“Every story is an escape story.”

I’ve taped that slogan to the wall of my work station.

It clarifies my character’s trajectory.

It helps my story “come true” because it acknowledges a fact of our human condition:

We are all escaping something.

That notion hijacked my brain after a decade of professionally assessing and writing film scripts. I found myself emotionally invested in characters who were trapped. And it remains the case in every good story I encounter.

Here’s what I continue to discover:

All the best protagonists are trapped within the gravity field of an idea, a relationship, or any situation that makes life not worth living. Naturally, they’re going to escape. Or die trying.

Three great escapes:

The Great Escape—Steve McQueen is a prisoner of Stalag Luft III. Of course, he escapes.

A Room with a View—Lucy Honeychurch, on holiday in Italy with her chaperone, tries to escape the company of man to whom she is unsuitably attracted.

In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart is a prisoner of his self-pity. If he doesn’t put his broken heart behind him, audiences will demand their money back.

Three stories, three kinds of prison—a concrete jail, a relationship, a belief system.

Three kinds of escape dominate most story plots.

#1. Escaping a prison or place

Prison stories depict characters whose goal is a physical escape. O Brother Where Art Thou, for example. And the futuristic Escape from New York. And the current The Maze Runner.

Escape or die trying!—it’s box office gold.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy yearns to escape Kansas for a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops.” Once she lands in Oz, the story is all about finding a way back home.

In Casablanca, which is essentially a love story, almost every character is preoccupied with escaping the Nazis by flying to Lisbon and onward to freedom in America.

The escape to greater freedom—it’s a condition of our human condition.

A more subtle and more common escape theme in fiction is…

#2. Escaping a Relationship

Love affair, job, family—these are relationships from which it’s never easy to walk away. A prison break is nothing compared to escaping some relationships.

Fatal Attraction depicts a happily married man who risks a one-night-stand. Big mistake. His partner in infidelity assumes a relationship from which our protagonist struggles to extricate himself. He’s lucky to escape with his life.

In the Booker Prize winning novel, Hotel du Lac, a bride on the way to her wedding instructs the taxi driver to “Keep going! Don’t stop. Pass the church! Whatever you do, keep driving!” She escapes the wrong man and goes into hiding. Close call!

Once again, in Casablanca, Bogey has escaped to the ends of the earth in hopes of never crossing paths with the woman who broke his heart. Who hasn’t felt the need to escape a relationship? Yikes! Let’s not even go there.

But the most subtle and most significant escape theme concerns…

#3. Escaping Oneself

From On the Waterfront, to Moonstruck, to Good Will Hunting, to Silver Linings Playbook, the protagonists are on a trajectory toward escaping their own self-destructive attitudes and beliefs. Casablanca! Again. The protagonist is engaged in all three escapes.

The hero’s redemption (and ultimate victory) hinges on their transcending their self-concern. And it rarely happens unless the writer brings the hero to the point of despair.

It’s another fact of life—and fiction:

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”  ~ William S. Burroughs

Why do we need to escape ourselves?

Because we are all liars. By necessity.

“We tell ourselves stories that can’t possibly be true, but believing those stories allows us to function. We know we’re not telling ourselves the whole truth but it works, so we embrace it.” ~ author, Seth Godin

The delusions that underpin our human condition—and our equally human yearning for the truth—drama depends on it.

It’s as if fiction exists to remind us that we are born to escape.

Born to escape.

If it’s true that we’re born to escape, it’s one of the juiciest facts of life. It may explain why we read and more importantly (for writers), why we are driven to write fiction in the first place.

This week, check it out for yourself—the films you watch and the novels you read—see if it’s not true that:

EVERY STORY IS AN ESCAPE STORY.

If you’re writing a story and creating a protagonist—can you identify the prison they’re trapped within? What kind of escape is he or she engaged in?

Any thoughts? Share them in the “Comments” below.

No one should worry about thinking outside the box.

Because THINKING is the box!

Worry about that, instead.

As fiction writers, we needn’t worry personally about the existential angst that “thinking is the box!” might stir up. But we should concern ourselves with how “thinking” relates to the journeys of our characters. And it goes like this:

If we really love our protagonist, we won’t ease up on him/her until they’ve utterly finished with thinking. From opening gambit to the story’s major crisis—thinking reigns supreme.

Thinking reigns supreme

The hero’s goal, her motivation, strategies and actions through the beginning and middle of a story, it’s all a function of thinking. It takes the hero a long way, but (in a good story) never all the way.

Thinking takes our POV character from Page One to the brink of the story heart, but thinking should never be allowed to move her through the heart to the story’s resolution.

This is a basic principle I work with, and it helps me break down the story into two parts.

A super-simple overview

Story One portrays the character operating within his thinking box. It’s a magnificent box of powerful biases and beliefs which, when spent—when emptied utterly—opens the protagonist to “seeing.”

Story One—thinking.

Story Two—seeing.

Is that simple, or what?

I have a habit of devolving into a rant at this point, because, although obvious to me, many story experts don’t grasp the significance of seeing vs. thinking. And yet the difference may explain nothing less than why we’re so addicted to fiction.

We yearn to see truth for ourselves

There comes a time in every struggle—if we’ve fought hard enough and failed—when we lose faith in ourselves. The hero grows tired of the sound of her own voice, and weary of the lies she’s forced to tell herself to sustain belief in her strategies. She rejects herself, her thoughts—the whole freaking box!

This is the moment of truth.

But truth is not served by a fictional character digging once again into her bag of tricks to come up with a last ditch solution. It’s just more box! It’s often called “thinking outside the box,” but as we know now, thinking IS the box!

Audiences get their money’s worth when the hero escapes the box for the freedom of no-thought (a few milliseconds will do) and the “seeing” that is the miraculous consequence. If you want to call that a religious experience, go ahead, please. Because it is powerful enough to give the reader a blast of authenticity. And that’s what’s addictive.

Anyway…

I’m designing a writing course for local writers here on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. I aim to present a few keys to writing a killer first draft. “Thinking is the box!” is one such key.

Not to overload the writer with rules, these basic principles and overviews will encourage the writer to write the most reckless-but-considered first draft possible.

And you — what are your guiding principles? When you set out, what are those big “story” thoughts without which you would never leave home?

Let me know in the “Comments” below.

If you’ve been reading my deep travel tales, you’ll know how un-smart I am.

Count the times I’ve been run down on the road less traveled!

I was barely home from my travels in Africa and Asia when the gods pulled a U-turn and made roadkill of me yet again.

I was filming in the Canadian Rockies

I was shooting a film on the geomorphology of the high country. Think erosion. Even solid granite breaks up over time and washes to the sea. Everything disintegrates, including the human psyche.

Especially mine.

After an exhausting day filming on scree slopes above a chain of turquoise lakes and then debriefing the tapes over dinner with the sound tech we drove to Lake Louise to be closer to our next location. It was midnight by the time we found a tent site on the perimeter of a campground.

We pitched our tent and fell asleep.

I woke at dawn with rain drubbing softly on the sagging canvas.

I heard something else.

