I started writing this in my journal, but I thought "hey, why not share it?" So I am.
This weekend was Thanksgiving. On the drive to Ann Arbor, I pushed my mind to consider Dust to Dust, a story I've been working on for some time. I made discoveries.
There are many similarities between making stuff up for stories and discovering things. Both result in being able to push the story forward Both result in new characters, events, and locations. Both feel good to do for the writer.
But discovery is completely different. It truly feels like the idea exists somewhere out there, floating in space, and all I am doing is plumbing its depths, trying to find more of what exists.
The birth of a story I came to call Legion was like this. I was sitting in 11th grade Humanities class, bored out of my skull and writing, and all of a sudden, there's this guy named Travis. And he's in a battle. And he's sort of killed, but winds up in this glowy whiteness with a sword on a pedestal in the middle. He acknowledges the place and says, "I guess this is the Atrium."
I remember being confused. I, as the writer, had no idea what my character was talking about. I asked all my friends that day, in dumbfoundedness, "What's the Atrium? Why is it capitalized? Why is there a sword there?" None of them could answer me...
Every time I added to that story, it felt that way. I was merely an observer chronicling events that were - somehow - happening.
(Speaking of, did you ever have the idea that all imagined things actually do exist? That the imaginer merely has some kind of psychic tether to some alternate timeline/universe/plane? I did...)
But then I had to finish the story.
All of a sudden, all of these individual scenes had to be tied together. All of the strange dream sequences that involved a small theophany had to be put into the sense of the story. Enemies that were mere shadows needed motivation. And there had to be an ending.
I felt so uncomfortable forcing that story to a conclusion. It lacked all of the reality that the rest of it held in my mind. I tied scenes together that, intuitively, I knew did not belong together. I jumped to thematic conclusions that source material received with coldness.
Since turning that project in, I have not even looked at the final product. It felt dirty, polluted. Like I had sewn together a Frankenstein's monster. There was no way to pull out the good pieces from the bad without ruining them.
But this weekend was different. As I explored a character, I found myself exploring a place. And with that place came events. Backstory. Presuppositions that I knew were there all along were explained simply and elegantly. It was... amazing.
No.
Perhaps divine. It is easy to see why, for so long, the creative spark was regarded as some kind of god.
Perhaps these moments are gifts that God gives to us creatives. We spend so much mental energy trying to tell meaningful stories, but so often, we grasp at straws trying to make sense of a world whose purpose has been so veiled. But God, in his grace, awakens that intuitive grasp that we have of the hidden structures of reality and we truly discover something that has never existed.
