How did the stories we tell shape how we think about the future, the present and the past?
What is speculation for? And how might we construct better narratives for a better future?
Narrative Futures is a podcast coming to you from Futures Thinking.
A research network housed in the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities.
My name is Chelsea, hey, I'm a doctoral researcher in the faculty of English here at the University of Oxford.
We're extremely honoured to host today. Thompson on this, the final episode of Narrative Futures and Hope.
You enjoy our discussion of, amongst other things, metaphors of alien invasion,
the role of narrative in psychoanalysis and the Ngoma awards for African speculative fiction.
This podcast is interactive, following the interview,
you'll be treated to to writing prompts designed by novelist and creative writing tutor extraordinaire Louis Greenberg.
We invite you to share your response to these with us via email at Futures Thinking at torch dot o x, dot ac dot UK.
We'll share these on the blog where you'll also be able to find the full transcript of each episode with links to the books,
writers and ideas that we discuss. As the world so radically changes,
we hope these conversations and ideas give you insight and inspiration to think about how else we might live and create collectively going forward.
Tara Thompson is the author of the award winning Wormwood trilogy.
He won the AFC Clark Award for the first novel in that trilogy, Rosewater,
and has also won a kitschy Golden Tentacle Award and the inaugural Nomo Lubow Prise for best novel.
He writes short fiction and novellas, one of which the murders of Molly s born has been optioned for screen adaptation in 2018.
He wrote the important essay, Please Stop Talking about the rise of African science fiction for Literary Hub.
Today is a psychiatrist and has a background in social anthropology and a voracious appetite for reading.
What I do is I decide what I'm going to spend my time doing on a particular day, at a particular time.
And.
Anything else that comes up, I just don't do because everything you agree to do, when you agree to do something, you're missing out on something else.
So if I decided that I'm going to write a thousand words today, I'm going to write a thousand words in the next hour.
If anything comes up for that hour, I have to say no. It's the opportunity cost of writing those thousand words.
Most of us, I suppose, are not were not very deliberate about our time.
So we kind of let things drift and we, you know, you'd be surprised at how much time we waste allowing things to drift in that way.
So, yeah, that's it's time. It's time management, nothing else. I am.
I take baby steps, but consistent baby steps.
So why take a vote?
So, for example, I'm currently writing a screenplay which is probably going to go into one hundred and twenty hundred and thirty pages.
And I'm just doing it three pages a day and I'm consistently doing it three pages a day and at some point it will finish.
But each day seems like a very little amount. It is not stressful for me to do that, but it will get done, you know, and that's that's what I do.
I take lots of little steps every day. That's really Berlins advice for any of the writers who will be listening to this.
And I was wondering, as a psychiatrist by day, what role do you think narrative plays in how we think about the future?
I mean, your sense of kind of incremental working towards, you know,
it doesn't feel like you've taken baby steps given the huge output you've had in the last five years.
But, yeah, what do you think about in in terms of narrative and kind of deciding and determining a future
both on the micro level and the individual level and I suppose a slightly larger macro level?
Well, narrative is everything. I mean, I subscribe to the idea that we tell stories for the purpose of continuing a particular kind of knowledge,
telling ourselves a particular kind of knowledge. I mean, it's diverting, you know, so there's that.
But basically, the very first thing we do about ourselves is we we have our own personal histories and we tell our own stories.
But even when we're telling our own stories, we're already subtly editing it.
And if some if you have an account of something, once you begin to edit it, it means you are foregrounding some things and backgrounding other things.
And that's really what writing is. That's what storytelling is. You remove stuff that you think is extraneous to the message you want to be delivered.
The stories that we tell ourselves, and this speaks to psychiatry as well,
the stories that we tell ourselves are the most important, you know, the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves.
So as individuals, we have our own personal myths. And part of my job.
Is to see people you could look at mental illness as as as as personal myths gone awry.
So in other words, a person who is depressed thinks I am worthless. Nothing I do will ever mean anything.