I crawled half out to peer around the tent—

Grizzly! Not six feet away from me.

Front paws on the picnic table, she sniffed our cooler, our food supply. Last night we had unloaded the jeep and then hastily secured one end of our pup tent to the table before passing out.

I’m sorry! I told you, I’m not that smart!

The bear took a second to fix me in the cross-hairs of her cold gaze.

I nudged Ken and whispered, “Grizzly.” He wanted to see. I shook my head furiously. He stuck his head out, withdrew, looked at me: “Three cubs.”

Worst case scenario. Now what?

Now what?

The tent collapsed.

The weight of the cooler and everything spilling out—bacon and steaks and yogurt, and bread, coffee, apples, raisins, nuts and milk and a week’s supply of Snickers Bars—it flattened the tent with us beneath it.

Four bears were sitting on us, eating. And not quietly, I might add.

While we lay still as death.

I thought of Fred.

Fred and I had played hockey at university. He was 6-3 and damned good-looking before he met the grizzly who left him minus one hip, a broken back, no scalp, half a face, and a chewed elbow, and those were just the physical injuries.

I was eroding inside, already.

I’d been here before, my life stopped dead in its tracks. (The cheetah comes to mind, remember?) My granite sense of self becoming “Fred,” I couldn’t muster the necessary thoughts to convince myself that life had meaning.

There was nothing left to obscure the fact that life has no meaning.

There was nothing left.

Hold that thought.

If you’ve read Story Structure Expedition, you’re familiar with how I recruited authors more eloquent than myself to do the heavy explaining through moments like this. Well, here we go again:

John Gray (The Silence of Animals), he sounds like he’s been under a grizzly’s picnic tablecloth:

“Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves.”

That’s it! What every crisis has taught me.

If Mr. Gray moves over we can squeeze physicist, Alan Lightman, into this dilemma:

“In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. Underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.”

Lightman is describing the fictional protagonist waking up in the Act II Crisis.

At the heart of the story, heroes see the world as it really is.

Un-smart like me

I’m not saying I’m a hero, but I certainly have been serially un-smart. My talent for not being too smart for my own good has earned me the moral authority to enter the Act III of my life.

And now, writing from the perspective of the final act, I want to share with you some of my discoveries (however arguable they might be):

1. The meaning of a human life is to realize—by whatever means possible—that nothingness is our most precious possession 
2. The best fictional protagonists do just that
3. Which aids and abets our own struggle to see the world as it really is
4. And that’s why we read fiction
5. And perhaps why we write it.

CUT BACK TO ACTION:

Behind the falling rain, low voices. The canvas was suddenly snapped back to reveal a uniformed park official standing over me with a rifle. He shook his head in dismay, or disdain.

I know, I’m an idiot, I’m sorry.

Mama lay in a heap, tranquilized, while her three cubs found refuge up a tree. Campers, soggy in the early morning rain, watched in disbelief.

I know, I know,  I’m sorry! It’ll happen again, I assure you.

Because:

Good writers—like good protagonists—are never too smart for their own good.

[POST SCRIPT: All this “meaning” business notwithstanding, I didn’t sleep well in a tent for a few years after that.]

People do die.

We die of heat exhaustion on the train from Bombay to Delhi.

We die in a taxi cab short of making it to a hotel where we die of despair.

We die of a broken heart. Betrayed. By ourselves. By our stupidity!

I lay on some deluxe deathbed in some beige hotel room somewhere in that suffocating gray limbo called New Delhi and for two or three days I drank blood red orange juice. Where did I find the money for a 3-star hotel? I thought I was broke.

As empty as I was—or perhaps because I was so empty—the image of the beggar in Bombay haunted me. No arms, no legs, not much left of him at all, he was beyond defeat.

The scene won’t quit my head even now. Not sure what I’m seeing as I remember him nudging his begging bowl with his forehead through a thicket of legs, a gauntlet of feet and fumes and cattle and cart wheels and spokes and grime and dogs and shit and broken asphalt. There is no Bombay for me above the knees of that miraculous city. I am down there with him getting trampled and I can’t escape.

At some point it occurred to me—I’m not taking a trip, this trip is taking me.

I was no less curious than the fly on the wall of that hotel room about what would happen next, and how far a person could run on empty.

I’m sweating again on a Delhi street so thick with smog you would be excused for thinking the city had exploded. I’m looking for the offices of British Overseas Airways (BOAC) because I have to escape this blessed country. Where did I get the money to buy an airline ticket? I must have held a few traveler’s cheques in reserve. I can’t remember.

Who can remember everything that happened so long ago? And yet I sometimes remember things I’m not sure I ever saw. The beggar, for instance, whom I saw for only a minute, what I remember about him changed my life.

As the 707 lifted off and banked on a trajectory for Hong Kong I would have been thinking of that beggar. Even as I swore to never ever ever ever set foot in India again, I was carrying him with me. Oaths notwithstanding, I would return to India four more times over the next 20 years.

Why? Because I was looking for answers?

How far can you run on empty? And what happens when you get there?

Hong Kong. What a relief. Clean, efficient, sensible, and above all polite. They were very, very sorry. The Immigration official, he was sorry to tell me that I could not enter Hong Kong. No onward ticket, it hadn’t occurred to me. “Very sorry you come to Hong Kong with no money, so sorry.”

He sent me to the BOAC agent who looked at me as if I might have had a begging bowl protruding from my forehead. He was manufacturing a ticket before I’d finished my sob story. A ticket entirely bogus. Immigration stamped my passport, they were perfectly happy.

I applied to the Canadian High Commission for a loan to see me home. After all, two-years of volunteer work on Zambia’s rivers had left me with schistosomes cavorting in my blood stream, and what’s more my funds had been “stolen” in Bombay, so that here I was running so precariously on empty that by this time tomorrow I would be begging for my supper.

You have to admit, that’s not a bad pitch.

But the High Commissioner wasn’t buying scripts for TV movies. “You have parents,” she explained. “They’ll wire you money.”

While my SOS telegram did its nasty work, I retreated to an offshore monastery.

I didn’t know much about Buddhism or Zen except that the philosophy was Stoic and the life was Spartan. You enter a monastery, you leave everything behind. Fine by me, there wasn’t much left of me. A bamboo mat on a slab in a stone alcove, fine by me. Small log for a pillow, why not?

Oh, yeah, and next to the pillow—a wooden bowl.

The universe was working overtime trying to tell me something.

It’s pretty obvious what the purpose of a monastery is. The silence and simplicity presents a challenge to the monkey-mind. Thinking soon proves pointless, in the aftermath of which things just are. Three bowls of rice a day were a miracle. If they were trying to empty me out, well, I was already losing my urgency to get anywhere.

My final destination might not be a place, after all. Maybe it’s a new way of seeing things.

After a week I returned to Hong Kong to discover that my telegram had not been delivered. “Recipient not home.” I returned to the High Commission and was told to “get a job.”

One Hong Kong dollar—I remember this detail—it was all I had to underwrite my next move. I entered a bar. Was I seeking darkness? Or to speak with someone. I can’t remember.

