Although I knew a little about the elephant-headed god from my travels in India many moons ago, these weren’t exactly stories I’d heard my mother’s knee. What if others were more familiar with the story than I was? Would I be able to engage people? What if I forgot my lines? 

Of course, I needn’t have worried. Thanks to Chamu’s support and a lovely group of tolerant walkers, I had a fabulous time telling my two stories, as you’ll see from the pictures below, and from others on the Hindu Samaj website. 

The experience got me thinking about the differences between story writing and storytelling. Although I often read my fiction aloud to check for stumbling blocks, telling a story without a script to an audience is another matter altogether.

As a reader and as a writer, I treat adverbs with suspicion and every adjective has to earn its keep. Yet the oral form has a baroque feel to it, bustling with verbal curlicues, never using one word when half a dozen will do. Repetition, cliches, It came to pass and In due course – I welcomed them as joyfully as I attempt to edit out each just and quite from the written
form. It wasn’t the presence of two delightful children that made me spout such archaic and nursery-style phrases; they seemed appropriate for the story to flow.

Relaxing into the role, I began to tell the story physically: modulating my voice;
exaggerating my facial expressions; making judicious use of pauses. I don’t have an extroverted bone in my body, but I couldn’t help falling into the rhythms and performing.

This will be no surprise to those familiar with reading bedtime stories, but to me it
was a revelation, and I’m looking forward to doing it again at the end of August next year, only better. (If you watch the video below, you'll see there's lots of room for improvement.) If you'd like to come, the details will be on the Ranger walks calendar.

If you've been paying attention, you might have noticed I've delivered all the posts I promised for October (gold stars all round). For next month I hope to bring you the fourth instalment in my series on fictional psychologists and psychotherapists; a look at internal obstacles to achieving one's personal and fictional goals inspired by my Q&A with Anthea Nicholson, as well as my recent post on character motivation; and why I'm raving about a small book of psychoanalytic case studies. I've also got posts in the pipeline on writers' routines; writing in the first person plural; old-age stereotypes; leaving home; another look at rhythm and my love affair with allotments. Hopefully there's something you'll want to come back for.

If you're still wondering how the elephant god got his head, you can read a précis of the story here:

The video picks up the story halfway through, when Shiva has chopped off the head of Parvati's darling boy and is sending out his bodyguards to find a replacement.

Or go here for a musical version of the story.

Given you’re still reading, I have to assume she hasn’t put you off. But would you have read on if Maeve were the opening of a short story or a novel? I don’t think I would. In those few sentences, I’ve prioritised an accurate representation of what happened – and it is absolutely true, apart from that Maeve isn’t her real name – over the form of the writing. It might serve as a provoking starter to a blog post but, were a piece of writing to continue in this vein, it would prove heavy going.

I’ve been unable to source many examples of fiction featuring hallucinatory states that isn’t jettisoned by treatises on illicit drug use or psychiatric
assumptions about psychosis. I’ve read a couple of good thrillers where it turns out that the jeopardy is all in the protagonist’s head, but to name them here would involve committing the sin of spoiling. There’s the shellshocked war veteran hallucinating birds singing in Greek in  Mrs  Dalloway, but I’m not so taken with stream of consciousness and multiple exclamation marks.

In real life, our goals are often fuzzy, especially regarding the things that matter most, and, even if we think we know what we want, we’re often quite haphazard in the way we try to achieve it. Who can show me how to take my characters along an obstacle course that will satisfy the reader without compromising on the complexity of human motivation? It turns out there are some excellent models in the novels I’ve been reading for my interviews with debut authors.
 
Let’s start with Alys, Always, the foundation for my latest Q&A with author Harriet Lane. What Frances wants is uncertain at the beginning and is gradually shaped by circumstance.  Later, when she develops her plan, the details are withheld from the reader. The tension arises, not from following her along a clear path, but from wondering exactly where she’s heading and how far she’s prepared to go. Here’s what the author told me about this apparent subversion of the motivation ideal:

Above, for your amusement and edification, is my TBR/TBB pile as of the last day of September: debut novels; novels featuring therapists or set in psychiatric hospitals; one for the Hungarian slant; one with a quirky take on pronouns and a book that isn’t a novel at all. 
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many of these will get a mention
here in the coming month?
So how does this compare with your own TBR pile?  Anything here you’re already raving about?  Anything you’ve sampled and thrown across the room?
While we’re on the subject of questions about books, remember the quiz
I set when I blogged about my new header at the beginning of last month? Three simple questions, and my apologies for the absence of prizes, but I’m sure you’re all grown-up enough not to hold it against me.  The answers are below the line so, if you didn’t do the quiz before, you’ve still got a chance to go back and test yourself before clicking on Read More.

While Adrian's ineffectiveness is no great advert for clinical psychology, I find him one of the most convincing fictional psychological therapists I've encountered so far.  This might be down to the author's expertise in creating plausible characters, as well as her good sense in seeking professional advice, as noted in the acknowledgements.  (As I mentioned in the introduction to this series of posts, psychologists and psychological therapists are appealing to writers, but can be hard to get right.)  Although I've never worked abroad, or with those blunted by war, some of Adrian's experiences reminded me of the challenges of working as a psychologist in longstay psychiatric institutions in Britain, with the sense of overwhelming need and not yet having the right tools or structures to meet them.  Perhaps the best he can do is listen to the stories of those able to tell them, and bear witness to the tragedy around him.

In that context, the ending didn't work so well for me, when he offers his friend, local surgeon Kai Mansaray, a potential remedy for the trauma that prevents him sleeping.  It might be a case of letting the psychology dominate the story rather than support it: while the treatment, EMDR, is a recommended intervention for post-traumatic stress disorder, and one that a suitably trained psychologist might practice, the somewhat mechanical method seems quite a shift in tone from Adrian's previous approaches.  However, those with a more immediate experience of trauma work may disagree with this reading and, either way, it's a small point in a psychologically astute and deeply moving novel.

More war trauma with the next in the series, I'm afraid, when I review Pat Barker's take on the treatment of shellshocked soldiers in the First World War in her 1991 novel, Regeneration. But I'll be posting on some jollier topics before then, starting with my reading pile in four or five days time. If you can't wait that long for something on the lighter side, check out this style blog for a very different take on the spirit of the people of Freetown, Sierra Leone.