Transformation

The natural warmth that emerges when we experience pain includes all the heart qualities: love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness in any form. It also includes loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear. . . . these generally unwanted feelings are pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring. These feelings that we’ve become so accomplished at avoiding can soften us, can transform us.                                                                                                                        Pema Chodran

Pema Chodran, the famed Buddhist teacher, isn’t talking about pain experienced in stories. She is talking about pain experienced in life. But the reason stories exist is because they give us a potent way to understand life, to live it with deeper attention. So all she says here refers to the work we do in creating stories, too.And thus the point she is making, that “pain includes all the heart qualities: love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness . . . loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear,” is a powerful one for all creators of stories.As I write this I am emerging from a week of virulent flu, and in the miasma of my illness I spent far more time settled on a couch watching films than I ordinarily would. Yesterday I watched the 1962 film based on the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. I am ordinarily not a fan of old black-and-white films. Too often the acting seems stilted, forced. But this one is so delicately and exquisitely done that I was, once again, utterly compelled. And of course that was possible in no small part because it is based on a delicate and exquisite novel.When the final credits rolled, I found myself saying, “Ah . . . that’s the kind of story I want to write!” A laughable enough longing. After all, who wouldn’t?But my heartfelt reaction prompted me to pause to ask, What gives both story and film so much power? Why do I feel transformed by living through this story, even though I already know exactly where it will go?I think there are two answers. The first is that To Kill a Mockingbird is set on the bedrock of large, important issues. Every personal conflict rises out of deeper, more fundamental conflicts of society as a whole. Not just racism. Indeed, if we consider Boo, the story’s “mockingbird,” it’s society’s attitudes toward all the dispossessed that are being challenged here. But writing about important issues doesn’t necessarily make for an important story. And it certainly doesn’t make for a transformative one. In fact, big topics can lead to grand writing and no transformation at all.What makes these big issues work? It’s because they are approached, in every case, through the small, personal, utterly believable experience of living characters. And living characters are those whose vulnerability shows. Even the young woman who entraps Tom is a victim, a victim of her isolation, her longing, her father’s rage. And Scout, the six-year-old who witnesses our story, casts light on the whole through her own innocence, her lack of comprehension.Many stories take on large issues—take most murder mysteries, for instance—but they don’t always succeed in making those issues truly important to us as readers, as viewers. It’s only when large issues are seen through a personal lens that they have true power.These days I resist stories in which my emotions are compelled by a character’s death. I’m too acutely aware of how easy it is for a writer to kill a character off. And if she does so simply to draw a reaction from me, I hold back. I won’t be jerked around.But when the death—or any other source of story pain—is demanded for the sake of the story’s own truth, when strong action rises out of the characters instead of being imposed upon them from above, then the writing serves its purpose. The story transforms me, opens me to feelings that enlarge my own humanityAnd that is, I believe, one of the deepest functions of stories. These “unwanted” feelings, so pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring, can touch us, teach us, soften us and make us more human while leaving our daily lives intact.A pretty good bargain, that!

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