The Grasshopper #10, Going Further In
Claiming your own ground
“If you’re always trying to be normal, you’ll never know how amazing you can be.” — Maya Angelou
I’ve been glued to the January 6th subcommittee hearings about the insurrection and Trump’s attempted takeover of the US government. As a result I’m a little behind getting this week's newsletter out.
Over at Medium.com I write about current events, politics, and climate- all issues with tighter timelines to be relevant. But here I’m looking at writing and creativity in a different time frame. These things are lifetime pursuits and there is an almost limitless space for improvement over time, if you actually pursue them and go deeper.
I’ve done a lot of different kinds of writing over the years, much of it very different from the others. Writing fiction, which is the greater challenge, demands a very different mindset than writing about something like sustainable energy, for example.
Yet that more down to earth writing is informed and improved by the storytelling skills you need to write a novel. Both have improved my writing, but like all things, the deeper you go in, the more you find you don’t know.
Into the Mystic
There are places in our minds we have never explored
I just finished Anthony Doerr’s latest novel Cloud Cuckoo Land. If his name doesn‘t ring a bell, he wrote All the Light I Cannot See, a long novel that it seems like every reader I know loved.
The newer title is an ode to story, books, and libraries. It is a complex layer cake of characters living in different times but connected by a story, Cloud Cuckoo Land. They are mostly children, just as the blind girl in Light is a child on the verge of adolescence. Both books are complex and it is not immediately clear where Doerr is going, but he manages to get there by the end.
I wrote about structure in writing last week and Doerr is master of complex structure, but I doubt he maps these stories out, at least not in the beginning. It may be that at some point, with many storylines spread out in his head, he has to do some conscious thinking about where this thing is going and how it is going to get there.
But I think he still immerses himself in the story and is as surprised by what emerges as we readers are. In fact, I really think this is the reason writers write and artists paint- to see where the story goes. To do this you have to go into a place in yourself that many never explore. The writing or painting or music is the path into that place.
My friend Paul has been painting for at least fifty years. Like other artists I know I am always surprised by seeing how his mind works because it is always different than the path I think I would take. He tends to work in a series, which is an artist’s way of telling a story.
We follow art into something. Unknown territory.
The creator is the guide but it is important to understand that they only see a step ahead, they don’t know where it is going either. When I think about going further in, I am thinking about not stopping at the familiar but pushing through to a place you are not entirely comfortable in.
Does this take place in non-fiction too? I think it does but in a much subtler way. My favorite non-fiction builds to a conclusion about an event or person, but that conclusion might not be the expected one. It’s hard to describe but, as a reader, it means a piece that flows right along. As a writer, this doesn’t always happen, but when it does readers inevitably respond to it.
Writing about going further in is writing about a mysterious process that doesn’t always suit the normal, the expected. To me, the best return I get from writing is when I write something and I think, I don’t know where that came from, but I like it.
When that happens, that thing always leads you further in and you have to go.
The Lacuna in the Basement
Will you step into the darkness?
I live in an old apartment building, circa 1940. In my building there is an odd space in the basement, a low entrance that looks like the beginning of a tunnel. It is dark inside and though I know it is just a little extra storage space carved out under the entry stair upstairs, I still cannot look at it without thinking of its potential as a fictional device, a lacuna.
A lacuna is somewhat mundanely described as: ‘an unfilled space or interval; a gap.’ It comes from the Latin for pool or lake. But it also describes an entry into the unknown.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know that I am fascinated with something we can only accomplish with storytelling or art: the ability to travel between worlds, either as a fantasy or as a metaphor for life transitions, those times when we take a leap of faith and send our life into a new direction.
This is a common theme or device in fiction, one I have used in both my unpublished novels. One uses this on the fantasy level where a man finds himself in a neighborhood that his rational self knows cannot exist. Adventures follow, but I severely restricted the use of the unknown and magical devices when writing because I find them cop outs for too much lazy fantasy writing. I tried to maintain the enormity of the mystery my character is already dealing with as he navigates this new but familiar place.
In the other novel my lacuna is more down to earth. The story starts with a woman who has left a comfortable life behind and relocated across the country to a city where she knows no one. She is recovering from the suicide of her husband and building a new life. The story begins with her turning the key on the lock of the door into an empty apartment she has rented sight unseen.
Devices like these are often used in stories to move the plot forward. It is my conceit to label them lacunae, but once I did I see them in nearly every book I admire. Their power lies in their potential to change lives, which is probably the most common theme in literary fiction.
So, if you find yourself in a story you’re working on, look for the lacuna, and when you find it, go in, go deeper, and take the reader with you, never looking back.
Because once you have stepped into the darkness, there is no return to the person you once were.
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” — Madeleine L'Engle
“As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.” — Ursula K. Le Guin