The Art of Telling Stories That Hold Opposites
Writing From the Space Where Light Meets Dark
One of the books that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on my life and way of being in the world, is the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. So each month I am exploring a chapter of this book and how we can use its wisdom in our writing, and lives, today.
I hope you enjoy it. I'd love to hear from you with your comments and ideas. This month's translation is from the Stephen Mitchell translation.
Chapter 2
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
Balancing Act
At the heart of Taoism is the concept of balance, which is expressed through the belief that you cannot have light without dark, happiness without sadness, slow without fast, day without night, etc. The yin-yang symbol is the embodiment of this and the black and white portions of the symbol are equal to one another.
In the book Qigong and the Tai Chi Axis by Mimi Kuo Deemer, she explains:
"The original meaning of yin and yang, however, referred to the shady and sunny side of a mountain. Ancient Daoist and shamanic sages observed that as the sun rose and crossed the sky, one side of the mountain would be in sun while the other was in shade. By afternoon, the light on the mound was the opposite. This non-hierarchical idea came to reflect the notion that the world exists in a harmonious balance of opposites; if something contracts it must first expand."
If you read the whole of the Tao Te Ching, you will see that this message of balance and harmony is at the heart of the entire text. And that it is when we achieve this balance and live aligned with the Tao that all is well in our world. We only need to look around at our societies, at the atrocities being committed around the world against humans and animals and the planet that is the only home we have, to see that all is most definitely not well. We are not living aligned with the Tao and we are not witnessing the natural balance of opposites that it speaks of.
Storytelling
What I want to look at more closely for storytelling from the ideas in Chapter 2 and how they relate to the time we find ourselves living in now, is this part:
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
This part of the chapter seems to me to be highlighting the ways in which the world becomes out of balance and also to reflect our world today. We are living in a time of division — the them and us mentality seems, to me, to be growing by the day. People splintering into different groups and aligning themselves with that group's ideology only. Demonising other groups, and even people who are in no groups and are accepting of all, as they're not saying what the people in that group want to hear. We see it in politics all the time.
Anyone who has seen any of the news from the UK over the past decade in particular will know about the demonisation of 'others' by the media and politicians. Those others take many forms depending on the stance of the media outlet, or political party but they have a huge impact. In 2016, the people in my home country were divided into Stay and Leave and the repercussions of that Brexit vote, which was driven by barefaced lies and a propaganda campaign that was quite something to behold, are still reverberating now.
In 2022 I spent several months backpacking and in that time I visited Turkey, Mauritius, Thailand and Malaysia and in all of these places (bar Thailand), people I spoke to told me how their government marginalises people based on their religion and/or ethnicity. Everywhere I went I witnessed the fast-widening gulf between the haves and the have nots, and the fast-growing numbers of have nots. In 2023, I spent three months housesitting in Canada, in a town in BC where the number of homeless people sleeping on the streets was overwhelming. These social issues are wrong and upsetting, as are the many others we all witness every day. They are not the harmonious balance of opposites at the heart of the Tao.
But it is being in a state of imbalance and the strive to achieve balance that provides the impetus for the stories we write and the characters that appear in them. Conflict is at the heart of storytelling — both external in the world of the plot, or premise, that starts the story off and internal in the minds of our characters that the plot forces them to confront. That conflict doesn't have to be huge and explosive, but it does have to be there, and it is created by things in our characters’ past that have caused an imbalance in their thinking and, consequently, in the way they live and behave.
Story Reading
Useful Sister by Weike Wang
This short story appeared online in Electric Literature and you can read it here.
Synopsis
A story of sibling rivalry and fitting in, or not, Useful Sister is narrated by the middle child of three sisters. Shifting alliances and hierarchies and the ever-changing, fraught yet loving relationship between them are all explored to shine a light on how families work, or don’t, in the modern world.
Story Analysis
I chose this story because the conflict at the heart of it isn't huge and explosive and because it seems to me to have the 'other' within it in different layers. It's present right from the start with the youngest sister, Veronique, being named differently and parented differently, and subsequently, as our narrator believes, behaving differently. Then there is the otherness of being a Chinese immigrant family in America and, all through the story, the narrator lists the ways in which Veronique is not doing things the way she believes they should be done.
Also, I like that these passages in the story have a Tao Te Ching kind of feeling to them:
Blend in just enough but also aim for the top.
Stand out too much and you will inevitably be cut down.
Save and live frugally so you can be rich.
Throughout the story though, it feels to me that it is the narrator who really feels, fears, that she is the 'other' and I believe that feeling lies at the heart of everyone driving division and splintering into groups today. That people are afraid they don't fit in so they have to join a group, or create one, where they can try.
What did you think of the story and it's sense of otherness? Let me know in the comments below.
Craft Development
In the craft book, Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc (which I wrote about here), Dara Marks talks of the "Eternal Story" and that at their heart, all of the stories we create are about life and death. Not always a physical birth or passing, but the birth and death of hopes, dreams, ideas, judgements, all of the things that make up a human life and psyche.
In this post, I share a recommendation of a book by Pema Chödrön which looks at the constant cycle of the things that are born and die on a daily basis in our human lives. So as you approach the writing exercise and prompt, think about how you can introduce this concept of life and death into your story and how it is tied to the conflict at the heart of it.
Writing Exercise
Use a character in a story that you have been working on for a while that you are still developing and spend 15 minutes working out what they need to let die in their life and what can be born to take its place. This can be for a character in a novel, short story or memoir piece.
New Work Prompt
Write a story that features 'the other' and a character that has to confront their assumptions/prejudices about them.
When you write the story, think about how you can also bring in this element of the Tao chapter as part of the character's emotional journey.
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
How does someone teach without saying anything? For me, this is all about actions speaking louder than words. What ways do you think this can be expressed in a story? Let me know in the comments as I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts.
Things to think about when drafting/planning your story:
How can the otherness be present in the story in layers?
What changes for your narrator during the course of the story relating to the otherness?
What is the overarching message of the story?
Happy writing!
With love,
Serendipity- I was playing around with the concept of reframing things from a different perspective. Your prompts are giving me a whole range of possibilities here, thank you
Love this Amanda. I've always meant to read this, so much wisdom!