VOICING THE UNSAID:Using Narrative Therapy Techniques as a Tool for Revision

in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Barbara DeGrote

Critical Paper and Program BibliographySubmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in

Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2012

1

Voicing the Unsaid: Using Narrative Therapy Techniques as a Tool for Revisionin Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Introduction

While feedback from writing workshops often helps writers find places in their

manuscripts that run thin or need development, most revision work is done without the

aid of other seasoned writers. Most revisions take place in the lonely confines of the

writer’s head—a workshop of one where writers try to untangle underdeveloped themes,

wayward paragraphs and mismanaged metaphors.

Revision often feels a bit like wandering in the desert. It is difficult to have a clear

picture of where the writing needs to go. How do writers revise when there is no one in

the room to say, “Tell me more about that” or to provide feedback and a fresh point of

reference? In lieu of a workshop, a writer needs a framework to guide his or her thinking;

the field of psychology provides one such method through the guise of Narrative

Therapy.

Co-founded in the late 1980’s by Michael White and David Epstein, Narrative

Therapy techniques provide a template to lay on top of a narrative “telling.” In the

language of Narrative Therapy, “re-vision” helps clients and writers “restory their

stories.” For writers, Narrative Therapy techniques provide a new way to articulate the

work of revision as writers labor to establish clearer themes, coherent structures, and

more meaningful images. Bradley Lewis, in his book Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories

Can Shape Clinical Practice, uses terms familiar to the writer to define Narrative Theory

as a whole when he speaks of the three elements of narrative most important to the

2

clinical setting: metaphor, plot and character. Lewis later adds a fourth element: point of

view (43).

This paper will focus on two approaches used in Narrative Therapy—Interpretive

Poetics and Contemplation—as effective vehicles for revision for both the fiction and the

nonfiction writer.

Interpretive Poetics

In a therapist’s office, the goal of Interpretive Poetics is to voice the unsaid: to

challenge existing paradigms, discover their origins, and replace them with more

authentic or alternate perspectives. The goals for a good revision are similar: to ask

effective questions and deepen or open up the work.

In short, Interpretive Poetics is a four-layered process used to help interpret

clients’ written narrative detailing their situation as they see it. Irina Todorova, in her

article “The Said and the Unsaid: Approaches to Narrative Analysis,” defines the process

of Interpretive Poetics this way: “ . . . this interpretative method unglues multiple voices

of the said and the unsaid, so as to be heard more clearly, yet preserves their

interconnectedness and overlap. It helps the researcher peek into the silences or into the

cracks between the pieces” (abstract).

In the Process of Interpretive Poetics or any form of Narrative Therapy, clinicians

work from a single text, reading and rereading as they work the story both for form and

content. The method of Interpretive Poetics as defined by Irina Todorova uses multiple

readings of a single text with an eye for coherence. What catches the clinician’s eye are

3

passages of incoherence: silence, gaps, and negativity. The clinician then begins to ask

questions.

In a similar manner, writers in revision begin to break down or deconstruct the

thinking behind the first-draft writing, “peeking into the silences and cracks” of their

early manuscripts. Following the framework of Interpretive Poetics, questions arise for

the writer in revision that address the manuscript through four separate readings or

“layers.” Adapted here for use by a writer in revision, the questions used in the clinical

approach to Interpretive Poetics provides an effective checklist to the writer as he/she

enters the revision process:

Layer 1: What is the dominant story? What other stories lie beneath the often oppressive power of the one presented? What has this draft chosen to reveal?

Layer 2: What social constructs have influenced this story? Why have I included these details and not others? Are there stories that contradict the dominant story?

Layer 3: Are there negative statements that need to be explored? Are there incomplete sentences, silence or space in the narrative? Are there topics mentioned but not developed?

Layer 4: Are there places in the draft that allow for multiple interpretations especially in

the use of figurative language?

Identifying the Dominant Story

Questions:� What is the dominant story?� What has this draft chosen to reveal?� What other stories lie beneath the often oppressive power of the one presented?

4

We all tell stories: who we are, where we came from, who we met along the way.

In fiction writing, characters come to us with stories and it is the writer’s job to coax

them on to the paper. Essayists carry their stories in their back pocket layered in memory

and folded into tiny squares. “Stories are a way to organize and give meaning to our

experiences,” states Ian Ridgway in his lecture “Narrative Therapy” (3). Our stories

define us. But what stories do we tell? And why one story over another?

