Hal’s Reading Diary: November 2008

On long car journeys seven-year-old Hal now asks his father to tell stories and while he makes specific requests about characters and location, he wants the denouement to be a surprise. His father, psychodynamic counsellor Roger Mills, explains.

‘Dad, can I have a story?’ Pretty much every car journey of any length that we go on starts with this request from Hal. My first reaction to this is usually reluctance and sinking spirits largely due to a fear that I won’t be able to come up with anything imaginative. Once under way with a story though, my feelings tend to shift. Ideas usually start to pop into my head and, even if they are shameless borrowings from other stories, the having of them feels good. I enjoy the mechanics of telling stories as well. The ‘Five minutes later, in another part of the palace…’ kind of phrase has a little charge of the real about it that always delights me. Storytelling starts to be fun at this point, and the narratives get bigger and bigger. Most of my recent stories for Hal have lasted several hours and taken us a number of journeys to complete.

These days I get Hal to help me to get over the initial hurdle. I have him tell me who he wants in the story, where it should be set, what the core of the drama should be about. The answer to these questions derives, always, from Hal’s obsession of the moment driven, almost always, by a recent film release. This week’s story is a Clone Wars one as Hal saw the movie at the end of the holidays. Two months ago it was Indiana Jones – again in the aftermath of the film. These obsessions are powerful things with Hal. He acts them out in games with friends. He makes Lego models of things he’s seen. He wanders around singing the theme music. He appears to be endlessly playing the dramas in his head.

When we are setting up a story, Hal is very specific about some features he wants it to have. He will insist on certain bits of scenery – telling me, for example that there has to be a maze, or a temple full of traps. He is also very particular about villains. When we were doing the prep work for a recent Indiana Jones story he told me that the bad guys had to be exactly like the thugees in one of the Indy movies and should wear black turbans and have three red streaks on their faces, and he got quite annoyed when I strayed from the prescribed details when the characters first appeared. But while Hal is very exact about the mise en scene, the narrative is left entirely to me. What he doesn’t want to know is what is going to happen.

Once I start telling a story Hal listens in rapt silence. He tends to look straight ahead, hardly noticing anything outside the car window, and you sense that he is picturing everything I am saying in his mind’s eye. It is obvious he loves the stories and the impression I have is that it is precisely the bit he has left to me, the unfolding of the narrative with the ebb and flow of tension and then relief, that he really enjoys. All of our tales, inevitably feature this most basic narrative device. Tension is built up – for example Indiana is about to be killed by a giant python and taken to the point where escape seems impossible. And then, at the eleventh hour, Indy does escape.

This tension/relief pattern is a basic of much fiction of course. Elizabeth marrying Darcy against all the odds is another, very different version of the pattern, and it is interesting to speculate about why human beings find this so compelling as a psychological experience. My guess is that it is ultimately a way of reassuring ourselves that we are safe. You face a threat, the threat seems overwhelming, but then peace and stability are restored. Facing and getting through the artificial dangers of stories make us feel that the real difficulties we encounter in life are going to be manageable. It is certainly one way of making sense of why stories are so important.