I found myself gabbing with a friendly face, another Canadian, a round-faced farmer from a small community not far from my home town, as it turned out. I told him of my African sojourn and of my blunder in Bombay and the gift of the beggar and the monastery and being told to get a job, and as we were laughing he ordered us another round, and he slapped some dollars on the table and kept on slapping to the tune of 600 US dollars. I didn’t know him from Adam.

“Pay me back when you can,” he said.

I never saw him again.

I’ve heard it said that the gift seeks the empty place. I suppose emptiness ensures that the gift will be used, consumed, not hoarded but spent. The giver by giving becomes empty and is now in a position to receive. And around it goes like that.

Arriving in Vancouver, I needed $35 dollars to fly over the Rockies to Alberta. A friend from university came to the rescue.

What do you make of all that?

Have you ever survived on empty? WRITE A STORY ABOUT IT! We love stories about people getting run over on the road less traveled. It seems you have to almost die to hear the heart of the world beating.

From Africa I flew to India.

I would return home through Asia, circumnavigate the globe, prove the world was round, see it with my own two eyes.

Bombay. Wow! The smells. The crush of humanity! A beggar with no arms or legs.

My god, he had no face, either.

His begging bowl—if you can picture this—he nudged it along the street with his forehead. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t not look.

For a second I couldn’t breathe.

Have you ever been so far from home that your brain wouldn’t compute?

I don’t know how many rupees I dropped in his bowl, probably a lot, because suddenly and inexplicably I felt more alive. I swore to never again bitch about anything, and isn’t that what travel is about?

Travel puts distance between us and our tired old way of seeing things.

What if you could travel twice as far from home?

What if someone approached you in the lobby of your Bombay hotel with a promise to take you twice as far from home? Would you listen to his pitch?

He is tall and impeccable and impossibly smooth-talking as he invites you to sit down so he can make his case. You’re all ears. Where is this place? How do I get there?

“Very easy, my friend,” he says. “Firstly, you allow me to con you out of all your money.” He is joking, of course, this Mr. Patel. “You have traveler’s cheques, yes? Very good. May I see them? No? All right, later perhaps.”

He hails a waiter and orders wine. “In any case, once you have been fleeced, my goodness, you look in the mirror—are you sick?”

“Depressed, I would think, for sure.”

“No, no, I mean sick, sick. You most certainly need a doctor. Here, I can give you his phone number. He confirms that a parasite infects your blood stream. Perhaps you have been exposed to stagnant water. In Africa? That explains everything. I’m afraid it can be fatal. You must be treated soon. But without money you are going nowhere.”

The wine arrives, a Bordeaux, for goodness sake. Who is this Mr. Patel?

“You cannot escape the heatwave we are having here in Bombay. The humidity in advance of the monsoon is unspeakable. But a cheap hostel is all you can afford, a bare mattress upon which you are lying spread-eagle. You are clinging to it for dear life. Otherwise you would run to the window and hurl yourself onto the street below. Such is your despair. Such is your remorse. You have been such a fool! You no longer trust the thoughts that arise to resolve this calamity. I’m afraid to say, sir, that you thoroughly hate yourself.”

Patel raises a glass in a toast. “You cannot travel farther from home than that, my friend.”

I take what must look like an unsophisticated glub of wine.

“But I can see you are not sold on this expedition. And I understand perfectly. It is not part and parcel of the human condition to collude with one’s own demise. We must go unwittingly. Kicking and screaming as it were. Ha, ha! So be it.”

I have no memory of Patel saying any such things, although I do recall the Bordeaux and that he was a businessman in need of foreign currency for an overseas trip, more than bank regulations allow. He offered me a handsome premium on the face value of my traveler’s cheques, leaving me with cash to convert to currencies for my onward journey.

“We will transact this business over a meal at the Taj Mahal Hotel, yes?”

How to travel too far—be gullible, be greedy, be an idiot!

The Bombay Taj, like most 5-star hotels, smells of money. Money having been spent and money being squandered everywhere you look.

Patel threw a heap of rupees at martinis there in the posh mezzanine lounge—and at various kebabs and little lamb chops and chicken tikka—so it didn’t seem inappropriate for me to hand over my traveler’s cheques for his inspection. It seemed appropriate that his uncle, the hotel’s comptroller, should want to verify the cheques. That Patel should confer with his uncle alone sounded suspicious, so I tagged along as far as the elevator where I lost him!

He slipped into an elevator behind doors that closed in my face.

I bolted down the grand marble staircase of the Taj Mahal Hotel to Reception where I learned that no such money manager existed. Three Patels were registered at the Taj and I hammered on each of their doors in vain.

Deep travel—are we there yet?

I applied for a refund at the American Express Office and was told to check back in a week, by which time I would have examined the mug shots of every criminal known to the Bombay Police. By then I could no longer ignore strange fluids leaking from my body. A doctor prescribed antibiotics and a flight home.

Broke but for the cash in my pocket, I downgraded to a hotel without air-conditioning. I remember lying on my bed naked and sweating under a feeble fan and gripping the mattress in mortal fear of having traveled far too far.

I decided to escape Bombay—to Delhi by train.

If Bombay was a sauna, the Rajasthan desert was a furnace. You opened a window at the very real risk of burning yourself. Every whistle stop along the way provided an opportunity to rehydrate, but instead I gorged on ice cream thinking it would cool me down, and I was right. I began to shiver feverishly. And vomit and retch until my muscles seized and I lay on the wooden floor of the 3^rd-class carriage as hopeless as a leper.

A leper without arms or legs!

How far from home was I? I had passed self-loathing hours ago. I was going to die and the sooner the better. I was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. “Go ahead and shoot me,” he tells Ingrid Bergman. “You’ll be doing me a favor.”

This is where the fictional hero bottoms out. If only! If I were a fictional character, my writer would save me here at the heart of my story. But this is a true story and I have no one to blame but myself. What do they call this in India—karma? How much more was I supposed to suffer? How much more could I take?

What was I supposed to do—push my begging bowl with my forehead?

If that’s what it takes, okay!

I heard someone mention the Taj. We were passing through Agra, home of the real fucking Taj Mahal, one of the so-called Wonders of the World. I didn’t have the wherewithal to throw up. There was nothing left. There wasn’t much left of me. I didn’t think I would survive till Delhi.

I had never felt—and I have never felt since—so far gone.

To be continued…

Have you ever gone too far? WRITE A STORY ABOUT IT!

We are all starving for stories about people who are greedy for life.

[NOTE: If you don’t want to miss any posts in this travel series, please SUBSCRIBE at the top of the page.]

It’s a mega-watt moon shining down on western Tanzania.

That ragged ribbon of moonlight you see is a rough-and-tumble highway known in south-central Africa as the Hell Run. From Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean, this 1500-mile lifeline serves the heart of the continent.

A 5-ton truck speeds westward with its load of car tires in a metal cage. At the wheel, a hungry-looking Tanzanian, and beside him an over-stuffed Sikh bending a tire iron just for the hell of it.

