Creative Uncertainty
I’ve been equating our meandering on the road this week with how my favorite writers approach their work. Not knowing the direct way is a skill I’ve cultivated these past years to good effect.
It includes a kind of confrontation with both self and story. Letting truths become realized that are not pre-known.
Road trips are all about meandering, which is perhaps why they cause such longing for me. I’m happy, as a creative person, with some level of routine and predictability. But I also love the break-out: staring at endless stretches of highway and not really knowing where I am located in my life at that moment.
Today is all rainy and chilly, brilliant fall leaves, and we’re in Pennsylvania. I’m spending time with my journal, processing thoughts about these past six months of book publication and what made this particular one so surprisingly satisfying, so obviously successful, compared to my past books.
I’m also watching the weather app: a cold snap and snow coming to New England before we get home, and our safest route means staying above 28 degrees at night and no snow. Change in plans—we hang out longer here, detour to avoid winterizing the camper’s plumbing just yet. Begging a few more days of creative freedom and the unknown of the road.
I’ve been enjoying Tom Lake, Ann Patchett’s new novel (Meryl Streep reads the audiobook) as an example of unashamed meandering by all characters. Especially the female narrator, Lara. She’s exploring various truths—her beliefs and memories about the past and present. She’s recognizing that truths can coexist as opposites (more about that below) and it enhances a life and relationships, gives everybody more freedom.
The narrator of Tom Lake is a clear-hearted mother who helps run a fruit farm in northern Michigan. She knows where her life is located. During the pandemic, her three daughters are home and they want the story of her youth as a stage actress in Our Town, where she played alongside a now-famous male actor. Their relationship was fraught with betrayal, which the narrator accepted as part of the deal, betraying herself as well. Betrayal happens when we step aside from what we know is our best path, often. She sees that unconsciousness as part of her, as real as the present in the cherry orchard. In Patchett’s skillful hands, neither past or present is particularly right or wrong; both have value.
I believe that until a person can hold opposites inside, not judging them, they are more inclined to need to be right, to need to know the path ahead. To not be comfortable living with uncertainty.
Why does this matter to writers? Because uncertainty is where the best writing lives, in my humble opinion.
I was recently inspired by a post from George Saunders of Story Club, who mused about a story he almost gave up on because the ending was too predicted.
“I didn’t want to write that story,” he says, “because it felt like such a foregone conclusion. . . . Those early minutes had been spent in a state of discovery but this, now, felt like something different.
“But I still had that voice working pretty well in my head and so, as I recall it, I just intuitively made a slight adjustment, a sort of mid-course correction, that was a form of aversion, really; it was almost as if I said to myself, ‘OK, but what if it doesn’t end badly? Is there a way we might, without falsifying, get to that place?’”
Knowing where I was going did a lot of nothing for me as a writer launching a new book. Whenever I felt that being right was most important, my love for the book was pushed aside. If I need the path to be straight, not meandering, much of the surprise, the astonishment, the joy goes away. It also hampers my ability to be in community with others.
“What did you learn most when writing your novel?” a podcast host asked me a few weeks ago.
I learned that not knowing was more fun than knowing. In early drafts, I kept my characters’ trajectories straightforward, thinking this would make their motivations more logical and believable to a reader. I spent a lot of time knowing everything about them. When this happened to them, they would logically react this way. It made sense and it gave me a feeling of control over the uncontrollable process of writing fiction.
But it also made things boring. For my early readers. For me too. I got lots of feedback about needing to be surprised. About wanting the unexpected. About craving the coexistence of opposite traits that made the character’s movement unpredictable. “He’s too perfectly predictable,” said one of my readers. “What could he do or be that’s totally unexpected?”
There’s extreme risk in uncertainty as writers—as in the kitchen when you’re out of your depth. Or in a time of life when change is too big. Debora Robertson writes a Substack called Notes from a Small Kitchen Island, which I savor each week because I used to be a professional cook and cookbook writer too. I love reading about her life in France as an ex-pat Brit and her adventures with French cooking. One week, she posted an essay that struck me as a bit more whimsical and introspective than just the recipes coming from her market haul.
She wrote about the change of moving from London, how she gradually let go of what defined her life as a Londoner, including her to-do lists. To me, this brought to mind the meandering that we are doing this week in our little “book tour” camper van. I haven’t looked at my calendar in days. Lists are also anchor in my life at home, but on the road, much less.
But it wasn’t easy for Robertson to set them aside. “Uncertainty is stressful,” she wrote.
Yet I think in the creative life it’s a requirement. A blessing too, to be in a place where you can accept it and recognize its gifts.
What is your relationship with creative uncertainty?
I think uncertainty in my writing life, my books past and in process, can be stressful, as Robertson says, because I don’t actually know where I’m going next in my story. I wish for clear instructions. I push back my chair and close my laptop and go find something to do that’s predictable. (Is this why writers tell me they sharpen pencils and clean the house when deep in writer’s block?) I embraced the storyboard because it gives a map during drafting and revision. I work with mentors and partners and writing groups to help me stay oriented.