There is no point being alive. I am a waste of space.
You know, these are distortions of someone's personal story because those things aren't really true of anybody.
But they begin to believe those things and they act accordingly. Sometimes they stop eating, sometimes.
Sometimes they eat too much. Sometimes they harm themselves.
You know, sometimes they you know, they go there to go other destructive behaviour.
But at the root of everything is a personal story that has become distorted, a personal history that has become distorted.
It's not to say that bad things have happened to the person,
and it's not to say that there's no possible neurochemical problem that is causing those thoughts.
But primarily the way we find out about it is because of a distortion of a person's story.
So the ability to narrow it is extremely important to all of us.
It is it is one of the reasons why, you know, children are kind of natural storytellers.
They'll just tell you a story no matter what. They'll tell you what happened at school. They'll do all of that.
And it might be unsophisticated,
but they know instinctively that storytelling is how human beings pass knowledge from one generation to the next and from one person to the next.
Our ability to communicate is is is primary is of the utmost importance and as a group.
Any grouping of human beings. They basically follow the same thing that the individual follows.
They have a group myth. We are X. In other words, starting Lukie, we say, for example, we are doctors.
So we are regulated by the General Medical Council. We belong to a royal college, whatever our speciality is.
And the Royal College kind of determines a bit our group identity or I belong to a gang.
This is our name. These are our gang signs. This is our sign that we will spray onto the wall.
And this is how we identify ourselves. We operate on Tottenham Court Road.
We live there. And therefore, that's our identity.
We tell ourselves these stories to bring about cohesion and bring about a kind of unified personhood.
And that's what we do as a group. And we do the same thing as a country. We say this is our history.
This is what defines us as a country, as a country. And so on.
And I believe if we had if we had real extraterrestrials, we would have an earth identity, which we would we we would try to promote to them.
But it's all stories. It's all narratives.
And as the people with the best story or rather let me I was I was about to say the people were the best story tend to predominate,
but actually the people who predominately tend to have the best story because they can force their story and everybody.
Yeah, well, it it's the story of the victor, isn't it? The victor writes the the narrative of the conquest.
I'm really interested in all these ideas about personal myth, kind of national myth.
I think the UK is currently suffering from a skewed view of a national myth.
And I was thinking a little bit about some of the myths around Rosewater and how and how that story came to you and I why if you could speak
a little bit about that and kind of your your road to to investigating what what personal myth is and how that relates to a national myth,
because Caros journey is very much kind of implicated in both of those.
Yes. I mean, the origin of all of it.
I think the earliest origin of of the Rosewell two stories on the books and everything has to be declassified, CIA documents.
I spent a lot of time reading them because it's stranger than fiction.
It's fascinating. I just can't I can't get enough of the stupidity of 20th century in particular.
I just can't get enough of the things that they did. What led me there in the first place was, you know, was the murder of Patrice Lumumba.
You know, and I kind of got into a rabbit hole and I really started investigating things to do with that particular murder.
And then I just kind of went off on tangents because that's the kind of person I am.
And I got to M.K. Ultra, which was a mind control experiments.
M.K. Delta, which is the same thing, was done on foreign soil when it got to mind control.
I started to wonder about that and I looked at the tests they did. They actually tested people like Uri Geller and anybody claiming to be a psychic.
They actually put them in experimental conditions and tested them to see if this actually existed.
I have to say their methodology wasn't great, but it was being done.
So I wanted to tell a story about this, but I didn't I didn't know what it was.
It was something to do with mind control or telepathy, something like that.
And I started to ask myself how it would happen or how it would work.
And I realised, okay, the idea that there'll be nothing in between a subject and a recipient and vice versa is ridiculous,
that there has to be something in between them. And I kind of played around with entanglements and in the sense quantum entanglement.
But the idea is to experimental. And then I thought, okay, well, what if there were something connecting them?
