Narrative Chicken Alchemy
I made a choice to record the video draft of today's post near where the chickens were eating the fridge scraps. And the noises which occasionally interrupt my vlog are unfortunately... and thankfully... the result of that choice. You see, today I'm thinking a lot about what I call Narrative Alchemy. That is, the way in which the stories that we tell ourselves, or the stories that we write, sometimes have about as much meaning as a rooster crowing right next to a pile of slop that all the hens are already eating out of.
But sometimes there's those little outbursts, those cries for help, those rants or angry responses which do have meaning. They have importance.
A lot of times I find, when the pressure is building up in one location, be it psychologically, physically, emotionally, in a story or in a chess game, it's easy to notice it there. It's easy to focus on that one place where the pressure is building up. That one place where your plot is just breaking apart and you can't seem to get from point A to point B with your protagonist. Maybe your villain has taken over and they're a lot more interesting than your protagonist.
As you're working your way through the narrative alchemy of storytelling, or the personal alchemy of trying to figure something out that has been irking you for a long time, we can sometimes feel like we have found the solution. We can feel like, "Aha! This here, this is the problem, this is the thing I need to fix."
And while I'm not going to say that that instinct is wrong, since it's often dangerous to ignore the warnings in your heart, it is important to remember that sometimes the pressure is coming from a place other than what you're focusing on.
Sometimes your way of fixing the problem just feels like you're pressing against a wall. You sit there, you stare at the same damn paragraph for three hours and revise it thirty times. I do not deny that that is part of the creative process itself: That emotional, mental, sometimes physical struggle of figuring out what is standing between you and the art you are trying to create.
In pottery, sometimes the problem is not the clay or the speed of the wheel. The problem is the pressure I'm applying with my left index finger. That my brain is interpreting as, "Oh, there's too much grit in this clay." But if I loosen up my pressure a tiny bit, maybe adjust it to a different finger, then suddenly the clay reshapes itself into, well, I was going to say a lovely mug, but I'm actually terrible at making mugs. Perhaps a bowl or a vase.
I mostly came out here to the chicken yard this morning because I cleaned out the refrigerator and needed to dump the slop bucket. I'm dealing with the extra noise of the chicken yard today because it was a task that needed doing. A small thing that I could clear off of everybody's radar. Make sure that anyone who opened the fridge would be able to spot food that was good to eat.
And then... in that little bit of magic that I genuinely love about having a hobby farm: I get to take that slop, set it out here on an old coffee table that was going to get thrown away until I put it in the chicken yard, and enjoy watching a chicken banquet. I take that garbage and turn it into a few moments of joy. As the light increases with the year going on, as the weather warms up, those moments of transformation from frustration or impediment to entertainment and food for the farm animals... in a few months' time, that'll be eggs. We're not getting a lot of eggs right now because of the amount of light we have and how cold it is, but about a month from now, for every bucket of slop I bring down, I'll be coming up with a handful of eggs.
And that alchemy, that transformation of disgusting, frustrating, gross kitchen leftovers into first entertainment and then sustenance, it does something good for my brain.
Sometimes I don't have the ability to go out and feed chickens, whether because it's freezing cold and we're letting them eat on their grain for a couple of days before I come back out, or because I'm not at home. (A rare thing, that, as I don't really like traveling much). But that's ok, because we all know that these are all synecdoches. These are all metaphors. These are all ways of processing the creative drive, the human condition, and all the pressures of the world into something that is healthy. Perhaps even turning them into something that is entertaining or sustaining.
It takes a lot of weight off of my mind to not think I have to create a stunning work of artistic genius which must be perfect so that everything will turn out great and everyone will read it and I will make my living off of this and retire...
Instead, I reframe my expectations a little bit.
In the last week, I ran multiple D&D sessions where everybody felt like they contributed and something cool happened.
I had nothing in my commonplace book at the start of the week, but here at the end of the week, I have a collection of songs that I listened to, works that inspired me, frustrations that I had to vent.
A slop bucket can kind of stink when it's sitting there on the counter and you look at it and you're like, "Ugh, how did I ever think that was good to eat?" Transforming those scraps and bits and pieces of my mind and experience into something that entertains my clients, into something that brings me joy, that maybe brings just a little bit of learning... that's magic.
And then those little pieces build upon each other and stack. Little pieces, bit by bit. I have to think about how they're stacking up, but they are accumulating.
That's where it becomes super challenging, for other reasons.
I sometimes hesitate using phrases like Narrative Alchemy to describe my work, because I'm not the sort of person who tends to lean into spiritual metaphors. I don't find them helpful for myself, mostly because I don't like thought-terminating cliches. I don't like hearing, "This is the answer, do it." Even though I say definitive statements, even though I use cliches when I speak, even though the temptation to speak in the language of religion or magic or fantasy is so strong when science fails us. When our expectations of the civilized world begin to tremble a little bit on their foundations.
For me personally, it's a challenge to examine patterns of language which I can recognize echoing across multiple cultures or multiple faiths, and then hearing definitive statements in that language. That is a personal thing I have to deal with as my own struggle through this life, and yet I use that fantastical or spiritual language sometimes because there's a richness to it. There's layers of contradiction and argument that don't always exist in more scientific terminology, which in our modern time we tend to take as definitive, tested, proven.
Even though one of the hearts of science is its mutability. Is the agreement that we're going to say, "Yes, this is a physical coffee cup, and yes, I am holding it now in my left hand." while also acknowledging not merely issues of perspective, but larger contradictions. After all, the ceramic holding all of this coffee in place consists more of empty gaps between its constitutional atoms than it does of solid material, but because of the scale of the kind of liquid, the kind of material, and the size that I am, we operate at the scale of atomic structures appearing to be closed and complete.
But to many a scientist, the ceramic mug is not closed and complete. It is an opportunity for investigating. For asking, "Well, what's up with the quarks, though? What's down below that level?"
And that is where I do sometimes end up using these terms like Narrative Alchemy: Taking the pieces that don't make sense, translating them into a story, and then letting them bump around, letting them change. Don't say this character represents that politician, this event represents that war, this magical item represents an argument I had with my kids five years ago.
You don't say that, but you do it.
And then if you do it enough and let the story breathe and let the pieces bump into each other, when you find those rhythms and patterns that let you transform the slop into entertainment and the entertainment into the eggs which bring you sustenance, that's a bit of magic that we all have to do basically every day.
If one wall is feeling too solid, see if there's an alleyway just off to the side. If one source of inspiration or frustration feels immutable, feels impossible to adjust or change, try working around it a little bit, undermining its foundations (maybe not even intentionally) as you see what little thing you can do each day, what little change you can enact either in yourself or in your work. So that once that change becomes habit, it lets you change something else and then change something else.
And then a year or two from now... I'm not saying that you're going to have written a novel, finished a series of paintings, composed a symphony, or completely resolved any lingering issues in your personal life. But you'll have built out of those little tiny pieces and those small transformations something new, something healthier, something that you can even be proud of.