I remember trying to draft a pivotal scene in my just-released novel, where the two estranged sisters reveal who they are to each other. Early drafts were so bland, so afraid of uncertainty, I was bored. I hated my writing until one of my writer’s group friends said, “Wouldn’t they be mad as hell? Wouldn’t it feel like a betrayal to the extreme? What might they do if it was?”
I’m not entirely comfortable with violence and expressions of anger (blame it on my childhood), so my early drafts tend to create too-passive characters. But I did rewrite the scene, many times, until I could write anger. I could write fear, I could do running away—and I remember Caroline Leavitt, who gave me such a beautiful blurb for this book—telling me “They have to have a confrontation. They can’t just walk away!”
Here’s an analogy you’ve probably never heard before: Using anger in a story is like using tarragon in a recipe. Tarragon grows abundantly in my garden, ironic because I loathe using it. Only certain recipes (a Normandy chicken in cream sauce with apples, a certain cheese sauce, maybe a lemon ice) can tolerate its potency. Released anger in a scene is like that—it has to be used so carefully (to me). But I wrote a scene. Like meandering this highway we’re on, it was what it led to that surprised me.
The angry sister lashes out, knocks a cup of hot tea across the room. I made it be a favorite cup, a present for her daughter to heal a tentative relationship. Then I explored what other damage the broken cup could create. I started out with the hot tea hitting the other sister, but that felt too expected. Instead, I explored the cup shattering and the other sister, knowing her niece would be distraught that the cup broke, bending down to pick up the pieces and cutting her hand. A cut that becomes a launchpad for the next event, which is more separation, more fury and rejection.
Turned out to be one of my favorite moments in their relationship, a pivotal scene in the novel.
Uncertainty, or taking side trips into unknown territory when writing or cooking, is not something I can manage every day. It takes a toll emotionally to live on the edge of risk. We have to do that dive in and resurface thing so we build emotional muscles and begin to trust that if we do try something without familiar markers, we’ll be able to come back from it in good shape.
“Taking pleasure in small things helps,” Robertson tells us in her post.
Before I left on this “book tour” adventure, I did something very small that has sustained me during our travels in surprising ways. I invested in next season: I planted garlic. My brother sent me Music garlic from their farm in northern California. Music makes large cloves; it’s easy to peel, and almost sweet. The rest of the garden was dying when I went out to plant that afternoon before we left, ready for winter. Echinacea, Joe Pye Weed, and other seed plants are always left for the birds, but I had cleaned all the vegetable boxes except those in our greenhouse. I cleared a patch alongside the raised beds for our garlic, planting a big fat Music clove in each hole. Next summer, we’ll harvest full heads from each one.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
This week’s exercise is about opposites, letting yourself be open to what you DON’T know about your story. Maybe its shadow side, maybe its light.
During my recent workshop, “Writing and Risk: Aligning Your Writing with Your Life,” at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, I shared a great writing exercise I’ve been working with personally. It’s the creation of fellow novelist, Ginger Eager. I’ll share an abbreviated version here (with her permission). If you want to read more from Ginger, check out her AWP-award-winning novel, The Nature of Remains, or her newsletter.
1. Create a list of things in your life you cannot or do not know at this moment. Examples might include: How much of the world have I hurt unknowingly? Does my sister/brother/friend really care about me? Does my activism matter in any cosmic sense? Form the list as questions, if you can.
2. Select one question from your list. Write it at the top of a new page. Draw a line down the center of the page to create two columns. At the top of one write “true” and at the top of the other write “false.”
3. Think back to the past week or month or look at a larger section of your life. Think of three to five moments when it seemed to you that the premise of the question above was true. Note these in the “true” column.
4. Look over this period of time and think of three to five moments when it seemed to you that the premise of the question was false. Note these in the “false” column.
5. Study these and assess whether they can coexist in your mind and heart.
Examples
Did my sister /brother/friend really want to hurt my feelings with those hateful comments last Thanksgiving? Rather than limiting your thinking to just your relationship since the comment was made, go back farther, through the whole of your relationship with this person. What do you notice that affirms the premise that this is true? What specific incidents made it clear to you that this person hurt others’ feelings intentionally? Seek proof of the callousness, cruelty, ignorance.
Next, try to prove the belief’s falseness. What proof will you seek to show that your sister didn’t want to hurt your feelings at Thanksgiving? Maybe she has armored herself since her terrible first marriage. Seek specific incidents where you saw the need for this armor, or perhaps specific incidents where you saw her armor up unnecessarily, blocking herself from joy.
Look for conflicting truths. Allow that the questions on your list can be both true and false.
Like the meandering of a road trip, this exercise expands limited thinking, takes us out of our own box, or so I’ve found. It’s a mind expander. It also can contribute beautifully to get a scene unstuck: Ginger suggests incorporating these opposites into a scene. What if, using my example of the angry sisters above, someone can lash out but also be sad or longing for closeness? How would those opposites appear on the page? Gold. I loved this exploration and use it often—hope you try it!
And join me for a discussion on creative risk at my zoom book launch, Friday, November 10, 7:00 p.m. eastern, with author Allison Wyss. Register here to get the link and passcode to join us!