Carrier Bag Theory

no more heroes

Hello readers, ramblers and sequel scribblers, welcome back to Sequel Country. This week I’m going to give you a quick guided tour of a scenic spot which gives an interesting and different viewpoint across a wide range of countryside.

Last week I quoted from Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin’s wonderfully practical “handbook for storytellers – writers of narrative prose”. I first read it about 7 years ago, and I still refer to it from time to time – for example I found its discussion of how to choose tense and point of view, and switching between points of view, especially useful. Another thing I read in it, that “resonated with me” (which is an academic-sounding way of saying that I found something that agreed with something I already had a hunch about myself) concerns conflict.

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioural options. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.

Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

I’ve noticed this emphasis on conflict in many books on creative writing. In screenwriting especially (which next week’s column will be about), I’ve seen advice that every scene needs conflict. Now, conflict is something you can define pretty widely; I’ve even seen it suggested that it can include conflict with a character’s own past or future self, an intriguing idea that can be used to frame psychological tension as a conflict. But in general, I don’t like conflict, so I agree with Ursula, that it’s just one of many “equally important” aspects of life that a novel can be about. If every scene has to have something, it’s change. Something should be different, either in the world or in our understanding of a character, between the start and end of every scene. That’s true of every scene in my novel Parallel Lines – I made sure of it in the editing process, and cut scenes that didn’t pull their weight. At this point I can justify what every single paragraph in the book is there for.

So I wouldn’t say that Ursula’s view changed how I write, but it has given me far more confidence in the kind of story I mostly tend to write. She said more on this theme in an essay (which is available as a book) called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. It builds on the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution, which argues that we were gatherers long before we were hunters, and so would have developed the bag long before weapons. She critiques the hero’s journey type of story (which I discussed in part 20, Story structure) as being fundamentally a killer story, spear-shaped, but she argues that the novel is an inherently unheroic form:

That is why I like novels. Instead of heroes they have people in them.

That’s why I like novels too, and particularly ones that don’t revolve around an epic conflict. For that matter, I cringe whenever illness is framed as warfare (yesterday I heard “a battle against motor neurone disease”) – it’s your own body, surely there are better ways to frame a narrative of overcoming a problem with it, than weapons and battles, especially seeing as a war on death can only ever end in defeat. In the carrier bag theory of storytelling, the emphasis shifts from the goal (win the battle) to the experience of life, represented by all the things (objects of significance) gathered in the bag along the way. It’s oriented not towards the death or defeat of an enemy or obstacle, but towards life.

In my 20s, I had a phase of being interested in personality tests, I suppose because I was figuring out what kind of adult person I am. I’m an extrovert (perhaps obviously) and type ENFP supposedly. A much more useful thing to learn about myself, though, was that I’m process-oriented rather than goal-oriented. This was something of a surprise, since I was in academia until the age of 25 and always had an obvious goal in front of me until then, so I never had to think about it. But at work, and in my home life as I took 15 years to renovate a rubbish old house that we bought cheap, I found it was the acts of doing and the experience gained along the way that really motivated me, not the longing for the finishing or the basking in success. And this makes sense of my writing life too: I’ve been writing novels since the age of 9, but left them unfinished as often as not, because finishing was never really the point. I just enjoy the writing and the polishing of my writing, the craft and the journey.

Maybe goal-driven people are attracted by hero’s-journey, spear-shaped stories, I don’t know, but I like stories about authentically drawn people and the experiences they collect in their suitcase of life. I never watch superhero films, but I enjoy continental cinema with no beginning and end to the story, just an hour or two of stuff happening and then it stops without a resolution. Another shiny pebble with a happy or sad (or both) memory attached to pop in your bag, and maybe one day to pull out of the bag and retell the story to someone else. At least you do if, like me, you like telling stories, which is another important thing I’ve understood about myself in adulthood but which has actually been there all along.

So the essence of the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is that conflict and struggle are just two of many things to be collected within the carrier bag, box, medicine bundle or however you think of it. They

may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Understanding stories in this way frees you up to tell stories that aren’t limited to a linear progression towards triumph or tragedy. And that opens up all sorts of vistas across Novel Nation, and gives us permission to go explore, without it becoming a grail quest – just a ramble to see what we find and pick up some shiny stuff if it takes our fancy, put it in our satchel and carry on. And that’s exactly what I’m doing in Sequel Country. See you next time!