I need to hear your story

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Merely factual information tends to activate your language processing centres. Stories, by contrast, stimulate much larger areas in our brains, including not just the language centre but also those parts that are responsible for visual and motor processing, as well as our sensory cortex.*
Anna Katharina Schaffner

We need myths that will help us identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe.**
Karen Armstrong

Truth is often deeper than we believe.
The truth about you and me will not be revealed
in facts and figures alone, but
in the stories we create for ourselves and each other,
How we use our imagination matters:
We use our imagination not to escape
from reality but to join it,
And this exhilarates us because
of the distance between and apprehension of
the real.^
Time and again we will discover our deeper truth in
our interactions with those who are quite different to us,
Not only present truth, but also future truth.

*Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Development;
**Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
^Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.

4 thoughts on “I need to hear your story”

  1. LOVE this. Thanks, Geoffrey.

    —Nic 323-363-4417 (A text message is the quickest and surest way to reach me)

  2. Thanks for this, Nic. How are things going for you. It felt you were wrestling with your book quite well the last time I checked.

  3. yep, still wrestling. Here’s what I posted this morning to beta-readers who are looking forward to reading it when it’s finished (but before it is published):

    *Update on the manuscript:* had a breakthrough on Sunday (yesterday) with the first of a set of scenes that needs to be rewritten. I have hope!

    *Update on telling people about the book,* so that someone might buy it when it comes out: no breakthroughs yet. *sigh* The biggest obstacle here is within me. Intensely, irrationally, I do not want to even begin communicating about the fact that I’m writing a book, that it might be available for sale someday, that it’s going to be a fun story to read, and it’s fully grounded in reality, for both the tech and the conflicts involved… my mind wants to talk about all these things.

    But my gut writhes and says NOOOO!!

    It’s like there’s a symbiont in me that is terrified of what people will think about my writing, and it has fed on years and years of me helping others write better and get over their fears about writing and setting their stories loose in public… like all those fears that I dispelled in others came to reside in me instead. I have been colonized by a terror of publication.

    Weird.

    Not entirely sure how to battle this symbiont. In the movie Venom, don’t they make peace somehow and learn to work together? Maybe I should finally see that movie.

    Suggestions welcome.
    😉

  4. Again, apologies for being slow to reply to this message. I remember holding you in my thoughts, but I didn’t get to write.

    Hopefully, you found the symbiont to be more agreeable in the end, like those in Star Trek!

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