Smoke Screen or Window

Last week I talked about writing stories out of our questions, not as a vehicle for imposing our answers on the world. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

I began writing Blue-Eyed Wolf, the young-adult novel I’m working on now, to explore topics about which I hold firm convictions: war, religion, the desecration of our natural world, family loyalty, sexuality. The convictions with which I began, in fact, were so firm and so clear that I had to work hard not to dump them in the early pages in order to leave room to build to a truly meaningful climax. (A meaningful climax, of course, would be one that would communicate all my best-dressed certainties.)

Now and then, though, even as I worked, my ideas gave me pause. What is the point, after all, of saying war is bad, that we are destroying our natural world, that family loyalty is important? Who doesn’t know such “truths,” though the knowing changes little. Still, I kept writing.

As I moved forward through the story, though, something began to happen that was both disruptive and real. In the first draft, my profoundly held convictions walked me smack into a wall. I was on page 300 and nowhere near the end of the story when I found I couldn’t take another step.

I set Blue-Eyed Wolf aside and worked on other manuscripts. While I was doing that, I rethought the character who had pressed my nose to the wall, recast her situation, changed some basic facts about her, and gave her a very different role in the story. I also made a decision to enlarge the story’s perspective beyond that of the young sister of the Vietnam War enlistee. The story is still told through my original character but also through the enlistee’s girlfriend and through the character who brought the first draft to such an inglorious end.

And as I began again through these multiple perspectives something odd began to happen. I’ve heard writers say that a character took over a story, and that’s an experience I’ve wondered about but never quite experienced. In this case, though, the story itself began to signal the inevitability of its own conclusion, a conclusion I had not chosen, would not have chosen, but a conclusion every element of the story I had so painstakingly built insisted upon.

The fascinating thing about this new conclusion—which is, at this point, only in my head, nowhere near the page—is that it is not at all what I meant to say. In fact, much of the “wisdom” I began the story with has fallen away leaving me with uncertainties, ambivalences . . . questions. And very few answers.

And to my not-quite-surprise, I find it’s going to be a better story.

So here I am telling a story that reveals little more than the messiness at the core of my own life—of most lives, perhaps—and strangely enough that feels like quite enough “truth” for the moment.

Stories, all stories, however they are manufactured, can be a smoke screen to keep us from seeing ourselves clearly, as any Buddhist teacher will tell you. Or they can be windows to our souls.

Once more, it all depends on whether we begin with answers or with questions.