While explaining a quandary I was having as I waded into one of the more difficult portions of my novel, a friend asked, “You’re the writer. Can’t you just make them (your characters) do what you want?” And that, dear reader, is always the rub. Of course, I could, but, even when writing about magical characters (djinn and such), there is no magic wand. Everything must seem real, and if not real, plausible, and if not plausible—if wild and genuinely surprising—then I have to prove it.
The writer doesn’t have to avoid those deus ex machina moments, so much as show them in their complete and total glory. You place a grain of sand on the battle field, and then the whole balance is shifted—but you do not, never, ever, forget the grain of sand. You carry it in from some desert or beach (preferably one from which the ocean has retreated and left barren), and you drop it under a horse’s hoof, or into the eye of the hero (or worse, the eye of his lieutenant), and let it have its way.
So much of writing is about discovering the grains of sand. The larger narrative components are there: beginnings, middles, and ends. What holds them together are small moments. Images, lines of dialogue, secondary characters who stumble into a scene. You don’t know that they will be there when you begin, but you find them—or they find you.
And yes, they come from you—unintentionally, more often than not. They sneak in from your childhood, or something you just saw on the news, from a museum display, or from a clutch of conversation overheard while in line at Shake Shack. Your brain files all these away, and then, at the right moment (or the wrong one—but only if you’re lucky) drops them back in on you. “Thought you were done with that, eh?” your writing brain asks, while you have sent a character through a hole in time to receive a secret from his future self, and suddenly you are reliving a kiss, a gesture, from 25 years ago—or last year. Can you even keep track anymore?
No, but once you start writing it, everything floods back, and you are reliving and living and inventing and discovering something you never knew before. But there you are, and everything you write surprises you, and the ending for which you thought you were aiming changes. Because of a grain of sand that you have been carrying with you for 55 years. Here comes the sandstorm.
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