Welcome to the third of my posts on The Tao of Storytelling
For this chapter I am using the translation by John H. McDonald. Throughout my explorations of the chapters, I will use various translations. Each time I will include links to the previous chapters, although you can read them in any order. These are included at the bottom of the post.
As well as a discussion of the chapter of the Tao Te Ching, each post includes a reading of a short story and sometimes these will be available to read online, other times they’ll be from a short story collection or anthology so will only be available to buy and read. I will include links each time for both kinds.
I hope you enjoy these posts and I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about my interpretations, and to hear your own and read any work you create from the prompts. All of the posts are free for everyone to read, but to join the community and interact with me and other writers by commenting on posts and joining in chats, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber. I really hope you’ll join us.
With love,
Chapter 3
If you over esteem talented individuals,
people will become overly competitive.
If you overvalue possessions,
people will begin to steal.
Do not display your treasures
or people will become envious.
The Master leads by
emptying people's minds,
filling their bellies,
weakening their ambitions,
and making them become strong.
Preferring simplicity and freedom from desires,
avoiding the pitfalls of knowledge and wrong action.
For those who practice not-doing,
everything will fall into place.
Forgetting Ambition and Knowledge
Although this chapter aims to help rulers govern with wisdom and bring peace to a disrupted society, I want to explore it in relation to human psyche and behaviour, as that is the stuff of storytelling that really resonates with me.
If you over esteem talented individuals,
people will become overly competitive.
If you overvalue possessions,
people will begin to steal.
In our societies talented individuals in all walks of life have been placed on pedestals, both figuratively and literally. Olympic medalists. Movie stars. Footballers. Writers. Singers and musicians. Formula One drivers. Comedians. Tennis players. Artists. These people and their achievements, their lifestyles and belongings, are held up to us normal everyday folk as goals to aim for. We too can achieve greatness if we would just work hard enough. We can have that luxurious lifestyle, that bigger house and faster car, if we spend enough, borrow enough, steal enough. We can prove ourselves better than our friends, colleagues and neighbours if we just focus on getting, and maintaining, that edge.
Many people have bought into this and competition is at the heart of our society structure. And there are, of course, good sides to being competitive. It pushes us to try our very best. It leads to new discoveries and inventions. Often it brings about fruitful collaborations and there is much joy to be found in working with others towards a common goal. But it can be destructive too as a lot of the time, we are also in competition with ourselves to achieve more, be thinner, fitter, smarter, better than we were yesterday. Then we give ourselves a hard time when we feel we haven’t reached those goals.
So for the exploration of story for this chapter, I want to look at the ways the Taiost sages believe we find peace.
The Master leads by
emptying people's minds,
filling their bellies,
weakening their ambitions,
and making them become strong.
I have seen this approach in action in my own life. I had so many ambitions and goals and desires for my writing when I started venturing out into the publishing world. I believed the only way I could find happiness and self-worth was to get a literary agent and huge book and film deals for my novels. Get invited to speak at all the literary events and be a big novelist name. And when I was chasing these things, I was unhappy, unhealthy and unfulfilled.
When I let go of these desires, everything changed. I fell in love with writing again for writing’s sake. My ambitions for my work became related to the actual writing on the page not what happened to the words out in the world. Since this change, I have written the best work I’ve ever produced, much of which has never been read by anyone but me.
But whether or not anyone ever reads these stories, I am happy knowing that through weakening my ambitions for it, my writing has become stronger. And it’s this side of the human experience I want to explore in this chapter. How we can tell stories that show peace and love and happiness can be achieved by not striving. There are many ways we can explore this. Before we do, I love this short video about letting go of ambitions for material gain and think it captures what I am talking about.
Story Telling
The ways in which I think we can explore this idea of not striving in stories, are multitudes! It doesn’t have to be about letting go of big ambitions, although it can be if exploring the idea that way is where the writing exercises and new work prompt take you.
Things that a character can stop striving for:
Achieving something that deep down they don’t really want.
Proving something to others, or to themselves.
Spiritual enlightenment.
Believing that everything will be better if they can just get to the other side of the fence / over the mountain / to retirement / to the end of the week / into a different job / have a different lover … the list here could go on and on!
Getting a diagnosis for an unexplained illness.
Meeting self-imposed deadlines that are stressing them out.
Maintaining a facade that they believe will keep them safe.
What ideas do you have? I’d love to hear them in the comments below.