Ten miles ahead, beyond a sleeping village, three youths are running along the road. What are children doing up at midnight? The boys stop where the road descends into a wooded valley and shout to someone on the verge of the gloom. That someone is a mzungu, a white boy. Me.

“Habari gani?” I say. I have no idea what they want.

I’m returning to Zambia after traveling north to Uganda, then hitchhiking south-eastward through Kenya and into Tanzania. Now it’s westward as quickly as possible to resume my duties as a hydrologist in Zambezi country. I’ve been gone too long, six weeks, so I choose to keep moving by the light of this impossible moon. I don’t get far. Those boys are waving excitedly.

“What’s up?” I shout. “Unitaka nini?”

“Simba!”

Everybody talks about simba but how many have seen a lion with their own two eyes? Exactly. But I appreciate their concern.

“You saw the simba?” I ask.

“Simba eat man!” the oldest kid shouts.

“Yeah? Where?” I ask, skeptically.

“Just here!” He jogs down the hill to join me and points loosely, vaguely, into the near distance.

“When?” I ask.

“Yesterday, Bwana.”

While still not convinced, neither am I a fool.

The boys are brothers, children of the farmer who dropped me roughly in the middle of nowhere. As we approach the village I hear someone calling “Tobias!” The boys bound toward the village like jackrabbits. A vehicle is approaching. They’re waving it down, bless their hearts. The truck is stopping.

The older kid leaps onto the running board to negotiate the terms of this hijacking. The truckers step down to examine Tobias’ bribe, a tire, which the Sikh inspects in the light of the headlamps. He kicks it and growls and spits on it and tells me to climb aboard, not in the cab but in the cage, which he locks once I’m in, and I wonder if my odds of survival weren’t better with Simba.

Tobias and I shake hands through the bars as the truck moves ahead. It’s a mental snapshot that hasn’t faded all these years later—those boys as my guardian angels. It’s a romantic notion, isn’t it—angels. I don’t honestly do angels, and it’s just as well, or my life story would soon become tedious for its endless interventions of a divine nature.

Down into the valley we go. That laughing hyena at the wheel is targeting every pothole in the road. I’m safer the higher I clamber within that jungle of tires where I hang on like a monkey in a cage. Why do I get myself into these situations? Seriously, what is wrong with me? Let it never be said that I’m too smart for my own good. I’m just that little bit stupid, blessed with the essential naiveté that marks a fictional protagonist. Otherwise those angels I don’t quite believe in would have no cause to show up in my life. Not that I’m looking for trouble—who looks for trouble?—but if you were to accuse me of harbouring an urge to escape the gravity field of the known world, I would plead guilty without hesitation.

By the time we rise out of the valley I’ve made peace with the tires. They cradle me now. Peace is open savannah country by night, moonlit mile after magical mile. The earth is unearthly. I doubt heaven compares with this. Giant leafless baobab trees resemble elephants, mute herds standing guard on the grasslands, benign and protective. I have never felt so far from home.

The truck slows then stops for no apparent reason. The Sikh unlocks the cage and I reckon this for the scene where I’m murdered and robbed. Instead, he crosses the road to exercise his tire iron on a Mercedes abandoned in the ditch, stripping it of its tires in minutes. Welcome to the Hell Run. The African heaves each Michelin into the cage and off they go unaware that I’ve slipped away without a word of thanks.

The back seat of the Mercedes makes a perfect bed for the night.

I’m woken by the sound of a motorcycle, not the guttural rumble of a Harley but the unforgivable racket of a two-stroke Kawasaki. The sun is up and so is the hood of the Mercedes behind which someone is having a go at the engine. Someone dressed from head to toe in black. Father Manon, he calls himself.

“God helps those who help themselves,” he says, as he stashes a handful of electrical leads his saddle bags. He sets his goggles in place and says, “Allons-y! Let’s go, my son!” Saved again! This time by a priest from Chicoutimi, Quebec.

Father Manon drives as if he were immortal. He drives that Kawasaki with one hand so he can bless passers-by without slowing down. He blesses the chickens and the cows and the baobab trees. He blesses the ant hills! We speed along roads cluttered with people who lack the road-wise flow of urban traffic. Cyclists packing enormous sacks of charcoal waver and wobble within a spoke of death, and women balancing colourful bundles half again as large as themselves lead children-in-tow aside to allow us through.

I’m not sure if I’m being saved or not. Or if I want to be saved. I mean, why do I leave home in the first place if not to become lost? Think about it—doesn’t the human condition seem to demand our own undoing? The sages have been telling us since forever to risk everything, to leave everything behind.

I know, I know, easier said than done.

You’re reading this, you tell me—isn’t there something compelling about this picture of a young mzungu hanging onto the robes of a fake priest as he vanishes over the horizon deeper into the heart of Africa? To what end we can only imagine.

Maybe the real angels save us by leading us deeper and deeper into the heart of our own story. I don’t know, I don’t do angels.

But I seem to run into a hell of a lot of them.

(An earlier version of this story appeared here almost two years ago. In response to readers who have asked for more of these road stories, this will be an ongoing series. It’s time I got them all written down. But I don’t want to waste your time, so, please let me know if they speak to you.)

I was tearing up a Zambian highway on my white Honda “Dream” when it hit me.

I thought it was mud.

A convoy of trucks thundering past in the opposite direction was kicking up debris. Even after the last tanker had passed, the flak was stinging my hands and face.

What the hell—that mud?—bees! I was plastered in bees.

I’m telling you this story because I love the road and the dire straits into which a journey often leads. If you’re like me you love to hop aboard a good road story and be taken for a ride.

Bees! I was riding headlong into a swarm. They were inside my shirt. They were up my nose and in my ears and stinging my skull. How could they be biting my skill? I was wearing a helmet. I yanked the clasp and jettisoned the thing before I came to a stop.

Where they came from, I have no idea, but I was immediately surrounded by children.

They didn’t ask permission to debug me, just began pulling them out of my hair, out of my ears. They pulled one off my eye, which was swelling. These kids swatted bees off my back and off my thighs. They were inside my khaki shorts, for god’s sake. They were inside my mouth. My lips were swelling. I had to do something, and quickly.

Africans have a saying: If the snake bites you within sight of your village rooftops, you will die. The victim dashes home, I guess, pumping the venom to the heart. You get bitten far from home, however, and you have nowhere to run. You will stay put and do the right thing.

Though my heart was racing, I could feasibly ride the motorcycle without making things worse. I thanked the kids and sped back toward the city. At home I slathered calamine lotion over the worst swelling before lying on my bed. Calm down, I told myself, just breathe. I felt no panic, no sense of tragedy at the prospect of dying. No regrets.

Here I was in Africa living a dream. I worked the rivers, measured their flow when hippos would allow it. For two years I crisscrossed that high dry plateau by Land Rover, camping out most nights lulled to sleep by the sounds of deep nature on the prowl. I earned my pilot’s licence flying a Cessna 172, shot my 8 mm movies, and rode that Honda almost to death. I was 22 years old.

I lay as still as death. Is this what the Sufis advocate—to die before you die?