And the idea of somebody connected them came from a news report I read in 2011 about
why there were these twins that were conjoin twins who were connected by the brain.
And they could think each other's thoughts or they could hear each other's thoughts.
So I figured, OK, in between, if there were some if there were some connexion between the brains of people,
then they could hear each other's thoughts, even if that connexion was just one neurone thick or invisible.
And since I really like, how would that happen?
And I realised that for people to be connected, just the very basic Day-To-Day stuff is going to rip the Connexions apart.
So I needed something that would be able to be torn apart and reform itself.
And I thought, thought and thought. And I thought about fungus, you know, looking at a fungus, how the hyphy work, the fruiting body, then the lights.
And I figured, OK,
so if we had a microscopic fungus all around everywhere in the world that you'd be connected to and it would disconnect occasionally,
but then it would just branch out and connect again. That could work now for a reason that I'm not going to go into.
I was also at the time I was interested in computer networking.
I might do some sometime in the distant past. Actually, I've done some some internetworking training and all of that.
You know, I knew I knew how that worked,
and I used I used that to Soki find they would send messages to each other like small packets to say this connexion is open and all of that.
But this was just ideas. I didn't have characters and I didn't have a setting yet.
So I kind of just left the idea to Peter to percolate a little bit more.
What what then activated, it was when I remembered a cop, a convicted criminal I met once who was a thief,
and he told me stories, he told me stories about his life, how he became a thief.
He went to prison and all of that. And I realised that he would actually make a good character for this.
You know, some modified version of him would make a good character for this,
because once I thought of him in the kind of world where he would need to steal.
And I realised that I keep being telepathic would be a good skill for a person who was a thief.
Then the story started building from there. That's really where it came from. It's really beautiful.
I love the characterisation in the Wormwood trilogy because the old sci fi is so built around the world building and is so invested in,
you know, the explaining, the science, what you do so, so beautifully, but without losing the without losing the characters.
No cars, the thief, the sort of mahrous, irreverent, irresponsible, but ironically, fundamentally human protagonist.
And you've said elsewhere that you're more interested in characters than than worldbuilding.
Do you think that there's an emerging shift towards thinking about the human element
of the sort of the human to human experience of narrative features and sci fi worlds,
a shift away perhaps from the 1950s, 1960s style speculative fiction?
Well, there had better be, I think, in some way it's held science fiction back our.
Our fascination with the nuts and bolts of the world of technology in this space for all kinds of science fiction,
I would say there are people who really love that technical astrophysics,
that mathematical you know, there are people who really love that detail and stuff.
That's not me. I think stories are about characters.
And I think science fiction is the science. Fictional world is a backdrop for kids interacting with each other.
I don't identify very well with with science fiction or even fantasy that spends too much time on the minutiae of what's going on in this world.
My perspective is this. If you were writing a non science fiction story, for example, if you're writing a story about, I don't know,
suburbia or even, you know, are people in an urban environment, you will not be explaining how cars work.
You wouldn't be talking about how electricity works because the characters don't care.
They just cannot when they get into the car in the morning, when they stop the car. It works.
And when they script, when they turn the light switch, it comes on. Nobody cares how it works until it doesn't work.
And when it doesn't work, you get an expert.
So I can't imagine someone telling a story about the 21st century like right now and start to explain air travel.
This is how air travel works. Who cares? I don't care.
I just want to know who's flying in the plane. You know, tell me about the people flying in the plane and their anxieties about flying and their,
you know, their air sickness, their anxieties about legally, the fact that the person next to them smells or, you know,
the fact that they can't relax because someone is played songs f if, you know, earphones are too loud.
Things like that. Those are the things I want to know. You know, I don't want to know about left.
I don't want to know about drag unless unless that particular story is about that.
Unless there's about to be a crash or something.
But, you know, I don't like those kind of obsessions. I don't enjoy those kind of obsessions.
I enjoy people. I want to know about flawed people in interesting circumstances.