What makes the page? What does not and why? These are the questions to

explore in revision. The “truth” writers present in an opening draft is the dominant story

and more often than not, according to Ridgeway, a “problem-saturated” draft. In truth, a

draft brings with it multiple stories—many stories originating from the same

experience—some voiced, some unvoiced.

(Ridgway 3)

For a writer, each draft comes to the “therapist’s coach” to uncover its dominant

story. Robyn Fivush, author of the article “Speaking silence: The social construction of

silence in autobiographical and cultural narratives,” identifies a dominant story through

its repetition. Fivush states that autobiographical memories are “highly dynamic.” She

writes, “Each time a memory is brought to mind, it is reconstructed in the moment to

EXPERIENCE of the WORLDDominant StoryStory #3

Story #2

5

serve the goals of the current situation” (89). Speaking stories provides a filter through

which memories emerge. Speak them more than once, they clarify. Leave them silent for

too long and the details merge with similar memories, condensing the original experience

and blurring the edges.

Fivush continues by saying, “Through multiple tellings, narratives become

accepted . . . versions of the past. In this way, narratives take on a moral perspective,

explicating not just what happened and what it means, but what it should mean,

essentially getting to the ‘truth’ of the matter. . . . Thus the question becomes: Who has

the right to say what ‘really happened’?” (90). Fivush goes on to label the culturally

dominant narrative as having the most power, and because of that power structure, the

dominant story is the one that needs to be challenged and at times silenced so that other

stories find it safe to speak.

For the writer the dominant story most easily rises at a point of climax or extreme

conflict. The cause may be obvious: alcoholism, post traumatic stress, depression,

change. But these are products, not stories. What stories accompany the obvious one?

Who else is in the picture? What influences do they bring? What is the social situation of

the time? The weather? The politics? Who would approve of this story? Who would not?

Perhaps the depression or the alcoholism or the stress is not what is going on. This first

layer of Poetic Interpretation, asks the writer to identify the dominant story and then look

around and see who else is watching.

Identifying the dominant story allows the client to contemplate “previously

overlooked aspects of the experience that are inconsistent with the dominant [oppressive]

story” (Ridgeway 3-4). The same holds true for the writer. Often pieces that have been

6

rejected or overlooked carry some form of discomfort with them. It is difficult to stay

open to a piece if it pains us. It is easier to let another story jump in and make it better.

Robert Boswell, author of Half Known Worlds recognizes this fight and flight response

when he writes, “The discoveries you make about your characters work best if they

involve searching that makes you uncomfortable, that forces you to face something you

don’t want to face, something that makes you want to flee—or at least shut off your

laptop and go for a walk. Your job ... is to strap yourself in and keep writing” (23).

The idea of one dominant idea silencing other more fragile voices is easily

demonstrated in the classroom. As a teacher, I try to encourage all of my students to find

their voices in class discussions. While it is easy to call on the first hand up—the kid with

energy and the words to go with it—experience has taught me to wait before giving

someone voice. Allowing a few silent seconds to follow a question allows time for other

students to formulate their thoughts and get their hands up. These hands belong to more

quiet reflective voices, voices that need time to formulate their thinking and get ready to

speak. Often, it is worth the wait.

Brenda Miller writes the following in her recent book Listening Against the Stone:

Patience is the dharma discussion we held in our meditation

group each month. . . . Sit quietly for at least three breaths

before indicating your own wish to speak. Those three

breaths can take a long time, and you have to quell your

desire to jump in, to answer any question that has been

asked. The question must sit, settle, expand. (136-137)

7

And from the original draft:

Because, it turned out, in dharma discussion it isn’t so

much what anyone says. Those three beats are really the

most important communication of all—the silence in which

we breathed, connected . . . listened. (136-137)

The lesson is obvious here: as writers, we don’t need to go with the first hand

up—the dominant story. Interpretive Poetics teaches the writer of a first draft to identify

the dominant story, the kid with his hand up. Wait three breaths. Allow the time needed

for more quiet stories to have their say.

Remember our lonely writer, a basketful of rejected writing, and yet . . . ? Pull a

rejected piece from its crumpled state and give it voice. Pause at the impulse to crush it

and send it soaring. Ask first why, then give it space and explore any signs of discomfort.

If found, let the discomfort have its say.

Identifying Influences

Questions:� What social constructs have influenced this story?� Why have I included these details and not others?� Where are the summarized scenes that need to be brought out? What is hiding?� Are there stories that contradict the dominant story?

A writer adapting the construct of Interpretive Poetics first identifies the dominant

story within the writing. Once identified, it is the writer’s job to challenge that voice

through the writing of what Fivush coins in “Speaking Silence” a “resistance narrative.”