I’ve been lucky for the “still as death” moments that life has forced upon me. I’ve learned how to cultivate such moments but back then I was dependent upon bad luck to trip me up and pin me down. I hope you know what I’m talking about.

We normally operate from a sense of being a physical-emotional-thinking entity. That’s us, the subject of our everyday lives. Then we’re brought suddenly and against our will to a full stop and an amazing thing happens. I’m lying there fully aware of “myself” in all its physical-emotional-thinking-ness. But if I can see it, then what is this subjectivity that’s aware of it?

Who am “I,” really?

The question creates a vast space in which time seems not to exist, but the clock on the wall showed that an hour had passed while my condition had not worsened, so I checked my physical self in the mirror. I would be okay. I remember starting to laugh.

I’m telling you this story because I have a vault full of road stories that might add up to a travel book one day. I was mentioning this publishing possibility to an old friend and without hesitation he instructed me to begin with the bees. It’s a short story which not only doesn’t get very far but then I hurry home. What kind of travel story is that?

Long or short, the key to a good road story is that it distances the protagonist from who he or she mistakenly thinks they are. That would be the point of a story, wouldn’t it? We leave home in the hope that we might reach closer to who we really are.

I recently riffed on “road stories” for Patrick Ross over on his The Artist’s Road website. “Road Stories—Why We Like to Be Taken for a Ride.” Check it out.

And let me know in the comments below if you’re the kind of reader who is willing to be taken for a ride. I promise you that my next story will take us miles beyond sight of our village rooftops.

Metafiction:
a literary device that poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.

Not the kind of thing you would ever find in a book for 3-year-olds.

Until now, that is. I didn’t intend to, honest.

It happened like this:

While writing Story Structure Expedition (which launches in two weeks) I found myself the unwitting protagonist in a Congo River nightmare.

Narrator — that’s the role I signed on for. From Brazzaville we would head upriver in search of the heart of a story. My thesis would prove first of all that the story heart exists, then explore its deadly nature.

Something happened. The essay morphed, it went rogue. Characters showed up uninvited and soon I found myself in  a novella. I didn’t ask to become fictional. I suppose it’s my fault for not blowing the whistle, which left me to face the consequences that befall any worthy protagonist.

I didn’t quite get it — me, a  fictional protagonist in my own story.

Would I have to suffer the story heart myself? The facts of fiction demand that the hero suffer a massive failure. Meaning what exactly—that my book wouldn’t get written? I would rather die.

I wanted to escape from my own story.

How meta is that?

Anyway, for comic relief I distracted myself by writing a children’s picture book.

I called it, Off your bum, Columbus! Explore the world!

A series of photographs would depict a woolly little character named Columbus who reluctantly abandons his storybook heroes to see the world with his own two eyes.

(Oh, yeah — Una Kitt — that’s my pen name.)

“Be a storybook hero yourself, Columbus!”

Do you see what’s happening here? My cute little alter ego is being made to suffer my surreal ordeal.

“If I was in a storybook,” Columbus asks himself, “what would I do?  Storybook heroes do something.”

Columbus confronts the very same metafictional existential dilemma. It’s a book for three-year-olds, for goodness sake!

“If this was a storybook, I couldn’t lie here all day, could I?” says Columbus. “If this book was about me, I’d get off my woolly whatsit.”

Columbus doesn’t have to wonder very long. The tide comes in!

Now he’s in trouble. Now up the Congo River!

I’m betting—in both these books—that readers young and old have a soft spot for the unwilling anti-hero.

I’m already finding out. Columbus launched this week and it’s already heading for #1 in its category. One reviewer liked the “ingenious concept that connected straight to the heart of my child’s imagination and to the way he already plays.”

Metafiction for kids. Who’d have thought?

If you have kids, or are a kid, or just want to see Columbus hit #1, here’s the Amazon link to save Columbus:

Go Columbus!

How to fulfill an audience?

I mean, really fulfill.

I think I know what nourishes me.

The romantic genre, for example. Boy meets girl – boy loses girl – boy gets girl back. We’re meant to swoon at the “getting back.” And we do, sure, kind of.

But honestly, do we consume fiction to see characters simply get what they want? How banal. How everyday. How superficial. (I’m getting depressed just writing this.)

Case in point—the movie Perfect Sense.

Here’s a story that almost comes true. The film is on a trajectory for greatness, but with the final shot the writer turns his back on the story. He gives us the standard romantic convention—boy gets girl back—roll credits.

The writer opts to merely sate the protagonist’s desire. And for this we have given up two hours of our precious time?

Perfect Sense makes perfect Hollywood sense

Perfect Sense is your standard romance—boy meets girl, etc.—except that the story unfolds during a global epidemic in which the afflicted become deprived of their five senses. Smell is the first to go, then touch, then hearing, etc.

I saw it coming and was excited—billions of people rendered deaf, dumb and blind. Wow! Humanity will discover that the habitual doors of perception have actually been obscuring life’s true beauty. With the senses gone, pure consciousness will prevail…

And love will have its way with the world.

The perfect sense is love

(Didn’t I just write about this just last week?)

All over the world—in India, Mexico, Thailand—whole populations are moving beyond themselves, helping each other, falling into each other’s arms.

This isn’t boy-meets-girl love, this is impersonal love.

This is Big Love.

The best stories end with Big Love

We saw it in Casablanca, where the hero sacrifices the love of a woman for a higher cause. Love for the wider world—this is Big Love. And it doesn’t just satisfy an audience, it nourishes.

But look again—it’s not even the love that melts our hearts, rather it’s the pain of the sacrifice. It’s Bogart emerging out of smallness. It’s the escape from the small self.

It’s the birth of an evolved consciousness.

Okay, just call it “growing up.”

Oh, yeah… almost forgot… we were talking about Perfect Sense.

The boy, who has met girl and then lost girl, is just about to find girl again. They’re on a trajectory to fall into each other’s arms at the moment the disease renders them blind. Excellent. The screen will go black just before they find each other.

It’s a clever twist on the usual ending, which worked for Crocodile Dundee and When Harry Met Sally and scores of Hollywood romances before and since. But wait a minute! Something’s radically wrong here in Perfect Sense.

While the Big Love disease is sweeping the planet, our protagonists only crave each other. Their love is small, puny. No way I’m buying this ending.

I WANT MY MONEY BACK!

Can’t the director see what’s wrong with this picture?

Let this pair of protagonists find each other, sure, good. But by now they’re infected with Big Love, aren’t they? Petty personal preferences take a back seat to a world that so badly needs love to have its way.

These two characters have proven themselves to be great lovers in the standard, carnal, self-interested sense. Now it’s time for great love to serve the wider world.

That’s how the best stories end.

The degree to which Big Love prevails in the climax, that’s what determines our satisfaction with the story.

That’s what fulfills me, at least.

What more can I say with any certainty?

What satisfies you?

I’m not saying that The Two Faces of January is a great movie.

But the Viggo Mortensen character serves to show how many good stories end.

It goes like this…

And love has its way with the world.

You don’t hear it, no one says it, it’s the subtext. It’s even more “sub” than that. It’s what the audience feels in themselves:

And love has its way with the world.

