A quick note on writing.

I felt free when I realized I could write the way I thought life worked. I mean without moral meaning, without a plot that resolved conflict, without a narrative that ended in a place that was planned from the beginning. Like the Bible.

I don’t believe in models of conversion, recovery, survival. I don’t believe in stories that can be summarized: I used to be, and now I’m not. Often these stories are: I used to be, and now I’m not, and you can use the template of my story and get fixed, like me.

I don’t believe people are as broken as many stories about mental health—also known as the field of mental health—preach. If we’re not as broken as is maintained, we don’t need to be fixed, as is maintained. And there goes one giant narrative industry that includes the successful marketing of personality disorders and used cars. I’m saying: I don’t believe in selling, homilies, or sermons. If I had to summarize a plot that feels true, it would be: I used to be, and I still am.

There is no subject matter that's intrinsically interesting or uninteresting. The story is not about what happened, it's about what the narrator makes of what happened.

Change and drama can happen in moments of reflection layered into narrative. I call it thought-in-action. It’s what Shakespeare invented in the soliloquy. A person in real time is looking back to an earlier time, whether it is five minutes ago or 50 years ago, and the person is thinking about the way that time was sensed in the past and the way this evocation of the past is stirring the narrator’s thoughts now. Has a mind changed? Minds change from moment to moment. They don’t stay fixed, and new thoughts add volume, they don’t replace each other. The past is not a series of mistakes the present has arrived to update and fix. In my humble opinion.

That leaves you with a very different kind of written document from ones that offer a continuous narrative, or ones that progress chronologically, or ones that see a chunk of experience as a mystery, finally, to be solved. We aren’t ever going to know, really, why we behave the way we do or why anyone else behaves the way they do. There are no clues. There is no untangling. There is only more tangling. Tangle better might be the thing you can exchange for ending a piece of writing with a bow.

The thing about the chunks you offer instead of a continuous narrative is: They have to be brilliant separately as well as in the series where they are placed. They have to surprise, use language in ways no one expects, produce feeling in the reader. The reader has to enter the circuit of tangle better as if the tangle is about the reader. Ultimately, the arrangement isn’t haphazard. That’s where the artifice comes in. To be continued.

The next Zoom conversation covering memoir and other narrative forms is now set for Saturday September 23 3-4pm EST. It’s for paid subscribers, and the cost now is as little as $3.75 a month. To RSVP for the Zoom, email me: lauriestone@substack.com.