Language is a social construct. Every story is not just a story but a selection of

experiences; no one story includes all experience. Writers do not come to write what they

8

write without influences of one kind or another. As writers, it is important for them to be

aware of the conscious and unconscious influences that affect how they tell their stories.

A writer employs a variety of filters in the telling of his or her story depending on

who is listening. Even young children know this as evidenced in the following

conversation captured in Robert Boswell’s book The Half-Known World as his father

demands an explanation for a disobedient behavior: “‘Tell the truth,’ my father said.

Which truth? I might have thought” (24).

The second layer of Interpretive Poetics stops to consider a variety of societal

“heavy-hands,” that act as filters to the writing and challenges those cultural truths when

discovered.

Writers need an audience and audiences come with baggage. Narratives whether

political, religious, familial, environmental, or knowledge-based need constant

negotiation. (Consider that once many believed that the world was flat!) This is not a bad

thing. These negotiations cause tension, and tension is manna to the writer.

Challenging the culturally dominant stories, the presumed stories that rise up and

flex their muscles, challenging these power structures creates more nuanced and

multifaceted tellings, both in a clinical setting and in the writer’s office. Challenging

long-held assumptions leads to good questions as the writer begins to test the truth of

his/her cultural beliefs and societal mandates.

I uncovered this process in my own essay this year entitled, “Lund’s Bait Shop.”

While initially the dominant story was to have been a nostalgic look back at a mom-and-

pop business that catered to the local tourists and provided live bait and friendly

conversation, the final essay captured a young girl growing up in the 1960s and the

9

gender issues already at work during that time. While I always thought that I had escaped

most of the invisible restrictions placed on females from my era, there they were right on

the page, staring back at me as I viewed my own reflection in a minnow tank.

Boswell’s chapter “Process and Paradigm” reiterates the power of long-held

beliefs on fictional characters and essayists alike when he encourages the writer to

“create patterns [create power structures] and use alterations in those patterns to negotiate

their conclusion” (39). In short, set it up to knock it down. Flip life on its head. Love your

enemy. Do good to those who persecute you.

Poetic Interpretation takes a more gentle approach. Rather than trying to dispute

an entrenched paradigm, Poetic Interpretation coaxes it from one’s writing with some

leading questions. A fiction writer may see this rising tension as fuel for the plot line

while this second layer of questioning leaves the essayists exposed and vulnerable and

just where we want them.

In resistance mode, the essayist navigates the off roads, his or her foot heavy on

the accelerator and taking the curves on two wheels. Using the template provided by

Interpretive Poetics, the writer in this second phase corners the conflict or the dominant

story and stares it straight in the eye by asking,

� What feeds the problem?� What starves the problem?� Who benefits from the problem?� In what settings might the problematic behavior/attitude be useful?� What sorts of people would definitely be opposed to the problem?� Who would applaud what you are doing?� Where might the idea come from that you are bossy, unlovable . . . fill in the

blank� Is there another story that contradicts the original one where you were not

abandoned, not excluded, not brave, etc. (again, fill in the blank)

10

Mary Stein showcases the effect of resistance writing through the use of the “if/then”

statements in her analysis of Lydia Davis’s essay “A Second Chance” as she explicates

the following passage:

If you could have your mother die a second time you might

be prepared to fight for a private room that had no other

person in it watching television while she died, but if you

were prepared to fight for that, and did, you might have to

lose your mother again in order to know enough to ask

them to put her teeth in the right way and not the wrong

way before you went into her room and saw her for the last

time grinning so strangely, and then yet one more time to

make sure her ashes were not buried again in that plain sort

of airmail container in which she was sent north to the

cemetery. (Stein)

As explained in Stein’s blog critique, the scene or the dominant story [mother

dying] in this passage is secondary to how the narrator addresses the material [her

resistance to the scene]. Stein writes, “Each clause first reveals conditional desire, ending

with descriptive material rooted in scene. This pattern builds tension between how the

narrator would have liked to experience her mother’s death and how it truly occurred,

creating dissonance [or resistance] between desire and narrative reality” (Stein).

Lydia Davis’s actual experience of her mother’s death runs counter to the

dominant plot and results in what Stein refers to as “prayerful, haunted silence” (Stein).

11

When the reader is taken into silence, the dominant story fades as the words “disappear

into thin air” (Miller 137).

