My Voice Will Go with You (Revisited)

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 29

This is Gerald Everett Jones, author of Mr. Ballpoint. My Boychik Lit book reviews air on The Mark Isler Show on Saturday nights (KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles). You may also know that these brief reviews are available as podcasts from BoychikLit.com, iTunes, and Feedburner. Now that I’ve done almost thirty reviews, I looked back to see which have been the most popular. The fifth most popular podcast, in terms of streaming plays and downloads, was Griftopia by Matt Taibbi. The fourth was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, followed by Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes and Abandoned in Hell: The Fight for Vietnam’s Firebase Kate by William Albracht and Marvin Wolf. But the top podcast, getting almost twice as many plays as any of the others, is a nonfiction book you probably never heard of.

Psychiatrist Milton Erickson is regarded as the father of neurolinguistic programming, or NLP. This book is a collection of very short stories he told clients who were in a trance state as a means of reprogramming their thinking about a problem they brought to him. Erickson believed that stories heard and then forgotten have the most power over future actions. That's because, once the conscious, censoring mind has ceased analyzing the experience, the persistent memory of the story can percolate in the unconscious. The book illustrates vividly the power of a story to transform thinking and behavior--immediately. The accompanying commentary by author Sidney Rosen tells why each story is effective in changing behavior.

My Voice Will Go with You. I sincerely hope it does.

"My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson" by Sidney Rosen

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 7 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles My Voice Will Go with You is a nonfiction collection of essays.

Psychiatrist Milton Erickson is regarded as the father of neurolinguistic programming. This book is a collection of very short stories he told clients who were in a trance state as a means of reprogramming their thinking about a problem they brought to him. Erickson believed that stories heard and then forgotten have the most power over future actions. That's because, once the conscious, censoring mind has ceased analyzing the experience, the persistent memory of the story can percolate in the unconscious. The book illustrates vividly the power of a story to transform thinking and behavior--immediately. The accompanying commentary by author Sidney Rosen tells why each story is effective in changing behavior.
My Voice Will Go with You. I sincerely hope it does.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. My new humorous novel Christmas Karma will be released in paperback and Kindle on November 8th, and you can find these audio clips on BoychikLit.com.

Read more in my review of this book on Goodreads.com.

Why Talk to a Shrink? (in movies/TV)

Tony Soprano spills his guts. Fortunately, it's just talk (this time). Talking to a shrink has been a narrative device in books and movies ever since there have been shrinks. In traditional movie dialogue, you have the main character talk to his best friend to find out what he's thinking, planning, cares about. But in this postmodern age, people are more alienated, less free with their feelings. And in the action stories, the characters are all so dumb they can't form a compound sentence.

So dialogue with the shrink is a way to reveal inner thoughts, motivations that the character can't or won't share with others but the audience needs to know. Another technique used for this purpose is voice-over narration. Writing coaches used to warn novices away from it, because they would use it to explain mundane plot points instead of using engaging dialogue (e.g., argument) with other characters. But again with so much alienation and isolation, today's main character often *has no friends* and that's the core of the story. So the rule for VO now is you can use it if the character is expressing emotions and innermost thoughts that can't be said to someone else.

You don't have this problem in a novel. The omniscient narrator can get into anyone's head. That's one of the reasons why first-person narratives are so challenging.