Friend and author, Ashley Meggitt joins me...

...here on the blog today.  Hi, Ashley and thanks for taking time out to be here today.  You're the author of a number of non-fiction books and the best-selling novel, The Dark Chorus.  So, why do you think stories are so important?
 
AM  Stories resonate with us.  We use stories to understand and explain ourselves, to make sense of the world around us, to connect with others and to connect to the past.  Stories offer us paths to commonality and help us make sense of our differences, imbuing cultural knowledge, social norms, and morality.

The particular stories we hear are dependent on our social location which in turn informs, what can be thought of as, our ideological environment.  When we construct a story, either to deliver some factual position (as we see it), or for entertainment, we call on narratives as construction resources.  The narratives we have to hand are drawn from our ideological environment.  In other words, we build bespoke stories based on existing, often implicitly, understood narrative templates.  A story can be seen as instance of a given narrative.  Multiple stories can be derived from the same narrative template.

Works of fiction are by their nature based on the narratives available to the individuals that write them.  There is no difference between the narrative use for a personal story or one of fiction, but there is between the stories themselves. Their difference lies in the story’s degree of factuality, the adherence to or deviation from a person’s real experience.

The chilling cover of my copy
of 1984

With this in mind then, it’s arguable that works of fiction can be as valid and impactful as real accounts.  An example of this would be George Orwell’s 1984. A narrative of state oppression and control provides the template from which Orwell created his iconic story of Winston Smith - a bleak and powerful telling of a dystopian future.  The work is clearly fiction, yet it seems to ring true.  That’s because the narrative is familiar, it runs through our history, and Orwell’s skill in its delivery has had a lasting impact on many of those that have read it (including me!).

The eminent sociologist, Arthur Frank says, “Stories work with people, for people, and on people, affecting what people are able to see as real, as possible, and as worth doing or best avoided.”

As writers, this statement is worth keeping to hand.  We have the opportunity to affect the reader’s thinking, to give them alternative ways to see everything from the minutia to world views.  And this can have consequences which we need to be aware of.  Stories have power, they can create feelings of happiness and empathy, create hate and resentment, and they can even set a country on the road to war (the latter is a little unlikely but possible).

The narratives we use when we write tell our readers what they can broadly expect, but this in itself doesn’t give us a story that can be impactful.  To do this the writer needs to call on their penmanship, on their ability to create believable characters, events, create emotional conflict and possible resolutions.  If Orwell hadn’t been such a skilled writer 1984 would not have been nearly as impactful despite the powerful narrative.

People are hardwired to process stories.  Stories are our fundamental vehicle for communication and from a social reality point of view, we might consider that we exist only as the stories we tell.  In essence, stories animate us as both the teller and the listener.

...about the book The Boy can see lost souls.  He has never questioned the fact that he can see them.  He thinks of them as the Dark Chorus.  When he sets out to restore the soul of his dead mother it becomes clear that his ability comes from within him.  It is a force that he cannot ignore – the last shard of the shattered soul of an angel. 

To be restored to the kingdom of light, the shard must be cleansed of the evil that infects it – but this requires the corrupt souls of the living! 

With the help from Makka, a psychotically violent young man full of hate, and Vee, an abused young woman full of pain, the Boy begins to kill. 

Psychiatrist Dr Eve Rhodes is seconded to assist the police investigation into the Boy’s apparently random ritualistic killings. As the investigation gathers pace, a pattern emerges.  When Eve pulls at the thread from an article in an old psychology journal, what might otherwise have seemed to her a terrible psychotic delusion now feels all too real…

Will the Boy succeed in restoring the angel’s soul to the light? Can Eve stop him, or will she be lost to realm of the Dark Chorus?

You can get Ashley's novel on Amazon

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