Writing the Children: Discovering the Theme for Life and Research

‘Writing the Children’ is an illustration by Moasenla, a portraitist/illustrator from Mokokchung, Nagaland. Contact her through Instagram: @the_exultant_painter; or e-mail: asenari67@gmail.com

‘Writing the Children’ is an illustration by Moasenla, a portraitist/illustrator from Mokokchung, Nagaland. Contact her through Instagram: @the_exultant_painter; or e-mail: asenari67@gmail.com

Dr Brainerd Prince

We have been talking about children under the bridge in the past few issues and how our response to them gives us a vision for life and research. We began the story with our observation of them which begins a search within us. In the last issue we talked about reflection and how our observations demand a reflection and thus imprint themselves on our souls. I claim that our reflective thinking, however systematic, will not converge completely unless the event experienced is written down. 

Writing is the act of archiving our thoughts and giving it a certain linearity and logic. There are different kinds of writing, but the kind of writing we want to do now, is simple narrative writing. It is about writing up as a story the critical event that happened. We therefore move from reflective thinking to reflective or narrative writing. Hatton and Smith argue that there are two types of reflective writing – descriptive and critical. Descriptive reflective writing merely offers a description of events with no discussion beyond it. On the other hand, critical reflective writing shows evidence that the writer is aware that actions and events may be ‘located within and explicable by multiple perspectives. There is consideration of the qualities of judgments and possible alternatives for explaining and hypothesizing.’ We want to get a simple structure of a narrative story so that we can write out the children who have powerfully touched us.

We have to turn to Aristotle if we need insights on writing a good story. He is probably one of the first thinkers in history to reflect on stories. Let’s pick out two insights from Aristotle: firstly, a good story must have six parts. They are plot, character, thought, diction, song and spectacle. Let us try and understand these constituent parts in a simple and straightforward manner. Aristotle’s point was that, in order for any text to be considered a story, there must be a plot of connected incidents or events concerning various characters about a particular thought or theme that holds these events together. These themes speak to each other in dialogue, visibly located in various settings and having a movement or rhythm that approaches a crescendo even as the story moves towards its climax. 

Secondly, for Aristotle, the plot was of central importance and the story needed to have a beginning, middle and an end. Therefore, emplotment is the first step in writing out a good story. Writing a story is different from mere description. For example, consider this – ‘The grandfather died. The grandmother died. The house was silent.’ Now, let’s ponder on this – ‘The grandfather died and then the grandmother too died of grief, and as a result an otherwise cheerful house became silent.’ The first case is an example of descriptive writing, that merely describes various observable states. But the second case, according to the English novelist E.M. Forster, is a story with a plot as it entails a cause-and-effect relationship between observable states or events. The link between events or states need not be merely causal, but there needs to be a link that logically holds the various actions and speech together to fulfil some purpose. Then it becomes a narrative.

Gustav Freytag built on Aristotle’s model of story and divided a story into five parts. I would say that the ‘Freytag’s pyramid’ as it is now known, dissimilar to Aristotle, is not about what constitutes a story, rather it captures the flow of the plot in its five stages. These stages are – (a) exposition or introduction that introduces the setting and the main characters, particularly the protagonist, (b) a rising action that begins with a conflict which defines the goal for the protagonist and as she moves towards her goal, she faces many small problems that needs to be overcome. (c) The climax is the highest point of the story in which the protagonist meets the antagonist face to face and there is a final showdown. In a tragic story it is not a simple case of the protagonist wining over the antagonist, but the situation becomes complex even with the revelation of the protagonist’s weaknesses. (d) In the falling action, this conflict begins to find its resolution. It may begin with the antagonist wining over the protagonist and then there being a reversal, or it could be straightforward with the protagonist winning over the antagonist. It also depends on the writer as to who wins the conflict, as it might go either way. (e) The final stage is denouement when post resolution, the conflict ends, and the lives of the characters post conflict are depicted before the story is wrapped up. This gives a conceptual structure to the progression of the story, and it can be used as a tool to help us write out the narrative.

Now to apply Aristotle and Freytag for our purposes. Our goal is to write out the story of the event or series of events that have profoundly touched us. It is the story about ‘our’ children under the bridge. While in Aristotle’s schema, we already know the thought or theme about which the story is, in our case, we write the story in order to identify the theme. Therefore, our story has an exploratory angle to it. But of course, our story, following Aristotle, will have a plot with a rhythmic movement, various characters using dialogues, in a setting(s) that gives it its historical location and will hopefully follow, even if very loosely, Freytag’s stages of plot development.

Remember, it is our story that we are writing. And we are trying to capture the event(s) that have huge semantic value for us. But you are also a character in the story, even if not the protagonist.Sometimesyou are the protagonist. Therefore, you will be telling your version of the story from your point of view. Sometimes it is good to tell the same story from another point of view, say from another character’s point of view. This will reveal the many layers a particular event may have and also capture the various perspectives on it.

We have tried hard to tell the story as an outsider, not involving the narrator’s feelings in writing it. Therefore, the second section of the script is to write out your feelings even as you were participating in the event. What were your reactions and feelings to the event even as it unfolded for you? Here you are plumbing into your inner self to capture the subjective feelings, reactions and emotions the event brought about in you. This will also reveal your biases and your prejudices with regard to the event. Now, prejudices are not necessarily a bad thing. Matter of fact, we need to identify our prejudices as they alone would reveal our deeper inclinations and motivations. But are not prejudices irrational and unsubstantiated opinions of a person that thwart reasoned judgements? 

Unfortunately, in the post-Victorian era, perhaps following Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the term prejudice got the negative connotation of being an irrational opinion. However, if we go to the origins of this term in its Germanic roots, it means something quite different. In the German legal parlance, it is the first or the initial judgement a person makes, and Gadamer suggests that all of us are constantly making these judgements which arise out of our historical situatedness as well as reveal our deeper inclinations. In a sense, all judgements, particularly the first judgements which are not crafted by our mind make visible our inner view of life. This is very important for our research process, as we are keen to discover our own inner understandings and inclinations toward those events. In writing our feelings, we are putting words to our inner dispositions. Often this is revelatory, as the words we use to describe our feelings might conceptually surprise us in terms of our own inner leanings.

Once we have a description of the event, and also an account of our first feelings towards it, then we intentionally analyze the event and our feelings to make sense of the event and our take on it. All analysis is bringing a form of reasoning to the data that is being analyzed. There are no universal or one single kind of reasoning. The reasoning can be from different angles. We can use multiple perspectives in our analysis. For example, in the event about the children under the bridge, we can analyze the event from the point of view of the passenger, which is you, or from the perspective of the children, or finally from the perspective of the taxi driver.

Once these three paragraphs are written, in some sense we have completed our narrative writing. We have described the event, trying to stay true to what was observed, then we wrote our personal take on it that included our feelings and inner dispositions, and finally we ended by analyzing the event from several perspectives with a view to identify the focus of the event.The final stage of narrative writing is the articulating of the theme from the story that we have written, which is – abstracting the theme from the experience of the event. This is an exercise in self-discovery. It is in this action that we find what has touched us the deepest and what we would like to pursue in life and research. 

Dr Brainerd Prince is Associate Professor of Practice, and Director, Centre for Thinking, Language and Communication, Plaksha University.

 



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