There’s an author whose name I can’t remember, who said that writing is like awakening in the middle of a forest, without a map or sense of how you got there. What a strange, uncertain place to be. You start upon a path, but it quickly fades away, scarcely there beneath you. You don’t know where you are, and you don’t know where you are going. But it is in that not-knowing where a story can be discovered.
I was once in an anthropology class, and my professor told us that we did not have any survival skills. We would all die if we were dropped in the middle of the woods, my fellow classmates and I. She said it like it was going to be a part of our next lesson. The woods of a story are safer and more fun to get lost in, I think. The getting lost part is how you figure out where you were going all along.
Maybe you like to make outlines, something resembling a map to guide you along. You can plan it out and know it so well. But once you throw yourself in there, among trees and dirt and ferns, it may be quite different from what you were expecting. You may find another path along the side of where you thought you were going, and what a lost opportunity not to follow it? There’s something very special about not knowing the path of the story, and discovering it along the way. The map will still be there to fondly look back on, perhaps sometime after you emerge from the depths of the trees. You can laugh at the paths you thought you’d take, fold up the map and pocket it like a keepsake.
I don’t know many things for certain. I know bits and pieces of things I’ve heard from other people, some of which I can’t remember. I know that I (probably) can’t survive in the real woods. But I have awoken in those woods of a story (and the ones of life), and I have made maps that crumbled in my hands, and I have lost paths I meant to follow. I don’t know where I am going. I don’t think anyone does. The uncertainty will always be there, and it is by immersing yourself in it that a story can be found. You can get to know not-knowing, and come to see it as a friend. That’s where the stories are, and of that I am most(ly) certain.
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