I’m getting to know some new folks these days. I’m feeling them out, watching them in their private moments, wondering why they do what they do. They’re a little hard to read and sometimes they act inconsistently. They change their clothes a lot and make awkward hand gestures over and over. Something unspoken lies beneath their surface, like wounds and anger, but I’m not sure of the cause yet. We’ll have to spend more time together, and I’ll need to see them in a variety of situations that make their behavior more understandable. Do they have temper tantrums, lie, forgive, pray? Do they love walks on the beach, staying indoors, or getting lost in the city?
In other words, I’ve been working on a new novel. But it’s still a rough first draft, and I don’t know these people well yet. It’s a little like meeting a new friend at a party. You like their initial appearance, that cool knee-length sweater and those earrings. Man, I love the earrings. And the way the woman laughs when someone’s made an obvious cut about her efforts to parent, responding with winsome words—even a gracious compliment about the insulter’s own parenting style. You decide you want to get to know her better, but she’s only a blur of a person so far. Her outline isn’t solid, her features undefined, her character traits fuzzy. In fact, when you leave the party and go home, you forget her appearance and decide to sketch in your own details. Then when you finally meet again, she’s nearly unrecognizable. That’s what she looks like? You had filled in the blanks when she wasn’t in your company and got it all wrong. So you spend some time together and ask a lot of questions. A lot of questions. And slowly, detail by detail, she becomes a real person, different than the image you created in your head.
I love throwing odd people in a room on the page to see what they do and say to each other. I’m often surprised by their demeanors and dialogue. I usually fall in love with them, flaws and all. But let me just say this getting-to-know-you stage is hard work. Because I want my characters to surprise me so that they’ll surprise a reader, I don’t arrive at my desk each day with a prescribed task. I give them freedom. Many writer friends think this is cuckoo and incomprehensible, but lots of writer friends, and Anne Lamott and Madeleine L’Engle, write the same way. “Serve the work,” Madeleine L’Engle wrote in Walking on Water. And so I’m learning to follow the lead of the story that appears in my head, while holding a lose framework in mind. I want to write about how children can torment us as parents and we still adore them. I want to write about how we must learn from history—ours and the world’s—or else we’ll repeat it over and over with grave consequences. I’m beginning with that framework and some other details, like a location, a narrator, a time period, a specific family and event.
But even with all those details and facts, the blank page, fuzzy characters, and loose plot are scary things to face each day. Where will this story go? Will it go anywhere? Am I wasting my time when I could be trying to save the world? When the worries descend, I can find a million little distractions to prevent me from working on the novel, like writing this blog post instead, running some errands, taking a nap, checking my texts. Anything to avoid this hard, hard feeing of making something out of nothing with all the unknowns. Give me 90,000 words in the form of a novel, no matter how rough, and I’ll find life-giving joy in moving things around on the page, cutting, pasting, rewriting what’s already there, diving down deep into the details and the sounds of their voices and the wind outside their windows. The rewriting and editing part is easy compared to creating something out of nothing. Only God finds that task easy.
And my initial drafts are quite ugly at first. I can reread yesterday’s work and think, “Who would want to publish this?” Thankfully, I’ve been down this road before and know that those early ponderings seldom look all ready to go out in public. They can have paper thin characters and awful dialogue. When I wrote one of my first creative nonfiction essays years ago, I threw all the ideas I wanted to explore down on the paper. Messy stuff, most of which barely made sense to me the writer—and much of which ended up deleted. But I focused on each paragraph, cutting, rewriting, deepening, until something started to sing. Eventually, the words surprised even me with their appearance and the story they had to tell. It won a couple of honors.
Novel writing isn’t the only endeavor filled with unknowns. Parenting certainly has its risks and challenges. We pour into our kids for years and years, but on some days, the outcome is completely uncertain. Will they ever make it through this rough season, give up that troubled boyfriend, bad habit, lack of motivation? Teachers have those days, as do engineers and designers and project managers, trying to work out a seemingly unsolvable problem but sticking with it until the answer appears in its wholeness and beauty.
Well, I’ve procrastinated enough today by writing this post. Off to work on that getting-to-know-you task. In the meantime, I wish you well as you work on whatever job lies before you. Keep digging and deepening until it sings.