I love that the idea that the it's the circumstances that are interesting, but it's the characters responses to them that are that on the story.
And I think the kinds of speculative fiction we're seeing nowadays is life sort of since the 1980s is richer
and perhaps more popular for being engaged in the human element or more engaged in the human element.
I was thinking a little bit about your work having been kind of tied or having been described as having parallels to William Gibson's Neuromancer,
Ted Chiang's arrival and your own nods to Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain
and the title Rosewater and Rosewell in New Mexico being like worlds apart.
And I was thinking in relation to that, Owen does put downs of the British character Bellamy in the first book.
And the analogies between alien invasion and colonialism, if you would speak a little bit more about that.
Well, innovation is colonialism. I mean, there is no to me, there is no better metaphor.
That is what that metaphor is about. To me, the metaphor of innovation is people with.
Evil intent and better technology arriving in your space and trying to take over or taking over.
That's what it is. There is no there there is no better experience of alien invasions than that of former colonies.
There is no there is no better description of abduction,
of alien abduction than that of former slaves who are who find themselves taken away and taken into nations
where their language is despised and their very physical beings are used as markers to despise them.
You know where that culture is, that their culture is erased as fast as possible.
They're trying to make it there. They are made to assimilate one way or the other.
I'm.
I am very it's very difficult for me to write about aliens and for things like colonialism or slavery not to come out, because that is what it is.
That is what it is a metaphor for. Otherwise, we're just writing exciting space battles under which.
Generally leaves me cold anyway. I'm not I'm not a big fan of militaristic science fiction.
I will read it. And I you know, it's not that I can't watch a spectacle and enjoy the spectacle, but it doesn't because.
Conquest has been a tool used against my people for centuries because it because of what it has led to all of the time,
I find it very difficult to enjoy a militaristic science fiction. Yeah.
The Robert Heinlein Fusion of Space Fascism.
So when you're talking about what you do enjoy and thinking about texts that engage with
with the real history of the world when we're in an era where we're kind of negotiating,
well, is colonialism actually over?
I'm thinking about with the proliferation of genres like indigenous future isms, which is particularly booming in North America and in Australia.
What kind of texts are you seeing and what authors are you following and particular excited to read?
Okay, so I think as you talk a little bit about the idea of post colonialism first.
So one of the things I don't like, though, or that I don't enjoy is the idea of indigenous art being seen as post-colonial ism,
as if it has to be seen in relation to something someone else has done.
I would prefer to see it as something that is its own thing and not not a reaction to something else.
It has to be it has to exist, as you know, as the thing itself,
what Microsoft or elusively it has to be its own thing, not something that is in response to this.
As long as you remain in response to this, you might as well still be a colony.
You have to still be a slave if you're still responding to the things that have happened.
So there is a place for the response and there's a place for, okay, look, now we're just telling our stories.
We don't actually care about you guys, you know. Yes, this happened. Boodhoo But this is what we're doing now.
That's the role of the art, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it still goes back to the thing I said about defining ourselves with stories.
What stories to tell Taliban ourselves. It's important to want to move beyond it.
In other words, they get back to a history that precedes colonialism.
A lot of which was removed or are erased. To me, it's more important to get back to that.
And it's more policy to start thinking actually about the future, like.
Where are we going, what are we now, how do we want to define ourselves? Those kind of thoughts are the thoughts that I am that I wish we had.
You know, unfortunately, a lot of what we're writing is still reactionary and mimetic.
You know, some of it is more like, okay, well, this is similar to what science fiction has already done,
largely because this is how we think science fiction needs to be done. And all writers respond to what they've read, right, without it.
That is correct. You have to you will respond to what you've read.
And when you're in a particular stage, there will be that anxiety of influence because you think,
OK, this is coming out just like blah is just coming up, just like Stephen King's work was coming out just like this, you know,
and what you're supposed to do is right through that, you just keep writing until your own particular.
Individuality emerges, you know, and then the stories that you care about then begin to come out.