In a similar manner, Kathleen Dean Moore, a university teacher and writer, reacts

in this case not to a dying mother but to a student wearing a tee-shirt emblazoned with the

message “Love Your Mother” accompanied by a blue-drenched photo of earth taken from

space splayed across his chest. Notice in this passage how the dominant story [the student

and his tee-shirt] fades as she pushes against both the message and the student. Notice,

also, the repetition of the words “I wondered . . .” delivered in repetition like a prize-

winning boxing champ. Observe, once again, how the dominant story recedes as the

resistant passage expands:

Last spring, I saw a student on campus in a T-shirt that said,

‘Love Your Mother,’ and showed an astronaut’s photo of the

cloud-splashed Earth. To be honest, the t-shirt irritated me,

and so did the student. I wondered if he ever wrote to his

mother or remembered her birthday. I wondered if the

student had figured out what it means to think of the Earth as

a mother: Mother Earth, Magna Mater. I wondered if he had

even thought about it, if he had any idea how complicated the

analogy is, if he was ready to take a stand as to exactly

how—in what particular way—we are supposed to

understand the connection between the Earth and a mother,

and what difference that connection makes for the way we

live, what obligation it imposes. (67)

12

What Moore accomplishes with exposition in the above passage, she replicates

with images in her essay entitled “The Metolius.” While first seen as a well-constructed

piece of juxtaposition, the resistance comes in the final scene where Moore and her father

enter into a shared silence.

In the following excerpt, Moore slows and expands the activity of a natural

landscape: herons lift heavy wings, boulder spread apart, and youthful water runs so free

that the reader doesn’t miss a molecule:

When we came to the edge of the water, a heron jumped into

the air, lifted itself with one beat of its heavy wings, and

disappeared. Scalloped clouds blew across the face of the

moon, their edges glowing, then dissolving back into the

dark. Barely visible in the shadow of the hill, boulders spread

apart and the river rushed out, full and frothing, alive with

oxygen, pouring downhill as if it could flow forever. (73)

Into this scene alive with its own exuberance, she brings an aging and frail father

ever slow in his steps and worrisome to the daughter. Together they sit and peer into the

darkness. Here the resistance is much more subtle. Surrounded by so much life, the

readers understand the intensity of the passage through the stillness of the scene. When

the silence comes, the dominant story of both father and forest fade, and an unspoken

story—one of impending loss and shared gratitude—raises its hand. Moore writes,

The path to the river was treacherous with patchy ice, so I

picked my steps carefully, supporting my father by the arm,

13

warning him about the ice under his cane, terrified that he

would fall and break a disease-brittled bone. . . . .I helped

my father brace himself against a tree and slowly scrape the

snow off a bench We sat side by side, looking into the

darkness, pulling the cold pine-drenched air deep into our

lungs, saying nothing. (73)

Identifying possible covert influences to our original draft often yields a new

dominant story. A draft open to possibilities allows for some tender probing. If all goes

well, often both the original story and the resistant story fade and the writing escapes the

limits of language and hovers suspended, transparent, stilled.

Identifying Negation in the Narrative

Questions:

� Are there negative statements that need to be explored?� Are there incomplete sentences, silence or space in the narrative?� Are there topics mentioned but not developed?

What a writer keeps or throws out depends on the genre in draft. A fiction writer

working to build character may purposely use the third layer of Interpretive Poetics to

add complexity to that character, through silence, negation and ideas purposely left

dangling. In contrast, an essayist leaves little unsaid as their relationship to the page is to

explore and discover and completely inhabit the scene. While to this point, creative

nonfiction writers and fiction writers in revision could lay the template of Poetic

Interpretation on top of their prose and make the process work, this is not the case in the

14

third layer of reading. The goal of memoirist is to tell the truth. The goal for a fiction

writer often is to create characters who do not.

The third layer of Interpretive Poetics takes a more direct approach to the text.

Dominant themes, societal influences, and resistant voices aside, this third reading scans

the text for visual clues: white space, incomplete sentences, negative statements, topics

mentioned and dropped.

How this third layer of Interpretive Poetic affects a final draft in nonfiction versus

fiction can best be seen by comparing two authors: one, an environmental essayist, and

one a fiction writer, Ernest Hemmingway.

There is little room for white space in the prose of David James Duncan,

environmental essayists from the Pacific Northwest. Neither does he pose a topic without

a thorough follow up. Duncan plays a line of thought like he plays a fresh-water salmon,

with patience, persistence, and a large dose of pondering. And, he does not give up until

he has landed it.

In his essay, “Native,” Duncan poses a series of questions in regards to a

declining salmon run. They are not rhetorical. He wants to know: “But what does the

word primitive mean? [Exposition follows.]… What about ‘primitive belief’ then?