The protagonist has his way for most of the movie. He may be charming but he’s self-centred, misguided, and self-destructive. (I’m talking about most fictional protagonists.) His way with the world has created mayhem and misery. It’s called the plot.

Now at the end, having failed utterly, what else can the protagonist do? He disowns his game plan…

And love has its way with the world.

Contrary to popular belief…

You know that happy-ever-after feeling—well, this is it. Think about it. The feel-good feeling rarely has anything to do with heroes winning or successfully manipulating people or events. Nobody achieves love. It’s transpersonal, isn’t it? Love is a grace.

Love does us.

Audiences feel good because their virtual heroes are done to.

Check it out for yourself—your favourite protagonists are probably those who finally get out of their own way so they can be done to by a force beyond their power to manipulate.

We’re talking about escaping from our “second nature.” It’s the one that prevents us from knowing the first.

Marcel Proust identifies this second nature as the heavy curtain of habit which conceals from us almost the whole universe.

CUT BACK TO:

The Two Faces of January and Viggo Mortensen lying dying on a street in Crete…

[SPOILER ALERT! Not really. Students of story aren’t concerned about spoilers. We consume fiction to better understand it! We want to know how fiction works. But I digress…]

Viggo Mortenson has been an incorrigible swindler, con man, and liar, and here in the final scene, with a bullet in his back, he has one chance to come true. And he better be quick about it.

Viggo has one chance to prove the film’s title—The Two Faces of January.

Janus is the Roman god of transitions, the god of gates and doorways, of endings and beginnings. Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking backward, one toward the future.

Viggo is Janus at the threshold.

Viggo’s second (bogus) nature is evaporating in the blinding light of his first nature. He’s glimpsing almost the entire universe. At the very least he probably wishes he could take back a whole lot of unfortunate history.

But of course it’s too late do anything more than die in truth.

Protagonist dies and yet audiences feel good—what just happened there?

Answer: Freedom trumps death. How does that work?

Answer: Because love is finally having its way with the world.

I’m falling in love…

I’m falling in love with this turn of phrase. It slipped out while I was writing the final chapter of The Writer in Love. My protagonist is likewise caught in a dead-end where he surrenders his game plan. He is Janus at the threshold of a new beginning.

As are most good protagonists.

As are we all in a moment of crisis.

Deep down I know that if only I would quit deluding myself, love would have its way with my world, too.

Isn’t writing fun!

You won’t believe me but…

As this shot was taken I was mining deep thoughts:

The price of freedom is death. ~ Malcolm X

I read it in a book called Death, the Last God.

All this death business relates to my work-in-progress, The Writer in Love. In this personal essay I suggest that “paying the price” is precisely what proves the fictional hero’s heroics.

The Writer in Love concerns itself exclusively with this “death” that takes place at the heart of a story. This is the scene where die-hard protagonists undergo a radical change of heart. They find themselves in such a deep dead-end that they have no choice but to surrender. Everything. Especially who they think they are.

We writers should be clear about our responsibilities to the protagonists we create—the hero must die. While most writing manuals mention this “Act II crisis,” I seem to be alone in suggesting that here is the reason readers read and writers write.

It’s worth a book!

But how do you write about something as amorphous as death? I’m trying to write about death as a station on the hero’s journey, but how to sound convincing? Death is without dimension or language. It has no shape.

A book needs shape. It needs limits and dimension. Otherwise, what are we spending $4.99 on?

Anyway, I badly needed to step away from the keyboard and spend the day processing new insights about how death makes life worthwhile.

I must have been in a trance when I took this pic—why else would anyone snap a shot of their foot? I was probably musing over another quote from Death, the Last God:

“Ideas of finding happiness and serenity away from the inevitable suffering of death are the superficial desires of spiritual materialism. We have to find happiness and serenity in the inevitable suffering of death. And that is a very different journey from seeking happiness by getting what we want.” ~ Anne Geraghty

I love it. Happiness in death. Talk about a tough sell. It’s killing me!

Here I am having a heart attack. Just kidding. The shutter caught me bending down to examine what appeared to be my doppelgänger lying in the surf—a dead jellyfish.

I know what you’re thinking, that PJ is all spoof and superficial happiness on this Mexican beach, but the truth is I’m in agony. I’m stuck. And it’s not writer’s block, it’s worse. I’ve written myself into an existential crisis.

I didn’t plan it, but my essay morphed into fiction and I became the protagonist trying to write a book. (Yes, very meta, I know.) It’s a book that takes the shape of a journey to the story heart. I only wanted to be the narrator, but I have become a fully-fledged protagonist.

Es horrible!

You see, if I’m a protagonist, I can’t permit myself to escape the facts of fiction. Starting with, the price of freedom is death. As in, I’m going to fail so miserably at this book project that I lose all faith in myself. As in, this book is going to be the death of me.

Well, folks, it’s happening!

I’m proving the existence of the story heart by my despair at failing to finish this book. Fantastic! Of course, now there might not be a book. Which might have explained why I’m on the beach, had I not been refreshed by these latest musings on death.

Here’s a friend I met farther along the beach. He was plucking out that Nat King Cole classic… Smile though your heart is aching / Smile even though it’s breaking…

What’s Nat saying here?—even though you’re dying, be happy, don’t worry, smile.

Talk about serendipity. I came to the beach mainly to digest a passage from When Things Fall Apart, written by that irrepressible little Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön

Ms. Chödrön has calculated how long a person is required to “die” in order to disable the matrix of habits we mistakenly identify as “me.” Astonishingly, Chödrön has calculated it to the tenth of a second…

1.6 seconds.

One point six seconds!

Is she being facetious? Who cares? This is something I can run with. One point six seconds, that’s how long the hero is required to keep his eyes open in the blinding light of utter annihilation. (Sounds like no time at all, but consider that the mystic Nikos Kazantzakis called this the “supreme human achievement.”)

One point six seconds—suddenly I have the framework for my book.

My whole book concerns 1.6 seconds of time.

Now, that’s shape!

The price of freedom is death, and in 1.6 seconds you’re paid in full. And the price of my book will be only $4.99. That might be the best five bucks a writer will ever spend.

If not, you get your money back.

A writer buddy of mine phones up and tells me to meet him on the first tee in 45 minutes.

Say no more.

I love hanging out with writers. I love their lack of common sense, their desperation, their vulnerability, their implausibility. Their impossibility!

Who in their right mind would be a writer?

I especially love watching movies about struggling writers.

Joe in Sunset Boulevard, and Roy in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and Henry in Factotum, and Charlie in Adaptation, and The Ghost Writer, and of course Miles (Paul Giamatti) in the film Sideways.

Miles (introvert, pessimistic, depressed) spends most of the story waiting to hear from his literary agent. The news won’t be good. Writers don’t show up in stories as symbols of success. They are setups for failure.

Someone should make a movie of my life.

Forget the first 40 years, they were altogether too glamorous. No, my life more truly started when my 13-year-old son called a meeting to say, “I’m in Grade Seven, Dad, and I’ve attended fifteen different schools.”

