What’s Your Context?

One fact about writing stories is that we populate them with characters in various contexts—on a dilapidated farm, in an overcrowded city, on a sailboat out at sea. We put thought and time into shaping relevant scenes, but how often do we consider the flip-side of our writing reality: the context in which we do our work?

What’s Our Writing-Context?

Surely the time of day, the people we live with, and our nation’s societal/political environment affect our writing on some level or another, as do the nuts and bolts of our writing spaces, i.e. writing at a desk, in a coffee shop, or on a bed. If your context is anything like mine, it shifts from hour to hour. It’s full of inspirations and exasperations. It reflects underlying ideologies. The makeup of who we are, what we believe, and where we live often seeps through onto the pages and shapes them like an invisible hand. Long ago, one of my writing instructors pointed out that all writing, not solely memoirs or autobiographies, is actually autobiographical. Even in fiction, you reveal bits of who you are, what you value. You and your context show up in tone, sentence structure, and diction.

Thank You, Mr. Junod

The impact of the writer-context on our work struck me while reading the article, “What Would Mister Rogers Do?” by journalist Tom Junod in the December, 2019 issue of The Atlantic magazine. I’ll tell you about that, but first, let me give you some context. There’s a newly released movie about Mr. Rogers—A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which I wholeheartedly recommend. The movie is based on Junod’s 1998 story for Esquire magazine, “Can You Say … Hero?” which describes his life-changing relationship with Mr. Rogers. In the movie, Junod is renamed Lloyd Vogel, portrayed by actor Matthew Rhys.

Here’s the bit from The Atlantic that stopped me in my reading tracks:

“I had been thinking of starting this story at one of those points of departure [how Junod was affected by a lesson of Mr. Roger’s], at one of those beginnings or one of those endings. But stories don’t only speak: they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written. And so, I have to start by mentioning that I have begun writing a story about Mister Rogers the day after two young men armed with assault rifles killed a total of 31 people in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.”

What is Speaking to Your Stories?

I love Junod’s remarkable sentence, “But stories don’t only speak: they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.” This fact seems so obvious that I hesitated to write about it; however, it’s holding me in its grip, so I decided to take the sage writing advice I received a long time ago: write your obsession. Now that’s a writerly context—consumed by an obsession!

After reading that article, I feel more conscious about how my context affects what I’m writing—it hangs like an invisible backdrop behind my work, providing it color, sound, ambience. On the backdrop is a mural of the country, state, town in which I am working, the weather, the noises impinging on my nervous system (I prefer writing in silence), the pen or computer I use. As I write this, I’m stopping more often to check up on myself, asking, “What is speaking to my work this moment?”

For instance, George Eliot (1819-1880), was one of the greatest Victorian novelists who portrayed the harsh reality of life in rural England in her masterpiece, Middlemarch. Each character’s story offers something different about human nature coping with conditions in England back then. Composing novels during Queen Victoria’s reign in England was part of Eliot’s writer-context.

Multiple Writer-contexts

Another voice on this subject is from poet and philosopher David Whyte in his book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (Many Rivers Press, 2015). “Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts.” As writers, don’t we aim to develop multiple worlds of stories, often drawing from our own experiences that have taught us how to live fully in different contexts? I suspect our ability to navigate our own varying circumstances (traveling is a great way to challenge that) helps us imagine how to show our fictional characters responding to the changing situations we invent for them.

This Season’s Context

Of course, our immediate context, the one in which I’m writing this post, is powerful: December, the season of holidays that provide occasions for gift shopping, gift-giving, decorating, goodwill sharing, and special holiday cooking. No matter the form our writing-context takes this season, let’s deck the halls with more awareness of what is speaking to our work. Happy Holidays!