[Exposition follows.] …Were these rights the ingredients that sustained those

magnificent salmon?” (106). He closes the passage with the following thought: “I sense

two things here” (106). As mentioned previously, there is not a lot of room in a Duncan

essay for white space or thought left to fend for itself. But this is Duncan’s final draft.

This book is published. Done. What about his revision?

15

Was Duncan’s first draft as tightly written? In a first draft, a reader could assume

the possibility of some unfinished paragraph left confused and wondering or a bit of

commentary left with its mouth open.--a question posed and not fully answered..

Fiction writers, on the other hand, work the third layer or tool offered by

Interpretive Poetics into most dialogues. As a good reader, an individual is looking for

the unfinished thought here. Readers want these characters to pause and wait. Bring in the

dashes, ellipses and line return. Bring on the literary patient ripe for a case study.

Ernest Hemingway’s writings contain many passages worthy of our best

clinicians. “Hills Like White Elephants” is about a couple deciding for or against an

abortion, yet Hemingway never uses the word “abortion” in the story. Instead, he allows

the characters to dwell on its possibility and its consequences through a stark

conversation filled with incomplete thoughts, negative reactions, repetitions, and silences:

‘I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do-’

‘Nor that isn’t good for me,’ she said. ‘I know. Could we

have another beer?’

‘All right. But you’ve got to realize –’

‘I realize,’ the girl said. ‘Can’t we maybe stop talking?’

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the

hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her

and at the table.

‘You’ve got to realize,’ he said, ‘that I don’t want you to do

it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through

with it if it means anything to you.’

16

‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.’

‘Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I

don’t want anyone else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.’

‘Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.’

‘It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.’

‘Would you do something for me now?’

‘I’d do anything for you.’

‘Would you please please please please please please please

stop talking?’

He did not say anything . . . . (Hemingway)

In this case, the author’s refusal to lay it all out on the table allows the reader to

sense that which the character can and will not talk about. Readers are left with a vague

apprehension, and that is how a reader might assume Hemmingway wants it, believing

that by not sharing emotional feelings openly more of the real character is revealed.

To the fiction writer, an unfinished sentence, a dropped topic, or negative

statement is a tool allowing for subtle complexity and nuanced characterization. What

appears on the memoirist’s page as an unfinished or underdeveloped scene is to the

fiction writer an opportunity. In revision, while the essayist may look to rework that

underdeveloped section, the fiction writer may choose to leave it silent. For one, silence

suggests a second look. For another, an intentional look away.

17

Figurative Language

Question:

� Are there places in the draft that allow for multiple interpretations especially inthe use of metaphor and figurative language?

With the right lens, metaphor becomes both the dominant and the resistant story.

A metaphor according to Bradley Lewis encompasses both what individuals are and what

they are not (45). Metaphor, according to Lewis, is a “mediator” between people’s

perceptions and the world. Understanding metaphor in this way helps writers understand

their own selection process when it comes to scene and the chosen details that define that

scene. Metaphor enables and constrains simultaneously. In that tension, the writer is

better able to tease out the full relationship between the two entwined images.

Lewis writes, “Metaphors structure the way we perceive the world, what we

experience, how we relate to other people, and the choices we make” (44).

While Robert Boswell, does not use the word metaphor in the following excerpt,

his chapter entitled “The Alternate Universe” from Half-Known World carries some of

the same overtones:

Many stories have the question of two worlds existing at

once. We may call them the world of the intellect and the

world of the heart, the physical world and the world of the

mind . . . the worlds should not be consciously constructed to

represent ideas or ideals. I would argue that the shimmer that

permits the character entry needs to have had some kind of

concrete embodiment, and at the same time this shimmer or

18

ride must exceed its physical definition. Finally the reader

should experience this moment of passage as viscerally.

(111-112)

Try holding up metaphors to Boswell’s expectation: grounded and concrete,

ethereal and transcendent, and fully felt. It is a large order, but it can be done. Boswell

provides a perfect example in Alice Monroe’s short story “Labor Day Dinner” as he pulls

from its last pages a rising blackness literally embodied in a speeding car in the dark of

night without its lights on. When the car barely misses a family of four on a country

intersection, the reader’s experience meets the expectation:

The big car flashes before them a huge, dark flash, without

lights, seemingly without sound. It comes out of the dark

corn and fills the air right in front of them the way a big flat

fish will glide into a view suddenly in an aquarium tank . . . .