Story Reading
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
You can read this online here and it also appears in her collection of the same name.
Synopsis
The repetitive cycles and bus journeys of a woman’s trips to the houses she cleans, and the insights into the the people she cleans for, slowly reveal more about her own life and the reasons why she’s stealing sleeping pills from each of them.
Story Analysis
I chose this story as I think it encompasses a couple of the elements above that a character can stop striving for.
Achieving something that deep down they don’t really want. As the story unfolds we see that she is planning to kill herself because Terry has died. But it becomes clear that she doesn’t really want to as if she did, she’d just steal enough pills in one go to do the job.
Maintaining a facade that they believe will keep them safe. All throughout the story the narrator is maintaining the facade of staying strong in the face of grief believing that if they let it in, they won’t come back from it. But the ending shows that she needed to cry and lament the loss of her lover. And that in doing so, she has found the real strength needed to carry on and find more peace of mind and joy in life again.
Are there any other elements you feel the character is stopping striving for in this story? Do let me know what you think.
Craft Development
At their heart, most of the stories we write are about a character wanting to find peace of mind and happiness. The inciting incident in stories is what sets them off on the path to try and get there and what happens on that journey puts obstacles in their way to stop them achieving it. In the story above, the narrator’s memories and feeling that she’s got to stay committed to Terry are the obstacles she needs to overcome.
As my writing practice has developed over the years, I have truly come to believe that I am somehow channelling the characters I write in my novels and short stories. My craft in relation to character development has become guided by talking to them and asking them questions. I wrote more about this here. I follow the structure of stories and everything I have learned about arcs and journeys and narrative drive, but I let all of that be guided by what I discover in letting the character tell me their story before I start to write. And in doing so, this reveals the essence of the story, which I have come to recognise is linked to the final lines in this chapter of the Tao Te Ching.
Preferring simplicity and freedom from desires,
avoiding the pitfalls of knowledge and wrong action.
For those who practice not-doing,
everything will fall into place.
The journey our characters go on is all about letting go of the desires they have that lead them to believe they know something to be definitely true, which in turn leads them towards taking wrong action. The transformation that unfolds for them through the story shows them that if they let go of those desires and the belief they have, if they stop taking the wrong action, then all will be well and they will gain peace.
Depending on whether we are writing a tragedy or a story with a more hopeful outcome, they will either let go and achieve peace, or cling to those desires and beliefs and continue along a path to further unhappiness. I’m advocating for more stories that bring peace, love and unity into the world so I hope you’re not writing tragedies!
Writing Exercise
Using a character in a story you are already working on, spend some time asking them the following questions. Write the answers in their first person voice even if the story isn’t told in that point of view. Try not to think too much and instead just let their voice flow through you.
What is it you want?
What will you do to get it?
If you do get it, will it really change you/your life for the better?
What would happen if you didn't get it?
If you look inside your heart, is it what you really want?
If we answer these questions for the character in A Manual For Cleaning Women, it could look something like this:
What is it you want? To be with Terry again
What will you do to get it? Steal enough sleeping pills to kill myself and join him in the afterlife.
If you do get it, will it really change you/your life for the better? It will end the pain I feel from my grief over Terry dying. But I would no longer have a life. I also don’t know for definite if it would reunite me with Terry.
What would happen if you didn't get it? I would have to find a way to carry on and live without Terry. To try and find happiness again.
If you look inside your heart, is it what you really want? No, what I really want is to carry on living and for Terry to still be here with me.
I have just given really brief answers here to illustrate how we can respond to exercises like this, but I encourage you to answer as fully as possible for your own characters.
Do let me know how you get on with this exercise and what it reveals for your character.
New Work Prompt
Write a story where a character starts out determined to achieve something. Start by getting to know them first. You can ask the questions above, and/or the ones I shared in my other post, or any of your own. In doing so, whether or not they will achieve it by the end of the story should be revealed.
That’s all for this month’s exploration of storytelling with Tao Te Ching. I really hope you have enjoyed it and I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about it all and read the work from the exercises and prompt, if you feel comfortable sharing them.
I’ll be back with Chapter 4 next time.
With love,
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Thank you for sharing this Lucia Berlin story. I bought the book ages ago and it's sat on my shelf. This was a lovely introduction to her. The narrator describes a life jammed with experience that could easily be dismissed because she is just a 'cleaning lady.'