book club exists to empower you to perhaps at some moment try and resolve that conclude that so that you can make peace with it okay so what i'm going to do first today is um the course is in three parts three lessons first lesson is establishing an inciting moment establishing that moment um for you where everything hit the fan there may be many of those moments there's certainly where for me just take one of those one's enough one at a time and then dive in okay so three episodes three lessons it doesn't mean you write the beginning the middle and the end as i was speaking about being a lateral thinker you know life doesn't run in a straight line it's messy and it runs all over the place depending on how creative you are it's depending on how your mind works and you um you may be a lateral thinker you may not you know if you're a vertical thinker you're more structured logical you follow a set path and you rely on your established knowledge and you'd like to progress step by step so the course might take that might look like that for you well i'm going to write the beginning with my first lesson and then i'm going to stick to the middle when things got a little bit um sticky and then i'm going to resolve it to the end for me being a lateral thinker what i'm suggesting um is you try something new and with lesson one with chapter one with the first part scene one of your story you actually dive right into the heart of the action and this inspires creativity it encourages you to explore multiple angles not just seeing it from one angle and to make new connections with what happened you might well jump between ideas it's a messier process it can be if you're a vertical thinker a scary process but it's necessary to do justice to the experience to your experience now going back as i said we're just going to talk about one experience okay so if you've just come into this and thinking what on earth is she whittling on about i'm just going to recap so my course is just about to drop it's a writing course and the writing course is about making sense of one of your experiences that you have had that you found difficult to come to terms with that's going round and round in your head that you need to make peace with and this course is about making peace with that and these lives that are supporting the cause about making peace with that by creating a narrative a three-part story that addresses and talks about the situation but actually picks it to pieces and allows us because we're writing about it so it's happened to someone else to distance ourselves from it okay so we start with an inciting moment take a moment think about something that and this is why i suggest we have a notebook with us because ideas thoughts inspiration comes at any given time and when we're on a live when i'm on a live and you're with me there might be things that come to you and even if you just have your phone you know notes on your phone and to do you to do it justice you really need to just get those words down those ideas down so take a moment i'm going to talk you through one of my inciting moments there have been many um and i'm i'm going to spend the rest of the lesson today talking about how we can reframe that moment to better come to terms with it okay so my inciting moment so when we were when i was late teens i had we had house fire um and everything burned to the ground so i lost everything i ever had i lost all my possessions my childhood possessions um letters dolls my cello my books my artwork so i had huge paintings that i did big murals on the walls um fabrics blankets my father had bought me soft toys clothes i was big on clothes i lost everything i had no clothes so there's me sitting in a blackened shell a blackened shell a hole a a cave of a room with no shoes on borrowed shorts um shivering and scrambling around in the dirt to see if i could find anything and guess what i did so my inciting moment is that so i start with my inciting moment and i write that down okay the house fire fine and what i want to talk to you about today is how not to get sucked into that blackness because it's very easy when our thoughts go round and round just to hold on to that and oh my god wasn't that awful and feel sad about that and actually when you distance yourself from it you can see other things going on so if i look at that child now sitting in the dirt scrambling around hearing the voices downstairs well it was all her fault she shouldn't have why did that well she's not getting anything you know yeah i can feel myself in my body everything closing in and then what i do is i say right okay i'm gonna step away from that and i'm gonna look at that kid what's she doing what does it look like out of the window what's going on in the bigger picture and that enables me to i'm always like the shadow of the person it's happening to i'm still feeling the experience but it enables to me me to see other things that are happening too and i spoke about in the description um symbolism and there were a couple of things that did happen in that moment and they were symbols okay and i've used them in my writing as symbols of what what i am to expect from the experience right so i'm scrambling around in the dirt and everything and i find considering everything was up in flames i find this dress my favorite dress and it's almost untouched how is this possible there's no wood anymore there's no door frame anymore there's no bed there's this dress sitting there that to me what's that symbolizing well that's symbolizing security nothing has changed that can survive i can survive this i'm still me i scrabble around a bit more this is a real experience scrabble around a bit more i find a little cardboard box and this cardboard ring box is untouched everything else has gone up in smoke and of course it's very wet because obviously the firemen have come in and everything's soaked and and it's just it's you know it's just like digging around in coal it's and there's this box and open the box and there's a ring in there you see and i realize oh my gosh some things go beyond this experience some things i still have connections with that are nothing to do with this experience this experience does not this is not all there is from now on i've lost everything materialistically but that's not the end of the story and this ring is symbolizing resilience determination that's my symbol so i write lesson one my first chapter as this kid scrabbling around in i describe the experience i talk about what's happening and i relate it to a symbol of hope something that's coming forward to me in the future now i'm going to go a bit off grid here so you know this is the lateral thinking coming out and um i'm going to just show you this so i also very very big on the artistic process and i want to just i believe when teaching it's important to approach a lesson in many different ways this is a visual um depiction of what i'm talking about so if i just focus on the room the blackness the horror of it all the loss i'm painting that picture in a monotone right in one color that's what i'm doing and that's not the whole story life does not exist in a monotone so first of all i'm just going to show you this before i go on to color so we've got this breakdown here of composition this is artistic composition how we create an effective composition right and we've got this thing here which is something on the horizon this thing which we're looking at and focusing on we create a path leading to it we create other items or points of focus within that composition we're talking about composing a story now okay and i'm comparing it to composing a piece of visual art and then as we carve out or craft our story we can see that suddenly and there's a person there suddenly we are part of the composition we are not the only thing in the composition