What they feel is strangeness. They feel as strange as

flattened out and borne aloft as unconnected with the

previous and future events as the ghost car was, the black

fish. (114)

The scene evokes a metaphor and one that meets Boswell’s own definition.

Boswell writes in his book The Half-Known World the following explanation:

Let me state the obvious: to say the encounter with the Dodge

is a moment in which the characters experience a comic-book

alternate universe diminishes the story. However, after

you’ve read and considered the story, and if you wish for it to

19

serve as a practical model, it may be useful to think of it as an

encounter with an alternate universe, a universe in which the

‘dark things that always rise up’ have a physical

presence—it’s where they live. (114-115)

I recently spent two weeks at a writer’s residency shared with five others: a poet,

two artists and a novelist. Passing through the kitchen one morning, I saw the novelist

hard at work revising his first-draft manuscript safely punched and tucked into a three-

hole notebook. He did not notice me so intent was he on the work. Too early in the

morning to know better, I interrupted him to ask what he was doing. “I’m looking for

repetition,” he said. He circled another word and turned the page.

Judith Kitchen, poet and essayist, said in a recent lecture, “Spend time with your

reoccurring [repetitive] images.” While writers often do this kind of read through for

repeated words, it would be interesting to do the same for repeated images. What writers

could discover in the drill is both a dominant and resistant theme, taking what is present

and looking for what is not.

Bradley Lewis quotes Paul Ricoeur’s work with metaphor, stating that metaphor

allows client and clinician to make meaning and shape meaning simultaneously (44). The

verb (“is”) that holds the metaphor together is not an absolute term. Lewis quotes Ricoeur

directly: “The metaphor ‘man is a wolf’ . . . preserves the ‘is not’ within the ‘is.’ Man in

this metaphorical frame is both like a wolf and is not like a wolf. The ‘is’ and the ‘is not’

are both preserved in the metaphor” (45).

Perhaps this is why the fourth reading of Interpretive Poetics zeroes in on

figurative language. Metaphors are a “two-way transformation” as described by Stan

20

Rubin in his class lecture on the PLU campus during summer 2011. In metaphor, both

the dominant and resistant themes exist in an opposing tension like two arm wrestlers

caught in equal force. Saint and sinner encompassed in one body, metaphors speak to the

whole person.

Using the framework of Interpretive Poetics encourages writers to examine their

figurative use of language more closely. In revision, writers might list the metaphors

found in the draft in one place. Follow Kitchen’s advice. What larger image rises? Play

both sides of the metaphor out. Challenge both the “is” and the “is not.” See how one

perspective informs the other.

Contemplation as a Form of Resistance

Since language builds the narrative, Gregg Blanton, in his article “Adding Silence

to Stories: Narrative Therapy and Contemplation,” suggests that silence is the needed

“resistance narrative” to the culturally dominant influences that inhabit our pages.

Contemplation can inform and enlarge a narrative. “Stories,” states Blanton, “depend

upon language” (212). As individuals speak they create a storied-self. Self is constructed

through the use of language. Because stories are constructed in language, they also can be

deconstructed and new stories can be built up.

Blanton suggests that contemplation allows for transcendent realities to rise up

that help to redefine the dominant story produced through language. Silence is the

process by which people disengage from language. It seems impossible at first thought

that stories can survive within the framework of silence since stories are dependent on

words. Can story survive in silence? Blanton, says, yes and more.

21

“In silence,” Blanton writes, “one quiets the language-processing areas of the left

hemisphere of the brain” (212). If language is in fact the over-arching dominant story, a

writer in revision, might expect to find in contemplation a resisting method that silences

the words in order to experience them.

Blanton sees stories as dealing with past and future, the story acting as a bridge

between the two. If writers restrict themselves to that equation, they miss the present and

the opportunity to experience the present. Contemplation allows a writer to enter into a

“timeless present,” a new experience that is not driven by language but the absence of it.

Blanton writes, “Silence carries with it the belief that conversation does not always

require language” (217).

My own experience with contemplation would attest to that. One early fall, I

joined about ten others at St. Ben’s monastery for a one-day introduction in

contemplative prayer. Our host handed each of us a fall leaf she had picked up on the way

into class that morning. We were to concentrate on our leaf, get to know its edges, its

colors, its smells.

Using the rhythm of our own breathing, we focused on the leaf, allowing what

ever images emerged within this time. From the dark red of my leaf, my father in his rust

suede jacket rose up along with the long hill full of maples at my family’s resort. We

were directed to go deeper into the silence using our breathing again as the vehicle. I

breathed and in a few moments experienced a joyous rush of adrenalin and the feeling of

feet flying down the hill as I threw my body into the pile of leaves collected at the bottom

of the hill.

