Practicing the religion of uncertainty

Ring the bells of doubt

I recently talked with a writer who quit writing her novel because she didn’t know where her story was going. She needed to have the plot all figured out, she said. She needed certainty, she said.

I get it, especially with the long slog that writing a novel can be. At its worst, uncertainty creates doubt. Festers start festering in the dark corners of our brain. We are snatched by all sorts of fears about our insufficiencies. We fear making ourselves vulnerable. We fear putting our voice into the world.

Everyone’s tolerance for ambiguity is different, but certainty and creativity rarely go well together (they’ve even done studies that prove this). Uncertainty is one of the most crucial parts of creativity, in fact.

And writing is a training ground in uncertainty. We confront uncertainty every day when we write. Uncertainty whispers through every sentence, every word. But uncertainty is also the fuel of every story. It’s the itch that must be scratched. It’s the rich topsoil where curiosity takes seed.

When you write, you have to risk all kinds of small, hopeful, but sometimes doomed leaps. No matter the uncertainty, the only way to move forward is with faith. You have to trust not only in your story, but in your devotion.

You write your story, as if “driving at night in the fog,” as E.L. Doctorow put it. “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

One gift of writing: the more you do it, the better you get at not knowing what you’re doing—and knowing that “not knowing what you’re doing” is a key part of the process.

The author Maude Casey said that we must go to “the Land of Un—a space of uncertainty and unknowing.”

“If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions.”

Call it the religion of uncertainty. Writing is my way to pray to the questions, to essentially worship doubt.

Pursuing the questions

This echoes one of my favorite bits of writing wisdom from Roland Barthes, who said, “Literature is the question minus the answer.”

We want certainty so much, and yet, as any wise writer knows, certainty can’t be had; it can only be pursued. Or to go one step further: the experience of the mystery itself is the answer.

This is an often overlooked benefit of writing: the ways it teaches you to see life through layers and nuances and counterpoints and contradictions. To see life in such a way is to hone humility, to open oneself up to other perspectives, to accept change.

When we release all of the anchors and grounding of “certain” knowledge, all of the quantifiable and provable and actionable data, we can live in the foggier aspects of language and life—the smudges and blurs, the impressions, the intimations. Life, in other words.

We know as writers how language cannot truly hold onto anything because our words are so limited and life is so elusive, but then that is the point of our writing: all of meaning and knowledge is fundamentally unstable.

Uncertainty makes up our working conditions. That’s why we work with metaphor, rhythm, connotations, juxtapositions, shadows—tools of nuance, counterpoint, and questions.

We seek concrete definitions of things, of course. We have notions of solidity and permanence. But everything changes. Life is about living in the shifts, the pivots, the ambiguous, the tenuous. We live in in-between spaces. We live in the liminal.

To claim clarity is to claim authority, to make the world definite and sure, to rule. To live and write with uncertainty is to explore the shadows and crevices, the places where a presence turns into an absence, where a toe dips into the water, except perhaps the water isn’t there.

The meandering stream of uncertainty poses questions, sparks curiosity, invites scrutiny. Uncertainty invites us to pause and listen, to surrender our egos, soften our stances, admit fallibilities and weaknesses.

Certainty leads to arguments and wars. Uncertainty leads to exploration and dialogue. Certainty closes us. Uncertainty opens us.

Nurturing a mindset of uncertainty

I’ve written about the role surrender can have in creativity (see my piece, Surrender as Action Verb), and it’s the “willingness to surrender,” as Walt Whitman calls it, which allows our thoughts, our dialogue with others, to move and shift, to … tolerate ambiguity.

“Fiction can allow us brief residence in the land of true ambiguity, where we really don’t know what the hell to think,” said George Saunders. “We can’t stay there very long. It’s not in our nature. You can be truly confused by something and then ten minutes later you’re grasping for your opinions like somebody going for a life jacket. But that brief exposure to the land of ambiguity is really, really good for us. To be genuinely confused about something for even a few seconds is good because it opens us up to the idea that what we know right now is not complete.”

As the Nigerian writer Chris Abani puts it:

“The point is to dissolve oneself into the journey of the protagonist, to face the most terrifying thing in narrative, the thing that has been at its heart since the earliest campfire and story. To dare ourselves to imagine, to conjure and then face all of our darkness and all of our light simultaneously. To stand in that liminal moment when we have no solid ground beneath us, no clear firmament above, when the ambiguity of our nature reveals what we are capable of, on both sides.”

Uncertainty has never been properly honored because our culture is so beholden to certainty. Uncertainty is seen as a menace, a threat, to the righteous. Religious orders often distrust those who question their faith.

Uncertainty is sometimes seen as the equivalent of sin instead of as a path to a deeper and more secure belief—as if questioning God is indignant, indecent, not a vital part of the process of belief itself.

But as the theologian Paul Tillich said, “Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.” Doubt deepens faith, each question adding a layer of thought.

How can you live your uncertainty, live your doubt, live your questions—and still make them into words on the page?

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Join a flash fiction gym!

I’m very excited to join flash forces with flash master and good friend Meg Pokrass to host the first in our upcoming generative flash sessions: Flash Gym!

What is a flash gym? We’ll feature six quirky on-the-spot prompts and also provide a brief craft discussion for inspiration. You’ll leave with six stories!

Our inaugural Flash Gym happens on December 8 from 11 a.m. to 1 Pacific—via Zoom. There will be an optional 30-minute add-on at the end for participants who wish to read their new work aloud.

The Zoom link will be sent the day before the class.

Writing with love … and uncertainty

As some readers know, I’ve been pursuing the question of how to write with love (see my recent articles)—in light of our dark world, but also because several writers told me they try to write with love and I wondered what that meant.

When I think of the love of romantic partners, friendships, and family, I think about how they are all brimming with uncertainty. Love is fundamentally unstable because it’s a living thing, changing shape and direction, asking questions:

How do you give your love? What if the other person doesn’t want that love? What if you have to find another form for that love? What if your love has to be an absence?

We want to write and love with certainty, but that tends to box a story in. You become like a parent telling a child they have to go to college to become a doctor, and no art classes. You’re telling, determining, not listening.

And practicing love is about the questions. About listening. Uncertainty invites in a deeper devotion and commitment because we have to live the questions, not the answers.

Ask yourself now … What do you really know about your love? How can you love better? How can your love go beyond your needs to be in service to something bigger—in life and on the page?

Approaching a story with uncertainty carries the same sort of love that approaching a person with uncertainty does: we’re not telling them who we think they are; we’re letting them be who they are—and discovering them anew.

Because a photo

I took a walk in the woods …