Let's Get Lost
Uncertainty is a magic potion of the imagination.
I recently talked with a writer who told me he was having trouble starting a new novel. He was excited by his story idea, but he said that when he wrote his first novel, he ended up going down a lot of story paths that didn’t lead anywhere, so he didn’t want to waste time writing characters and scenes that wouldn’t make it into the final version. He was looking for a new approach, one where he could make sure not to waste any time taking detours and side trips. One where every word he wrote mattered.
Except there isn’t such an approach. Sure, you can write a meticulous outline, a detailed map of your novel, but even with the most elaborate and methodical plan in hand, I think you still have to get lost in your story to find it. You have to write scenes and characters and maybe even entire story arcs that will have little to do with the final version.
Writing a novel is a fundamentally inefficient process. It’s a process of not knowing, of stumbling in the darkness, of running down a road — just because it’s there, just because you want to keep moving — and then realizing the road is a wrong road, or a road you don’t want to be on. You’re always living on the edge of mystery, or in the unknown itself, so the process of writing a novel is a process of disorientation, of even reveling in being lost, and then finding your way.
It’s an art, really, the ability to make a home in uncertainty.
You have to develop a strange kinship with the unknown, a trust in being adrift. You place your faith in an unspoken agreement with the god of Chance, and you then you have to keep believing in Chance even as it whisks you down what seems like a perilous path, testing you, testing you, testing you. You have to welcome surprise, steeling yourself for the moment surprise might knock you off balance — or steeling yourself for the moment of utter darkness, when there’s no path to take.
Never to get lost is never to live.
You become dizzy, moving without a beacon in sight, following the odd scents of intuition. Yet somehow in this peculiar, unbridled state, you become more alert. You’re not passively proceeding, failing to notice things in your rote movement — you’re highly attuned to possibilities and dangers. Your senses and your thoughts are enlivened.
“Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities — for success, for happiness, for really living — are waiting,” said the philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
Opportunities wait because you’re moving in a paradoxical state. You’re searching, tense with focus, nerves tingling with sensitivity, and yet you’re losing your ego, becoming unmoored, becoming part of something else. That’s because getting lost also involves surrender, and it’s in surrender where we receive things we might not otherwise.
Surrender is too often thought of as a bad thing, as a characteristic of weakness, but it is actually a moment of oneness, of connection, of receiving.
“I think surrender should be an active verb,” said the musician Brian Eno. He says that when you surrender, “you know you’re not in control anymore and that makes you more alert.” The surfer doesn’t try to control the wave, Eno says, but to balance control with surrender, because it’s only with surrender that the surfer can feel the wave. So surrender isn’t a passive state of being, but a transformation of approach.
What if you think of your novel like this, as a wave to surf, to surrender to? What if the next time you’re stuck, instead of succumbing to frustration, you see “stuckness” as an opportunity to spend quality time with uncertainty, a time to luxuriate in what I’ll call the spa of lostness and bathe in its unclear waters. Uncertainty can replenish certainty.
What if we strive to be rich in uncertainty?
Being lost is a state of mind, after all. Instead of panicking or quitting, pause to have a conversation with uncertainty and the possibility it holds. You’re in between things, which is the most fertile of ground. Think about the moments you’ve been lost. I’m sure they held discomfort and anxiety, and perhaps even pain, but did they lead you somewhere? If so, how?
Never to get lost is never to live. Never to get lost is never to find the deeper springs of your novel.
These days we have a lot of tools to make sure we know where we are. GPS literally guides our steps and our cars, but we’re also living in a GPS age figuratively as well. It seems that because of the tools that schedule and track and prompt and guide us that we might be developing an actual disposition of needing certainty — to the point that people are unnerved by uncertainty instead of recognizing the splendorous possibilities of it.
What if we strive to be rich in uncertainty? What if we practice leaving the door open for the unknown?
It’s the job of the writer to be a crafts person of uncertainty. A writer must be flexible, able to adapt and change. A goal might lead you, but the goal itself becomes less of a goal as you pursue the questions and feel the seduction of mystery that lie at the heart of your story.
The writer Anaïs Nin put it best when she wrote: “The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.”
Relish moments of uncertainty as a gift. Taste its potion. Follow it.
The Rundown
Reading: So We Can Glow, by Leesa Cross-Smith
Listening to: When Do I Get to Sing “My Way,” by Sparks
Lusting for: Aimless time in Matera, a town in the southern region of Basilicata in Italy. It’s the opening town in the James Bond film No Time to Die, and it consists of a labyrinth of grottos overlooking the sea.
Inspiration: The shortening days. My favorite time of the year. When darkness creeps in.
Random question: What if you trust the person you distrust?
Photo prompt: The joy of a cup of coffee in a diner. The natural artistry of cream.
