Writing help you to better understand what you really think.Yesterday I was listening to the radio show On Being and thinking about Taking Cover, the novel I wrote about Kuwait.
Krista Tibbets was interviewing Helen Fisher on the Sunday morning radio program. Fisher is an anthropologist of love and sex and has done a lot of TED talks about the brain and romantic love. Fisher also does studies for Match.com.
The gist of the interview was that we are lied to by our love songs. Lust is a kind of madness, to paraphrase Julian Fellows, the creator of Downton Abbey. Fisher described how the brain shuts down when we're in love, allowing us to overlook everything in order to procreate. This madness, created by hormones in a metabolic stew, ends after about 18 months, or maybe sooner. It would have to end or we'd simply run out of energy.
Fisher said that in these times, we're shedding 10,000 years of a farming lifestyle in which men were the head of the family, women stayed home, and patriarchy reigned. In the Kuwait novel, Taylor is a teenager in love with a rich Kuwaiti. She comes from divorce, an American culture that's confused about rules, and parents who have no religious background. Without rules, Helen Fisher said, we live in a world where nobody knows what to do. Taylor, who is very lonely in Kuwait, yearns for the old ways she sees there. She wishes for a strong family, a man to be in charge, and the covering and protection given to women in a Muslim society. She doesn't trust her own impulsive nature, and the culture she sees in Kuwait would offer her safety, she thinks.
Krista Tibbets spoke of growing up in a very religious background where you save yourself for marriage. She said, looking back, having boundaries wasn't all bad. Fisher agreed that casual sex with someone you're not serious about is a trap. Our hormones go to work and create an attachment to this person. Best to be picky.
Fisher said that some of her research with younger people on Match.com has focused on what the younger generation truly wants. Often they have seen their parents divorce and they don't want to repeat the same mistakes. They believe a partner is all you've got because families are less important in a world of such mobility. She said the young look for a partnership of transparency, trust, humor, respect, time devoted to each other, and physical attractiveness. They want to go very slowly, stay rational, live together, have kids outside of marriage until it becomes apparent that their relationship can weather child-rearing. They don't want to fail at relationship and, instead, take off the rose-colored glasses we wear when we fall in love.
The thing is, we're all victims of nature, which wants the genes to continue on through the generations. As Fisher said, we might know all the ingredients in a chocolate cake, but once you start eating it and feel that rush of joy, it's off to the races.
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Monday, April 9, 2018
This is your brain on sex
Writing help you to better understand what you really think.Yesterday I was listening to the radio show On Being and thinking about Taking Cover, the novel I wrote about Kuwait.
Krista Tibbets was interviewing Helen Fisher on the Sunday morning radio program. Fisher is an anthropologist of love and sex and has done a lot of TED talks about the brain and romantic love. Fisher also does studies for Match.com.
The gist of the interview was that we are lied to by our love songs. Lust is a kind of madness, to paraphrase Julian Fellows, the creator of Downton Abbey. Fisher described how the brain shuts down when we're in love, allowing us to overlook everything in order to procreate. This madness, created by hormones in a metabolic stew, ends after about 18 months, or maybe sooner. It would have to end or we'd simply run out of energy.
Fisher said that in these times, we're shedding 10,000 years of a farming lifestyle in which men were the head of the family, women stayed home, and patriarchy reigned. In the Kuwait novel, Taylor is a teenager in love with a rich Kuwaiti. She comes from divorce, an American culture that's confused about rules, and parents who have no religious background. Without rules, Helen Fisher said, we live in a world where nobody knows what to do. Taylor, who is very lonely in Kuwait, yearns for the old ways she sees there. She wishes for a strong family, a man to be in charge, and the covering and protection given to women in a Muslim society. She doesn't trust her own impulsive nature, and the culture she sees in Kuwait would offer her safety, she thinks.
Krista Tibbets spoke of growing up in a very religious background where you save yourself for marriage. She said, looking back, having boundaries wasn't all bad. Fisher agreed that casual sex with someone you're not serious about is a trap. Our hormones go to work and create an attachment to this person. Best to be picky.
Fisher said that some of her research with younger people on Match.com has focused on what the younger generation truly wants. Often they have seen their parents divorce and they don't want to repeat the same mistakes. They believe a partner is all you've got because families are less important in a world of such mobility. She said the young look for a partnership of transparency, trust, humor, respect, time devoted to each other, and physical attractiveness. They want to go very slowly, stay rational, live together, have kids outside of marriage until it becomes apparent that their relationship can weather child-rearing. They don't want to fail at relationship and, instead, take off the rose-colored glasses we wear when we fall in love.
The thing is, we're all victims of nature, which wants the genes to continue on through the generations. As Fisher said, we might know all the ingredients in a chocolate cake, but once you start eating it and feel that rush of joy, it's off to the races.
Krista Tibbets was interviewing Helen Fisher on the Sunday morning radio program. Fisher is an anthropologist of love and sex and has done a lot of TED talks about the brain and romantic love. Fisher also does studies for Match.com.
The gist of the interview was that we are lied to by our love songs. Lust is a kind of madness, to paraphrase Julian Fellows, the creator of Downton Abbey. Fisher described how the brain shuts down when we're in love, allowing us to overlook everything in order to procreate. This madness, created by hormones in a metabolic stew, ends after about 18 months, or maybe sooner. It would have to end or we'd simply run out of energy.
Fisher said that in these times, we're shedding 10,000 years of a farming lifestyle in which men were the head of the family, women stayed home, and patriarchy reigned. In the Kuwait novel, Taylor is a teenager in love with a rich Kuwaiti. She comes from divorce, an American culture that's confused about rules, and parents who have no religious background. Without rules, Helen Fisher said, we live in a world where nobody knows what to do. Taylor, who is very lonely in Kuwait, yearns for the old ways she sees there. She wishes for a strong family, a man to be in charge, and the covering and protection given to women in a Muslim society. She doesn't trust her own impulsive nature, and the culture she sees in Kuwait would offer her safety, she thinks.
