Every book about the writing process seems to recommend spending at least a few hours each day writing.
This morning I had only got as far as the reading stage when I heard our current guests, a Dutch couple, enter the kitchen downstairs. I decided to join them in my morning gown for a cup of tea and some talk. While staying with us, Jos has been working on a biography of a prominent Dutch politician; Ilda has been painting portraits of people with Alzheimer’s.
At some point our talk turned to the subject of narrative writing. Jos works with a group of PhD students in Amsterdam: “When asked to write narratives, what they produced wasn’t narrative at all,” he said.
“What did they do instead?” I asked. “Did they generalise?”
“Yes,” he replied. “They abstracted – maybe that’s the same as generalising – and they wrote about how things should happen in their organisations.”
“I expect abstraction comes naturally to them,” I went on. “In our society, we swim in an ocean of abstract concepts and categories. The students probably can’t see the water they are swimming in. So much of the language we use in organisational life is remote from any lived experience. Somebody I know once said that we’ve ‘become lost in our abstractions’.”
“It’s as if we live in a parallel universe,” Jos reflected.
I started thinking about what kind of conversation I might have with the students in Amsterdam about narrative writing and abstraction. The way I see it, writing has enabled humanity to develop complex abstract thought. But writing is such a versatile tool; it can also be used to develop other kinds of thinking, such as stories and narrative accounts of experience.
I mentioned Marshall McLuhan and his notion that the tools we invent shape us. For me, this perfectly encapsulates our complex two-way interrelationship with writing. It sparked a further thought from Jos: “We could explore with the students how the narratives we create shape us. At the moment, they view their working lives and academic study as separate spheres.”
“And narrative writing could help bridge the gap,” I suggested.
Before long, all three of us felt ready to go off and do our morning’s writing or painting. I am reminded again as I write this how inspiring it can be to allow conversations to emerge from the cracks and crevices in one’s daily writing routine.
Epilogue – how writing reflective narrative changes us
If we write a narrative account of our own experience, unexpected insights usually emerge. First we tell a story, then we re-read our own words, and finally we reflect further on what is emerging. The very process of writing changes us.
Related reading
Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg galaxy. University of Toronto Press, 1962.
David Abram. The spell of the sensuous. Vintage Books, 1996.