I said, “Wash your mouth out with soap,” but it turns out he wasn’t exaggerating.

“Pops, I want you to settle down,” he said.

So I quit shooting films, traded camera for keyboard, and decided that henceforth I was a writer. It was great. I soon became so broke that my son’s mother sent support payments from Hawaii.

Once, I forced my son to accompany me to the Welfare Office. They gave me so much money it was humiliating—rent, medical and dental care, bus passes, food vouchers, extra cash. I had to cut them off.

Though I soon acquired a stable of clients, every November it seemed I was scrambling to pay the rent. I sucked up my pride and hit the streets to sell door to door. Water filters, home insulation, sports videos, memberships, you name it, even vacuum cleaners.

I spent eight hours performing a demo for an Italian household. The extended family showed up to watch and applaud as my machine hoovered that mansion top to bottom. I thought they were going to adopt me. Alas, no sale.

I remember one cold, dark and stormy night somewhere out in Vacuumland huddling in a phone booth, demo machine in one hand and phone in the other as I listened to my agent promise me my script was all but sold. Alas, optioned three times, it’s yours, cheap.

One day the Revenue Department came snooping around to deny me my business expenses. It didn’t take her long to realize she couldn’t squeeze blood from a stone. Lost for words, she said, “Well, Mr. Reece…keep writing.”

Thank you, Ms. Klenck. And I did exactly that.

I entered writing competitions—the 3-Day Novel Competition, Short Story Challenges, Screenplay Competitions, and Pitch-a-Plot workshops. But it is with special fondness that I remember the “24-Hour One-Act Play Competition”—all of us wannabe playwrights sequestered into one room.

Twelve hours into my scenario about a kid who is abducted off a golf course (well, they tell you to write what you know), I thought it would be wise to review what I’d written. I pushed back from my typewriter (that’s right, a typewriter!) and unenscrolled the paper from the rollers.

I was typing onto dot-matrix computer paper, you know, a continuous feed. I separated the sheets along the perforations and made a nice little stack which then fell to the floor. Thirty-five UN-NUMBERED sheets all helter-skelter.

I couldn’t organize the pages, couldn’t find the continuity, couldn’t put Humpty back together again. If I didn’t bolt from the room I was going to cry. It was 4:00 a.m.

Walking the streets, I was Miles and Roy and Henry and every fictional writer who ever agreed to let their creator thwart them to the point of despair and even self-loathing. Why weren’t the cameras rolling?

At a convenience store I suffocated my existential crisis with anchovy & garlic pizza. That I was a writer caused the proprietor to reflect on his own life, roads not taken, etc. Lamenting his lack of courage to lead an art-committed life, he said something along the lines of:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

I knew there was a reason, besides my son’s ultimatum, why I was a writer.

At the same time I realized why I love movies about writers. As symbols of failure, writers depict Everyman at the brink of surrender. The struggling writer shows us what deep down we fear most—that the meaning of a life is to leave our old selves behind.

To be a writer is to have the courage to become unselved.

Spirits bolstered, I returned to the drama den—and damned if my abduction story didn’t win First Prize.

My words since then have earned me a million bucks, which, admittedly, spread over twenty years is a modest living. But I’m proud to count myself as someone struggling to bring forth what’s in him.

Who in their right mind would be a writer? I think that being a writer indicates nothing but right-mindedness.

But getting back to my son—I’d ring him for a golf game except the kid is doing so well that he’s off playing Pebble Beach. Last year it was The Old Course in St. Andrews. Next month Augusta National, it wouldn’t surprise me.

I might have to tell him to settle down.

When a drama rings true I want to cry. 

I do, it’s true, I confess, I’m hopeless, when the story rings true I just can’t help it. 

But in my defense let me put a finer point on this “ringing” business—I’m starting to say that the story has come true.  The protagonist has come true.  He or she has had a radical change of heart. 

There’s a word for that—METANOIA—look it up.  It really means a profound “change of mind.”  A no-going-back-to-the-way-things-were-before shift in worldview.  A new way of seeing things.

Take The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.  (What, you haven’t seen it?) 

An extreme narcissist is dragged (literally) through the Siera Madre mountains of Mexico to his agonizing undoing in the film’s penultimate scene.  It is so truly acted that there is no doubt in my mind that I am in the presence of the human organizm experiencing a universal repentance—a metanoia. 

Here is a character so utterly disillusioned, so emptied of his personal bullshit that he finds himself escaping the gravity field of his small self.  I’m sorry, but when I am present to anyone (virtual or not) breaking free, I weep with joy.  

Now, you might want to argue about how growth occurs.  It’s the old geological issue—evolution by infinitesimal increment over millennia, or through cataclysm.  Well, both as it turns out.  But the notion of sudden, terrifying, and radical metanoia is relatively new, and it still challenges many writers.     

Of course, explosive change is nothing new to Eastern traditions.  Zen monks, by their austere practices, cultivate the essential condition of “emptiness” that invites a new way of seeing things.  Even Christian mystics claim that true poverty of spirit “requires that man shall be emptied of god and all his works.” ~ Meister Eckhart

My new best friend, the famous American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, went spelunking into this emptiness and returned with an appreciation of the mysterious Tao. 

According to Merton, we can’t begin to understand the nature of this charitable void “without a complete transformation, a change of heart, which Christianity would call metanoia.  Zen of course envisaged this problem, and studied how to arrive at satori, or the explosive rediscovery of the hidden and lost reality within us.”

Discovering their hidden selves, always painfully, this is what the best fictional protagonists do.  And by doing so—by freeing themselves—they make the human story come true. 

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada came true for me in a scene I can’t forget. 

The narcissist (and who isn’t one, really?), on his knees, emptied of his outmoded self, opens his arms to accept whatever punishment or grace existence may have in store for him.  This kind of surrender—whether explosive or discreet—is where we’re all headed. 

When I am witness to anyone breaking free, I am in profound sympathy with them.  It’s happening to me, there’s nothing vicarious about it!    

So let me ask you this—what if this was fiction’s function—to give us a taste of our own story coming true.

“There will be nothing left.”

(Spoken like a wolf about to strip the meat from the bones of a sheep.)

I’m always looking for a more visceral tease into the ideas I’ve laid down in “Story Structure to Die for,” and this one perfectly describes the tragic trajectory of every good protagonist. 

“There will be nothing left.” 

I tried it out this week.  I began my presentation with it and kept returning to it.  It’s from the Oscar-winning screenplay, Moonstruck.  

Loretta Castorini (Cher) is newly engaged to a momma’s boy.  Then she meets her fiancé’s estranged younger brother.  Ronnie (Nicholas Cage) is an animal, a “wolf” she calls him.  Ronnie is what Loretta needs.  But she is playing it safe in love.  She’s been hurt before.  Loretta is all about playing it safe.  But now, in Ronnie’s apartment, after a disagreement, he picks up his brother’s bride-to-be and drops her on the bed.  

“Take everything!” she cries, “leave nothing for him to marry,” to which Ronnie replies, “There will be nothing left.”

