Inner Story
When I first started pitching my book to various literary agents, the most common question they asked was why is my main character so against unification, the joining of the seven provinces in my story. Like many things in life, I didn’t know the real answer.
The actual story, however, did know it.
I watched a documentary on Netflix called AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY. Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist who helped design the Bird’s Nest featured in the Beijing Olympics. He uses social media and art to inspire protests against the Chinese government. The thing about China is that freedom of speech is not a basic freedom like it is here. And to inspire any level of protest there would only result in one end.
An interviewer asked him why he’s so fearless compared to other people. His response: I’m so fearful that’s not fearless. I’m more fearful than other people maybe…then because I act more brave because I know the danger’s really there. If you don’t act, the danger becomes stronger.
That hit me like a brick wall that swung through the humid jungles of South China. That’s an absurd sentence, but Weiwei’s answer completely encompasses why my main character fights against totalitarianism than just rolling over and joining an enemy that seemed too strong.
And the actual story, the character, knew this without me consciously having to know. I can see the words, sentences and dialogue where he states this, just not in those exact words. Otherwise I’d know how to answer the question.
Now, I’m not here proclaiming my genius, nor am I proclaiming anything about me. There are two things going on here that I can see. One; stories choose us, the storytellers. Somehow we become the experts to those stories because we were chosen, and two; if we don’t tell it, if we do not follow that path given to us, we will in some way suffer.
We become the experts. What the hell does that mean? That doesn’t mean we as writers don’t need to do the research. We do when needed. We are the experts because somehow in some divine way we were given insights or the true meaning behind the stories we tell. In NIGHTFALL, if a person wanted to read for pure fun without wanting to know anything more than just the superficial stuff—the rollercoaster ride, the adventure—that’s fine. But if that person was curious enough, the hidden meaning behind the whole story and what drives every character in NIGHTFALL could be revealed to him or her, and they may learn something about themselves. In that sense, there are two basic layers to NIGHTFALL. Obviously, I can’t control whether the reader delves deeper or not. It’s their choice, and I wouldn’t want that control anyways.
I do believe, as people, we have gifts that we were given to give to the world. Huh? I do think we were put here for that reason. Every scientist and philosopher is trying to answer that question, and they can’t because the answer is different for every one of us. As far as I can tell at this moment, I was supposed to write the 7th Province series. Others were put here to teach lessons to their children, students, sections of society, the world. But if we don’t follow our paths, then what happens? Suffering. Whether it’s within that person who didn’t follow their path, or the people the gift wasn’t given to, I’m not sure. Something goes missing, then maybe it’ll fall onto another human to give that gift.
I was asked what my main character’s passion was. I didn’t know. For a long time I didn’t know. A few years after completing the first draft of NIGHTFALL, I figured it out. And the amazing thing was it was in the writing. I just didn’t see it.
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While the exact genesis of stories is mysterious, it’s not divine. All humans are creative. Our unique genetic code determines our proclivities. Some people are storytellers, most are not.
There is no place “out there” where stories reside, waiting for specially selected individuals to reveal them. They always come from inside us, our personal vision.
If they came from a “divine source”, how would you explain “Twilight”?
Twilight is actually a great book. I wrote about this on this site and here’s why I think it’s a great book. It’s a page turner. Now, you may say the writing, storytelling, character development, (input any other writing technique), sucks. Stephen King has. Nonetheless, almost every single person who’ve read those books could not stop turning the page, put the book down, and were compelled to finish the series. Isn’t that what we as writers want?
Think about it. Reading a book is a huge investment. It’s not like watching a movie, where we spend two hours in a theater and that’s it. We can risk watching crap movies. Risking reading crappy long books? Less likely.
I guess I worded things different. When people talk about God, soul, purpose, passion, paths in life, we may be talking about one thing, living a guided life. Basically, we as people have gifts. Whether we choose to share them or not is individual. But these gifts start in the formless, what you termed as out there. We as humans can bring them into the form: bridges, skyscrapers, children, books, government, etc. Everything man made started out as an idea. It’s impossible to know whether we are responsible or if some divine force helped us create these ideas. I can tell you, in my own experience, and what I’ve read from others like Arthur Miller, Robin Williams, Stephanie Meyers, and even the great Joanne Rowling have had the stories ‘given’ to them, stories chose them, or some how that idea fell into their laps. However you want to word it. My story that I’m writing definitely fell into my lap and has never let me go, despite my efforts. The way it germinated and matured has surprised me to no end. It’s one of the very few things that I truly love and keeps me going, aside from my survival instincts. I am human.
One last thing, this is just a response to your comment, which I completely appreciate. And this is in no way to dispute your experiences and opinions, and I write these posts from my own experiences only. I can’t really comment on others experiences, since they are their own.
I was half-joking about Twilight. Beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder. And, of course, the idea that because something is popular that means it’s great is highly debatable. I often think there is, in fact, an inverse relationship.
But that’s rather beside the point. What I was getting at was that automatically attributing the mystery of the creative process to a divine source is an error in reasoning. Here’s why I say that.
Again and again throughout the ascent of humans as sentient beings the mysteries of the natural world have been demystified. There was a time, not that long ago, when it was understood that the sun was a divine being, an intelligent force, a God, by pretty much every human on the planet. The particulars of the Sun God varied widely, but at the time that was our best explanation for the mystery of this fiery orb that ruled the planet. But the sun has been demystified, and only the most primitive people today, those still stuck in the Ancient Ways (ignorance) of pre-history, believe such a notion.
Over and over again man has increased his understanding of the natural world and divine explanations have fallen by the wayside. So why cling to divine explanations for today’s remaining mysteries? Such thinking ignores man’s entire history of continual, ongoing Enlightenment.
The creative process is indeed a mystery, as are so many other cognitive functions. By the same token, myriad cognitive processes which were just as mysterious only decades ago are now well understood. As time goes by, we will continue, inexorably, to demystify the human brain. Given this long history of discovery, isn’t it much more likely that, though currently mysterious, the creative process is a completely natural process, something our remarkable human brains are wired to do?
Where do our stories come from? I maintain that every single one comes from “in here”, our uniquely human imagination. So why is it that some stories seem much more complete to us, as though they have already been created and we are merely taking dictation? Who knows? That’s part of what we don’t yet understand. But don’t you find it interesting that these remarkable “gift stories” are unique to us as individuals? That is, they always seem to bear our personal signatures. They are never in a foreign language, for one thing. And they never seem to contain vocabulary that is unknown to us. And they are invariably built up from the scaffolding or our own personal experiences, interests, obsessions, special knowledge, artistic preferences, inclinations, etc.
You mentioned JKR. HP “came” to her because of all those parts of what make up the unique human JKR coalescing into her personal vision of a compelling story. But HP is certainly not something completely new on this earth. Magic, YA lit, British boarding schools, the Chosen One, and on an on, she didn’t create these elements. Her brilliance was in blending them in a new way.
Ultimately I just think the idea that there is some divine source picking and choosing which writers will be given which stories to write is a lot more problematic, on so many levels, that the idea that all stories evolve out of the many things that make humans human: our unlimited imagination, our social need to communicate, our self-awareness, our curiosity, our sense of wonder, our contemplation of life and death. All of which emanate, quite simply, from the completely natural processes of the remarkable human brain. I think it’s okay to take some credit for our ideas. Because they come from us, they are unique to us. I couldn’t write your books, and you couldn’t write mine. And that’s a beautiful thing, and exactly as it should be.