When Writing is like Real Life
I am in the middle of writing a short story. It is a pleasurable thing, and I am surprised to find I am enjoying it, while at the same time swinging wildly to bouts of doubt and frustration. One minute I love creating the sentences and the characters inhabiting them, the next I feel like everything I write is rubbish.
The experts will tell you that writing authentic characters means giving them room to breathe, to surprise you. People who look and act exactly as you expect them to are: 1)boring and 2) more boring. I suppose that beyond the boredom factor is the reality that people are usually more complex in real life than the neat boxes we want to put them in.
As I write, in that nebulous way that writers do when they are both in control and trying not to be controlling, the characters are leading the way. In one scene, a man who is in every way known to be cruel and unsympathetic, does something kind. A mother who feels powerless, makes a bold move.
There is however, another element at play. It is not merely the characters who have agency to make choices and change the direction of the narrative. There are unseen forces at work. In my view of the world, this force is God, and he intervenes or doesn’t to the delight or dismay of his creatures.
Which is to say that characters on the page are not a far cry from what I see playing out in the real life before my eyes. People surprise you. You surprise yourself. The situation takes a turn, you find you cannot write the scene to play out as you wish. God intervenes, or he doesn’t, or at least to your way of seeing— it is unclear.
There is something both comforting and unnerving about this state of things. There is more hope there than we realize, but we are more at risk than we care to admit. For a follower of Jesus, walking forward on this journey means we follow a path that may lead us into difficult places. We might experience loss, or pain, or a lot of disappointment. We are also being led, but we have to trust (and follow) the One who leads us.
I’m trying to hold my life and my family the way I hold the characters in my story. Trust the process. Don’t force the ending. Neat and tidy is boring.
And God is good.