I mean, one of the books I enjoyed the most I read recently was The Old Drift by Unwealthy Subpanel.
It's extremely well written. It's like a generational epic.
Yeah. So good for a debut. And I mean, so good as a novel, yet it's genius.
The Zambian space programme. Yes. Yeah. It's fantastic.
You know that that is the kind of novel I enjoy reading. Well, you won't be surprised to hear I'm a fan of Ursula Lagoon.
Read a front of that kind of writing that explores ideas.
You know, to the extent that, you know, that has beautiful language at the same time, you know, explores the depth of emotion.
It's just, you know, that's that's the kind of book I enjoy. I believe we still have a way to go.
But part of it is, is what's the real the real aspect of colonialism that I tried to address in Rosewater is the is a mental colonialism.
Neo colonialism where.
We see success in the Western world and we try to mimic it in the way we tell our stories and the way we the way we formulate our art.
We have inferiority feelings that make us think, OK, we have to ape what we see in order to be successful.
That is true to an extent. You know, what you're producing can't be so esoteric and nobody can understand it.
So it has to have some elements of some, I don't know,
some anchors that an audience can can pay attention to while they're consuming the new or unique stuff.
You're trying to say I mean,
I think family's character is really interesting for that in the subsequent novels because she's she's just not having any of it.
It's important making sure that we are not going to do this the American way.
Absolutely not. Well, exactly. I mean, vetting is great, are great.
She's actually basically someone like someone I know as well. You know, the way she navigates the world she's in, which is largely sexist.
You know, she's got the president to sexist to her even subordinate. You know, Kyra, her subordinates is certainly sexist.
So she's navigating a a sexist world where women's power is not.
You know, it is not a settled thing. You know, it's precarious.
So she may have the position and she may have.
Let's say she has wealth, for example, because she does,
but she still is in a very precarious position where she has to manage the emotions of the powerful men around her.
You know, I deliberately I deliberately wanted to. Wanted to show that it's still, you know, the world in which they exist is still a world in which.
Power is largely held by men and has to be negotiated in a sense.
Things like her having to say, okay, look, how are we going to do this?
You know, a certain degree of ruthlessness is required and a certain degree of callousness because of the end goal.
And in the entire book, she's the only one who saw the end goal from the start and knew what she had to do.
Yeah, she's she's brilliant in that kind of. There is an obvious, overriding narrative that she sees that.
But Carol, I can't imagine what a what a compliment to the person that you've based her on.
I want to talk a little bit now about the NOMO awards and your involvement with them following your win of the inaugural Nobel Prise for best novel.
And I was wondering what you think is the significance of the NOMO Awards and the African Speculative Fiction Society specifically?
It's I mean, obviously, it's a it's a massive honour.
It's the first speculative fiction award, you know, for Africans that there is it's the very first one.
Now, I was there from the onset, from the beginning when we started having casual conversations on Facebook about this.
And we were like part of the problem that that African offers,
like continental African authors and the like have is that sometimes the storytelling traditions are not really well understood by Western editors,
you know. Is there still it still is a problem that I see now. It's a problem you had at the outset of your career.
Yes. Yes. You ask anybody from, you know, from any kind of minority or any kind of anybody who is not in a position of power,
so to speak, and their stories tend to be marginalised. One of the reasons the stories are marginalised is what you said before.
Another was the victors write the stories. In other words, the victors decide how stories are to be told.
The other aspect is simply audiences are trained to understand particular types of storytelling.
All right. Little Miss Muffet sat on a tough editing recursion. Way along came a spider and sat down beside there and frightened mismo for the way.
You know, that is a storytelling tradition. Now, if you are a child and you've been told that kind of story all your life.
When you grow up and you finish from secondary school and you go into university and you study
literature and you study creative writing and you become an editor in your you still have an MBA,
regardless of what your training is, regardless of what kind of text you read in university, you will still have that imprint on your head.
