On the Way to the Beginning: Pulling and Following a Story
A few thoughts about a process I've observed in my writing.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.- T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets)
During high school, I wrote the first three instalments of a sprawling high fantasy series. Nearing the end of the third book, I became increasingly more concerned with the symbolism behind the story I was crafting, which I believe stilted the first draft material I produced from then to the end of the sixth instalment.
I became too careful; too pondering to let my characters explore the strange sidestreets and silent dirt roads that my rambling intuition suggested. Instead, I set them on the highway and lashed their backs with my cat o’ nine tails keyboard to keep them moving.
They yearned to take their time — and part of me yearned to let them. Let them wander through the thickets and get tangled in the ivy… But no, I knew where they needed to go and what they needed to go through to inspire growth or decomposition, and I made sure they got there.
And the story made sense in many ways. The symbols fit. The pattern held. The characters were fulfilled or disintegrated according to the choices that informed their disposition… Something was missing, though. There was some aspect of chaos absent that was essential for the story to come alive; a certain feeling of the writer playing with the reader, maintaining a fragile tension that might upset the story at any moment — as if neither author nor audience knew where the tale might tumble or climb to next.
It was not that the story became too predictable. I think perhaps it was that I did not feel like I was following the story. It felt like I was pulling it.
I just read Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlett Pimpernel, which prompted a few of these thoughts. The book is exceptionally fun to read. Somehow, Orczy masterfully composed the sense of running after the characters in excitement as they seek to unveil the identity of the ‘demmed elusive Pimpernel’.
Other experts in achieving this atmosphere are George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton. I particularly love The Ball and Cross for the ludicrously fun ways Chesterton finds to provoke, prolong, and prevent the protagonists’ duel, and At the Back of the North Wind for the meandering paths MacDonald follows Diamond down in the wake of the wild, winsome, wind. Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora is a high fantasy book with a similar thrilling sense of cheek that lends brilliantly to its page-turner pace.
That material I wrote during high school had some of this quality, I fancy. It had some tincture of play and recklessness that the deeply calculating approach later abandoned. No doubt, it was the intuitive openness and effortless discernment that all children dedicate to the hearing and telling of stories.
Alas, I became even more cautious for a time — when I realised I had been hamstrung by caution. A spiralling downfall. Caution is sometimes a black hole.
Often now, when editing that first draft material, it feels as though I’m searching for that element of mischievousness, that counterpoint of chaos and hope. I want to handle it lightly, but I don’t want to be too cautious, of course. I think it needs to dwell like a spinning top on the story’s pages — not turning so fast it dances out of the margins and into sophistry or incomprehensibility, but certainly never slowing so much that the story falls still.
Somewhere back at the beginning of my storytelling, I hiked down through a tangled wood and found a hidden stream. Upon the gully’s nadir — the source of all the valley’s verdure — I drank and wandered at ease. Then, thinking I could discover the structure of the water, I climbed the opposite bank; up through the wood and to the summit, where I turned and beheld …
The valley low where the water ran winking had vanished in the shadows of the wood. Heedless of this loss, I took my paper and my pen and began to sketch the valley and the path it took through the mountains. Long I laboured in mapping out this treasure and imagining what joy I might give another by showing such a beauty — so long I may have forgotten which the beauty was, my map or the hidden stream itself?
I grew thirsty — what luck! I descended once again.
As much as I might like to caution against caution, a stern word is called for in defence of the calculating attention to symbolism I adopted. The map has some use, though it should not be confused with its source. Though I devote much attention to enlivening the sense of following the story in my editing, there are also many aspects of the tale — large and small — that are in need of careful redirection to better highlight the meaningful patterns of the mountains and the woods.
Without at least a little preoccupation with symbol and structure — especially in the editing — the storyteller does tilt dangerously toward incomprehensibility. As one might discover in the seemingly nonsensical songs within MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, there is some utility in vaguely incomprehensible art, but Phanes is always subjected in some way to Logos.
Perhaps you could think of the concept also in terms of plot- versus character-driven stories. Stories where you seek to follow the character making interesting decisions will often grip you more than stories where the character is pulled along by the events of the plot. However, the choices the character faces are only interesting if they are meaningful, and they only mean something if they are attempting to map out — to plot — the symbols and patterns of reality.
A child may be open to a fantastically outlandish tale of magic and monsters, but one should not doubt for a moment that they will expect some sense to be made of the beginning by the end.
‘... though I cannot promise to take you home," said North Wind, as she sank nearer and nearer to the tops of the houses, "I can promise you it will be all right in the end. You will get home somehow.’
- George MacDonald (At the Back of the North Wind)
P.S. The thread on Derek J Fiedler’s post (linked below) got me thinking about this. Go follow him for more interesting thoughts and conversations!
P.P.S. My thinking about symbols and patterns is largely influenced by the Pageau brothers — Jonathan’s videos and Matthieu’s book, The Language of Creation. Check out this clip about creativity and symbolism from Jonathan’s great conversation with Benjamin Boyce in 2021.