Krista Tibbets spoke of growing up in a very religious background where you save yourself for marriage. She said, looking back, having boundaries wasn't all bad. Fisher agreed that casual sex with someone you're not serious about is a trap. Our hormones go to work and create an attachment to this person. Best to be picky.
Fisher said that some of her research with younger people on Match.com has focused on what the younger generation truly wants. Often they have seen their parents divorce and they don't want to repeat the same mistakes. They believe a partner is all you've got because families are less important in a world of such mobility. She said the young look for a partnership of transparency, trust, humor, respect, time devoted to each other, and physical attractiveness. They want to go very slowly, stay rational, live together, have kids outside of marriage until it becomes apparent that their relationship can weather child-rearing. They don't want to fail at relationship and, instead, take off the rose-colored glasses we wear when we fall in love.
The thing is, we're all victims of nature, which wants the genes to continue on through the generations. As Fisher said, we might know all the ingredients in a chocolate cake, but once you start eating it and feel that rush of joy, it's off to the races.
Friday, April 6, 2018
On Being a Foreigner--The Subject of My Novels
In the last month, I've finished publishing two novels on Amazon, a feat that has been ten years in the making. Both novels look at the experience of being the stranger, either to oneself or in a different country.
I spent two years teaching in Kuwait, and all I wrote at the time was a blog. A novel about it seemed too close to my experience. Most of the day I worked, and the rest of the time I drank coffee with my friends or we trudged around the city on foot for hours. There wasn't a lot else to do there.
A few years later, after returning home from a stint in Turkey, I wanted to write a novel but I hadn't found my subject. I decided to join a writing class taught by Laurel King at the Worcester Art Museum in which we participated in a nation-wide writing contest. The requirement for National Novel Writing Month was to produce 50,000 words in the month of November. The result of producing so much in a short time pushed me into writing about Kuwait. The book I wrote was too disjointed as I tried to create characters back in the states who intersected with my two American women living in Kuwait City. It didn't work, so I put the book aside. Finally I decided I needed to leave it all in the one setting, the Middle East.
The novel is about a mother and daughter who live in Kuwait during the daughter's senior year of high school. Since the girl has been out of control at home in the states, Kathryn, her mother, decides the strict mores of the Muslim country will be a cure. Instead of keeping Taylor out of trouble, however, the daughter cross boundaries in a culture that maintains strict ones. Her mother manages to create trouble as well.
The second novel, Falling from the Ladder, is about a private school director on Cape Cod who justifiably expels ten students at once for bullying or using drugs. Since the students' parents are very powerful and wealthy people, they demand the firing of the director even as their kids stay in school. The gutless board bows to the parents and the director is on the street, suddenly without identity, a foreigner to himself.
I find the theme of being the stranger has not disappeared in a new novel I'm writing. It's about a female border patrol agent who feels like a stranger and intruder in a world of ex-Army men and very few women. The main character lives right on the Mexican border in Nogales, AZ with a foot in both countries. Despite the fact that her job is to hunt down illegals and send them out of the country, she believes in open borders. Border Patrol Babe is a work in progress.
I hope you'll follow along as I write about writing on this blog. I particularly enjoy comparing novel writing to cartooning, another interest of mine. Oh, and if you have a novel sitting in your desk drawer, get it out and publish it. You'll be surprised at how satisfying it feels.
I spent two years teaching in Kuwait, and all I wrote at the time was a blog. A novel about it seemed too close to my experience. Most of the day I worked, and the rest of the time I drank coffee with my friends or we trudged around the city on foot for hours. There wasn't a lot else to do there.
A few years later, after returning home from a stint in Turkey, I wanted to write a novel but I hadn't found my subject. I decided to join a writing class taught by Laurel King at the Worcester Art Museum in which we participated in a nation-wide writing contest. The requirement for National Novel Writing Month was to produce 50,000 words in the month of November. The result of producing so much in a short time pushed me into writing about Kuwait. The book I wrote was too disjointed as I tried to create characters back in the states who intersected with my two American women living in Kuwait City. It didn't work, so I put the book aside. Finally I decided I needed to leave it all in the one setting, the Middle East.
The novel is about a mother and daughter who live in Kuwait during the daughter's senior year of high school. Since the girl has been out of control at home in the states, Kathryn, her mother, decides the strict mores of the Muslim country will be a cure. Instead of keeping Taylor out of trouble, however, the daughter cross boundaries in a culture that maintains strict ones. Her mother manages to create trouble as well.
The second novel, Falling from the Ladder, is about a private school director on Cape Cod who justifiably expels ten students at once for bullying or using drugs. Since the students' parents are very powerful and wealthy people, they demand the firing of the director even as their kids stay in school. The gutless board bows to the parents and the director is on the street, suddenly without identity, a foreigner to himself.
I find the theme of being the stranger has not disappeared in a new novel I'm writing. It's about a female border patrol agent who feels like a stranger and intruder in a world of ex-Army men and very few women. The main character lives right on the Mexican border in Nogales, AZ with a foot in both countries. Despite the fact that her job is to hunt down illegals and send them out of the country, she believes in open borders. Border Patrol Babe is a work in progress.
I hope you'll follow along as I write about writing on this blog. I particularly enjoy comparing novel writing to cartooning, another interest of mine. Oh, and if you have a novel sitting in your desk drawer, get it out and publish it. You'll be surprised at how satisfying it feels.
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