This is what a story is. A story is a beginning, middle and end, which is different from the same person.
Grew up, for example, not in person, didn't grow up in Welwyn Garden City.
The person grew up in Tokyo, for example. Ideas of stories are different people.
In Lagos, your ideas of stories will still incorporate the Western way because of colonialism.
But underneath all of that, we have our own storytelling traditions and those are going to lead to different types of of narratives.
When you when you begin to produce plays and screenplays and novels and short stories,
they're going to have different traditions because audiences are trained differently. Absolutely.
But I was thinking about from what you're saying now and how we think about memory and narrative.
Right. And the sort of linearity of what the supposed linearity of memory, which is, of course, not how we remember things.
And that connexion with the linear narrative story, Little Miss Muffet.
And then. And then. And then and that kind of pushing against that,
which I think is so important in in our in our reading practises and absolutely a kind of a kind of bias that we have to work against.
That's true. Yeah. And the sense that that these narratives can kind of disrupt,
but that there is also that element of if this is what you've grown up with and if your first is a little Miss Muffet stories,
then you've got to then you've been there is going to be in somewhat.
And so a reading blindspot. Yeah.
Yes. I think that's one way of looking at it. There's so many ways of telling the story.
You know, there's so many ways of thinking of certain ways of starting, you know, starting the story.
Yeah. I love the idea of the kind of thinking about something that, you know, a childhood narrative,
that kind of reshaping that to think about how how narrative works for novels for older people and how your
formative reading can really shape and change who you become and the kind of stories that you can tell.
And you're a huge fan of Frankenstein, but you've also said the House of Leaves by Mark Z.
Danielewski is a comfort read in different novels, reread, interestingly, innovative in different ways.
Yeah, I wonder if you'd speak a little bit to that, because I think. Yeah. I think that there's so much going on there.
I like I like playing with form. I like I like stories that play with form.
So Frankenstein, even for its time, you know, already had the intersecting stories, you know, it was a, you know, like a Russian dolls Nestl stories,
the story nested in in Victor Frankenstein story nested in Woolton, story nested in the narrative of them going to the North Pole.
I loved that structure, the basic unreliability of the narratives all the way through, you know,
because really we only have victors word about certain things to do with the creature.
We only have this word for those things. That doesn't necessarily mean that's actually how it happened.
And what did he admits so that he would look good. I like that you can think about Frankenstein, for example, in infinite ways.
You can sit down and start thinking, well, is it possible that.
Victor was actually just some disturbed guy picked up and he was delirious and
he was telling a complete fib that the whole thing wasn't even true anyway. Is it possible that Walton made the whole thing up to amuse his sister?
Is it you know, there's so many there's so many ways to think about the story itself that just so many ways,
if you sit down and obviously I have spent too much time reflecting on it.
But you know what? I love it for that. I love it because it's not linear.
It's not it doesn't lend itself to easy explanations. You know, I love it because of the emotional complexity of Victor Frankenstein.
True love not being Elizabeth, but actually being, you know, his friend and his dedication being something that's actually quite macabre.
That's not actually a positive scientific story.
Not unlike in the films in the book, you know, Victor isn't actually a doctor that often people say things like doctor friends,
but he's not actually a doctor, is a medical student. So he didn't he he hadn't gone through all of the training.
And then presumably he didn't go through the part that dealt with ethics ethics before it went ahead and did what he did.
Mm hmm. You know, and at heart, you know, it's it's the it's the story of of an abandoned child at heart, which is Shelly's story as well.
Yes, it's exactly. Shali story, Shelley. Story of, you know, having powerhouse intellectuals for parents,
having activists for parents, and then not only being abandoned more or less by her parents,
not not true about her, but actual effective de facto abandonment, but also being abandoned by her husband.
You know, at the same time, you know, pretty much at the time of writing the book.
So it reflected in her life, which is, you know, pretty much as interesting as the book is, you know, in her father's life and her mother's life.