22

And then, a sensed presence and expansion and the words that were not words

requesting that I go and have some fun —permission given to a woman with many

responsibilities. I had written about this childhood memory before, written about it in

memory-mode, but this was different. This was experienced, connected, lived. Enriched

and enlarged, the writing when it came could not contain it.

In Blanton’s construct, clients are encouraged to both draw close and distance

themselves from their stories. Drawing close elicits details—“the colors and contours of

their stories” (219). Distancing refers to a stepping back “observing the space between

the transcendent self and the dominant story” (219). This space allows the story to breath

separate and apart from a writer’s need to tack it down in paragraph and page.

Benefits of Contemplation

Using silence as a tool for revision may seem counterproductive to the writer.

What can one hope to accomplish by removing the very element that drives the

work—the words! Blanton states three therapeutic benefits to the practice of

contemplation within the venue of a therapist’s office. These three benefits are easily

applicable to a writer’s own narrative as well as they work their way through revision:

1) Through contemplation, a writer can become more aware of their thoughts and greater

awareness of their stories. By removing language from the construct, the writer sees the

story as a shell and not a container for reality or truth or even meaning. Since stories are

“social constructs” they can be deconstructed. New stories can emerge.

2) In contemplation, writers gain a new awareness of self—a transcendent self. To quote

Blanton “This is the self that emerges in silence, when the storying-self is quieted” (216).

23

In silence the sense of self emerges unrestrained, challenging the dominant story of who

we know ourselves to be.

3) By slowing the present through breath, a writer has access to many moments that pass

and are discarded. Blanton states, “Contemplation helps people experience the present

moment.” (215-217)

Silence moves a writer into stillness. Stillness provides new experiences. Through

contemplation, the writer gains experience other than through reason and intellect giving

way to more intuitive ways of understanding. From the practice of contemplation, new

stories emerge. Stories not restricted by language. Stories that move past the construct of

self and speak to the presence of soul.

Psychiatry and Literature: Method and Madness

Bradley Lewis writes, “A narrative frame that sets up a world with multiple truths

hardly means that all truths are relative. Which truth we choose matters deeply” (12).

While writers look to psychology for help with the revision process, psychology

has already found a helpful resource in the characters provided in literature. Complexity

of character is what draws the attention of the clinical therapist and where better to find

intriguing characters worthy of a therapist’s attention than in a good book.

Bradley Lewis in his recent book Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape

Clinical Practice states the following:

… fictional authors, particularly literary fiction authors, tend to give their

readers a much thicker set of contextual variables than one can find almost

24

anywhere else outside the clinical encounter itself. It is for this reason that

fictional narratives become the ideal place to gather case histories for

developing narrative psychiatry insights and skills. (78)

Psychiatry and literature are old acquaintances. Freud had his Oedipus and

Chekov his Ivanov to name two. However, in the last two decades, psychiatry’s approach

to literature moves from acquaintance to colleague with Narrative Therapy, providing a

shared language. What has the clinician found worthy of study in the pages of Chekov

and others? Why this new openness to story as a teaching tool both in the classroom and

on the couch? The answer: options.

Bradley Lewis continues: “In teaching narrative psychiatry, rather than close

down the options in advance . . . the idea is to keep the options as open as possible. This

helps people develop an experiential understanding of the considerable degrees of

freedom and agency they have with regard to narrating life stories” (79). Later he states,

“Thus the first step in a narrative psychiatry reading of fiction [and the first step for a

revisionist as well] is the step of imagining new possibilities” (81), or in Lewis’s

language “alternative interpretive frames” (85).

In his book, Bradley Lewis provides a case study for Chekhov’s play Ivanov. In

the play, Ivanov suffers from a deep depression. Chekhov brings in a multitude of

characters, all with good intentions, to interpret the cause of his suffering, providing in

Lewis’s words a “multiplicity of interpretation” or truths: Businessman Borkin suggests

that Ivanov “quit whining” and embrace the hard-work ethic of business; Sasha, a friend

of Ivanov’s wife, feels he has married the wrong person and is disappointed in the dowry;

and his own doctor delivers the harshest criticism to his situation to which Ivanov replies,

25

Think a little, my clever friend. You think I’m an open

book, don’t you? I married Anna for her fortune, I didn’t

get it, and having slipped up then, I’m now getting rid of

her so I can marry someone else and her money. Right?