End of Act I. 

This is the writer telling us where the story is going.  I love it when that happens!

This is the writer preparing us for the heart of the story.  This is the writer telling us about the fate of every good fictional protagonist—she will be left with nothing.  She will be stripped of everything she believes in.  Why?  Because belief systems are prisons.  Prisons we chose to live inside. 

Every good story ushers the protagonist to her moment of truth where she is set free.

Nothingness may be our most precious possession

I’m always making a pitch for failure, but it’s a hard, hard sell.  Damned if people aren’t always clamouring for success.  Sure, all conventionally good stories depict a protagonist on a journey to accomplish something.  Something that will grace her life with more truth, independence, or freedom.  

But it turns out that freedom isn’t a function of acquiring anything.  It’s about losing, escaping, surrendering.  All good protagonists, after much suffering, come to understand this. 

The worthy protagonist discovers that freedom is about shedding what is false about him/herself.  Which is everything.

“There will be nothing left.” 

At the moment of disillusionment, the hero realizes that his whole life has been a bad habit, “the heavy curtain of habit,” says Marcel Proust, “which conceals from us almost the whole universe.”

Or “the luminosity of what is always there,” according to American poet Jim Harrison.

Or “the inexhaustible world that exists beyond our selves,” as novelist John Gray puts it.

“This nothingness may be our most precious possession,” says Gray, “since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves.” 

Story structure exists to deliver protagonists to this precious moment.  But they can’t see it coming, never do, never will.  Not even if the writer throws the hero on a bed and stands over her and growls:

“There will be nothing left.”

Readers pay to live vicariously through this nothingness.  It’s terrifying.  It is (arguably) the supreme human accomplishment. 

Dare I say it…?  It’s…it’s…

It’s a full moon rising over western Tanzania.  

The ragged ribbon of moonlight you see down there—that’s a rough and tumble highway known affectionately in south-central Africa as the Hell Run. 

And that 5-ton truck—look closer—it’s a load of car tires in a metal cage.  At the wheel is a hungry looking Tanzanian and riding shotgun is a large Sikh.  Up ahead, three boys stand on the road, forming a roadblock.  What are children doing up at midnight?

And who’s that mzungu with them?

The mzungu is me.  I’m the white boy making my way back to Zambia after steaming my way up Lake Victoria and then hitchhiking through Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania to resume my duties as a hydrological field officer in the Zambezi River basin.  My last lift dropped me at the edge of this sleeping village, and I decided, what with a full moon and all, to keep going. 

I was confidently vanishing into a valley when these kids called after me.  I yelled back, “What?” and they said, “Simba!” and I said to myself, “Simba-schmimba.”  So much talk about simba, but how many people have actually seen a lion with their own two eyes?

“Simba eat man yesterday!” the oldest kid shouted.

So, there we are as the tire truck approaches.  The boys, bless them, are going to commandeer this vehicle.  The truckers have no choice but to let me climb aboard, not in the cab but in the cage, which the big man locks, and off we go. 

Oh, what a magical moonlight ride!  I’m not sure I’ll live to see the dawn.  Seriously, what’s wrong with me?

When the truck stops unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere, I’m sure they’re going to kill me, but, no, they’ve stopped to strip an abandoned car of its tires.  The cage door opens long enough for the highwaymen to toss in the tires and lock the gate and here we go again. 

What a moon!  The earth seems unearthly.  I have never felt so far from home.   

I’m in God’s hands, now, although I can’t say I believe in what passes so conveniently as God.  And yet…and yet I would appear to have faith in something.  This brilliant night seems to hold something of value for me, but what?  Truly, is there something wrong with me? 

Years later, I discover the words of a writer who speaks about “faith in the joyous tragedy,” and I think, yes, that’s it!  At the edge of the abyss—an inexplicable trust.   

“Whoever was born with faith in the joyous tragedy, with enthusiasm for the ironic mystery; whoever sings YES; whoever risks disharmony because he desires beauty…”

According to Nikos Kazantzakis, a Christian mystic, this counter-intuition is “the supreme human achievement.”  If he’s correct, then our everyday minds have things utterly ass-backwards.

“The Muse most worthy of the real man is Difficulty.  She chases the easy victory away from life and art: the kind of victories that humiliate the victor.” 

Does that explain why I was hitchhiking the Hell Run?  A test of some kind.

“Life should not be comfortable; it isn’t to a person’s advantage to have it so.  Nor should art.  Never have the masterpieces of life or art been pleasant or easy.  They are always rugged peaks to be ascended by the few.”

Kazantzakis, my brother!  He says that contentment—even the absolute perfection thereof—only perfects our “little selves.”  Easy victories don’t begin to serve our greater needs.

“If you respect your own soul, you have to spend yourself… be willing at every moment to gamble all you have, so that you may practice your strength.  So that you may never lose the assured feeling that you can do even without victory and are ready to begin again.”

To hell with victory!  Does the conventional mind even know what winning means?  I mean winning in the larger sense?  My everyday mind, what would it know about what Kazantzakis calls “the brave and hopeless YES!”

The brave and hopeless ‘Yes’

My first novel, , fictionalizes my Hell Run adventure.  It was written before I had ever wrapped my wee brain around “the brave and hopeless YES.”  And yet it perfectly defines my young protagonist as he negotiates his own Act II dilemma.

The essence of my novel—that’s it!—the brave and hopeless YES.

Look again, PJ—hasn’t it become your main article of faith as a writer?  Perhaps it’s every writer’s act of faith.  Is it?  I’d like to know.

That dim landscape down there—it’s the writer’s life—and there we are hitchhiking the Hell Run of our imaginations, making our way along that ragged ribbon of moonlight by the grace of the brave and hopeless Yes!

Amen.

(Quotes are from “England: A Travel Journal” by Nikos Kazantzakis.)

This week, a reader wrote:

“I know that John appears to be a big time loser in the movie…”

That would be John Max, the subject of last week’s post.  Max was a successful photographer whose loss of confidence was documented in a rare film.

“…but perhaps after his disintegration there was some sort of renewal in his life.”

Death-and-resurrection—this writer knows what turns me on.

The documentary portrayed Max as the uncompromising artist.  His belief system refused to die.  It was killing him.  Max’s intransigence demonstrated a sad truth about the human condition—that for some of us…

it’s easier to die than change. 

John Max conveniently proved my “theory of tragedy”.  But the commenter, a former photography student of Max, suggests there’s more to the story…  

“I can’t help thinking that in his soul there was something that surpassed our understanding… perhaps, in fact, he was a Holy Fool.”

A HOLY FOOL

Heathen that I am, I cannot speak with authority about these radical Christians called Holy Fools.  So, I’ll let the letter writer, a prairie poet and filmmaker named Harvey Spak, enlighten us:

“In the Eastern Christian Tradition, such people are valued, viewed as saints, fools for Christ, imitating his failure.”  

So, the Holy Fool feigns madness.  No way that John Max was faking his fear and confusion.  Perhaps it’s enough that the Fool—consciously or not—brings our attention to failure.

Says Spak:

“De