It's so it's just it's a little mixed. So there's a nexus of interesting intersections, all of it.
And in terms of the Laskey. You know, because, again, it has several layers of storytelling.
You know, as the direct story, you know, of the inevitable documents of what's going on in this particular house.
Then there's the story told in the footnotes about the discovery of the documents and discovery of the book and the experiments with texts,
with structure, with everything. It worked very through work so well for me and I, you know, you know, so I like the uniqueness of it.
As much as nothing is ever completely unique. But I like the uniqueness of it.
I like the inventiveness. And I like the fact that I can open any page and be interested in whatever I'm reading.
Yeah, a beautifully disrupts what we think a book should be, right.
Yes. What is inside the covers and how we how we engage with that.
Have you read Frankenstein by Jeanette Winterson. Yes, I have.
Yes. I loved I loved that as well. It's brilliant, isn't it? I love the spreading those stories together.
And the idea of, you know, Victor walks amongst us can actually love you know, I love Julia Winston anyway.
For those writers and speculators listening,
stay with us now for writing prompts and exercises designed to encourage putting pen to paper or hands to keyboard,
as well as reflection on the writing process. This section is designed and presented by Larry Greenberg.
In this interview today, Thompson says that alien invasion stories are pure metaphor for colonialism.
That's the powerful metaphor, then invites an empathetic jump. Entire cultures are appropriated and erased.
Languages and appearances are disguised. People are stolen. Their homes appropriated.
There are countless alien invasion stories available, told from every angle and often these centre on technological dominance.
On a related note,
Thompson also says he doesn't identify with stories that spend too much time on technological and logistical minutiae at the expense of character.
I think we need to talk about colonialism and I'm short on dialogue prompts in the series and maybe getting
characters to talk to one another rather than invade each other will be a good idea for this exercise.
Try to write a passage of pure dialogue, just speech and a minimum of associated description between an invader and an invader.
It's up to you who they are, where they are, what they talk about.
They might be barked orders and protestations or the conversation may become cathartic.
In addition to Thompson's feelings on technology, let's these technologized the scene.
Should be no technology in the scene. No machines, no computers, no spacecraft.
Just people or aliens, as the case may be.
Please share your ideas and consider how the restrictions have affected your vision and how it compares with any other pieces posted.
Thompson Sacher analytical background and his interest and character, above all, recalled several strands in therapeutic creativity.
Julia Cameron is the artist Sway or Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones or Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with
the Dead are just some examples of writing or creativity guides that take a therapeutic approach to creativity.
One of Julia Cameron's key exercises is the narrative timeline, telling your own personal history as if it's a story.
This helps us identify important themes and arcs in our own lives.
For your final prompt, write your narrative timeline or just a brief segment of it.
Then edited retail it. Reframe it in any way you like.
You might like to pause now and return when you've written the exercise. Consider the following.
How have you retold your story? Do things get better or worst?
In your new version, in the new story, are you someone completely different or recognisably the same?
Do you live in a different place? Do you do different work, have different levels of influence?
Are the changes to the story small and subtle or sweeping? Did you avoid the hard stare inside and actually describe someone else?
If you read the notes in the opening prompt of the Lauren Beukes interview.
Look back at it now. Do you feel any more or less inspired to write despite the isolation of writing itself?
Creativity is a communal act, so we've helped you feel more connected and inspired.
And that concludes the final episode of the Narrative Futures podcast.
Thanks to Today Thompson for joining us on this episode.
And to all of you listening in for engaging with these ideas and debates, if you have any comments or contributions, you can tweet us at think fut.
Now, your host on this podcast is Chelsea Haith, and you can tweet me at Chelsie, Underscore Haith and Louie at Louis Greenberg.
The transcripts of the podcast are available on the Torch Web site under the Future Thinking Tab and include links to the authors,
books and ideas we've discussed over the course of the podcast. Thank you to all of our listeners and guests.
Feel careful, thought and contributions that narratives for a better future.