Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

Is literary theory useful for the creative writer? IMHO it can often actually have an inhibiting effect. The reason for this, I think, is that most academic literary criticism is primarily concerned with texts – analysing texts, placing texts in historical contexts etc. For the creative writer, on the other hand, things are rather different.  The creative writer produces texts, of course, but only as a means towards an end: affecting the mind and emotions of a reader. Ultimately, for the creative writer, it’s not about the text in itself, but about the effects of the text on the reader: woe betide the writer who forgets his/her reader!

(Incidentally, none of the above is intended to denigrate academic literary criticism and theory as important scholarly activities in their own right: I’m just talking about their relationship with the activity of creative writing.)

However, there is one branch of literary theory and criticism (not a mainstream one, unfortunately, particularly in British universities) that I think does have something to offer the creative writer, because it is concerned precisely with what is going on the reader’s head when s/he is immersed, say, in a piece of fiction. I’m talking about what are known as “cognitive” literary studies – that is to say, approaches to the analysis of literature that draw on contemporary cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Cognitive literary studies is a large field – it encompasses, for example, the study of narrative (“cognitive narratology”), and it’s one that I plan to return to in future blogs. For now, I want to highlight one example that is particularly germane to creative writers: metaphor theory.

One of the most important developments in cognitive studies over the past thirty years had been the emphasis on the embodied nature of our mental processes: our thinking, contemporary cognitivism argues, does not occupy some disembodied, abstract space, but is intimately tied to our reality as living, breathing, moving organisms (just as the nervous system, extending throughout the body, includes but is not confined to the brain). We think with our bodies. Metaphor theory, as we’ll see in a moment, is a paradigmatic example of this embodied approach to cognition. (NB a classic statement of the embodied approach to the human mind is to be found in neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’s Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994).)

Now a superficial view of metaphor would regard it as a fancy extra that we sprinkle on our language, like sugar or seasoning, to make it fancier, more “poetic”. Metaphor theory, by contrast, regards metaphor as being something absolutely fundamental to all language, indeed all thinking – there is nothing exclusively “poetic” or artistic about it. (Here the classic statement is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980).) Above all, metaphor makes things that are abstract and difficult to grasp intelligible, by assimilating them with something with which we are intimately familiar – our experience of our own bodies.

Let’s take just one example, albeit one that resonates widely throughout our language and culture. Time is something essentially mysterious and difficult to understand – for millennia, it has been puzzled over by philosophers, poets, scientists. So in our everyday thinking and language, we understand it in metaphorical terms, by relating it to our embodied experience. “I’ve got a difficult day ahead of me, but somehow I’ve got to get through it.” “Christmas is coming up fast.” Language such as this makes time intelligible by envisaging it as a kind of space: we may not have the foggiest idea what time actually is, but we immediately, intuitively understand what it means to see things ahead of us, to leave things behind us. This basic underlying metaphor, time-is-space, has ramifications throughout our culture: consider, for example, the conceit that “life is a journey”. . . So engrained is this way of thinking, that it takes an effort of will to remember that time is not actually a form of space: it’s just a metaphor.

I could point to other examples of such protean metaphors. (For example, the understanding of understanding itself as a form of vision (“I see what you mean – it’s crystal-clear”) or touching (“I can’t get a grip on what you’re saying”).) I may explore some other examples in future blogs – once one had grasped (metaphor alert!) the central point of metaphor theory, metaphor-spotting can become addictive. (Listen, for example, to the underlying metaphors employed by politicians – they can be very revealing.) For creative writers, a feel for these underlying metaphors (as opposed to the cosmetic sprinkling of fancy imagery) sharpens our skills in using language as a tool – it enables us to get not just into the heads, but under the skin, of our readers. . .