How simple and straight forward. Man’s such a simple,

uncomplicated mechanism. No, doctor, we all have too

many wheels, screws and valves to judge each other on first

impressions or on one or two pointers. I don’t understand

you, you don’t understand me, and we don’t understand

ourselves. A man can be a very good doctor without having

any idea what people are really like. So don’t be too

cocksure . . . . (qtd. in Lewis 10)

Chekov provides in his play, Ivanov, a myriad of dominant stories each one

voiced by a separate character. Each character brings his or her own sensibility to the

narrative providing a literary case study filled with almost limitless possibilities.

Clinicians eager for options are bound to take Ivanov’s advice and not jump to an early

diagnosis but use the literature to its full clinical advantage.

Revision: Speaking Our Truths

Our characters and our stories carry many truths. In our drafts, we pick out pieces,

arrange them into a plausible whole and commit them to paper. We speak our truth as we

first see it. In revision, however, we deal with consequences more than truth. What is the

26

consequence of our character as we’ve presented him/her? In the creative non-fiction

piece, what story have I chosen to inhabit or not inhabit and where did it take the essay?

The resolution comes not by simply asking which story is true “but instead what

are the consequences of each story and what kind of action or thought will follow from

inhabiting these stories” (Lewis 14).

A current trend in polyphonic fiction, allows readers (and clinicians looking for

complex personalities) to ride the consequences of multiple-voiced narratives and watch

how various interpretations by a variety of characters affect the direction of the story line.

Consider the power of consequence as expressed in Tim O’Brien’s novel In the

Lake of the Woods. John Wade, a failed political career behind him, heads with his wife

to the north woods to reconsider his life. His wife disappears. Throughout the book,

Wade suggests plausible solutions to her disappearance although he remains a strong

suspect throughout. When evidence mounts against him, a local sheriff, believing Wade

innocent, gives him a boat and motor to escape into Canada. Having failed to inhabit the

truth of his mental illness and his own murderous act, Wade is seen in the last chapter

bouncing between islands [truths] neither here nor there—lost in literary limbo.

As a writer in revision, the take-home value from Dr. Lewis’s interpretation of

Chekov’s play Ivanov or novelist Tim O’Brian’s multi-voiced narrations is this: It is the

revisionist’s job to stay open and viable to possibilities. There can be many

interpretations for the action of a character or an individual’s own personal encounters.

Narrative Therapy teaches that in revision, writers start with the consequence of

the original storyline and retrace the trajectory, looking for small variations in the story’s

arch that might send the writing off the original course. Like Ivanov, a writer in revision

27

needs to challenge any cocksure interpretations, especially the ones that push their way to

the front of the line first. The four phases of Interpretive Poetics supply the method from

which to do this work.

While literature provides the medium for some creative madness, psychology

provides a framework to interpret it. Together both disciplines encourage multiple truths

to present themselves on the page. In the end, both writer and clinician decide which truth

is to be told and follow the trajectory of that truth to its natural consequence.

28

Works Cited

Blanton, Gregg P. “Adding Silence to Stories: Narrative Therapy and Contemplation.”

Contemporary Family Therapy 29.4 (2007): 211-221. Print.

Boswell, Robert. The Half-Known World. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2008. Print.

Fuvush, Robyn. "Speaking silence: The social construction of silence in autobiographical

and cultural narratives." Psychology Press 18.2 (2009): 88-98. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2011.

Lewis, Bradley, M.D., PhD. Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical

Practice. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Print.

Kitchen, Judith. MFA Summer Residency. Pacific Lutheran Seminary. Tacoma. August

2011. Lecture.

Miller, Brenda. Listening Against the Stone. Boston: Skinner House, 2011. Print.

Moore, Dinty W. The Truth of the Matter. New York: Pearson Education, Inc, 2007. Print.

Moore, Kathleen Dean. Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water. New York: A

Harvest Book, 1995. 65-73. Print.

Ridgeway, Ian PhD. “Narrative Therapy.” Lenten Studies. Tabor College. Melbourne,

Australia. 2007. Lecture.

Rubin, Stan. "Metaphor." MFA Summer Residency. Pacific Lutheran Seminary. Tacoma.

August 2011. Lecture.

Stein, Mary. “On Syntax: Creating Silence.” Hunger Mountain: The VCFA Journal of the

Arts. (2011): n. p. Web. 8 Dec. 2011.

Todorova, I. “The Said and the Unsaid: Approaches to narrative analysis.” CBB Journal

11.2 (2007): 229-247. August 2011. Web.