I’ve spent most of this past week with Julian Stoner.
Julian is the central character in The Boaz Superstition, the novel I’ve been working on for months and am finally nearing completion. He’s a psychiatrist, a former pastor, and a man who has returned to the small Alabama town where he grew up.
Lately, I’ve been giving him evidence.
Quite a lot of it, actually.
Names. Dates. Newspaper articles. Old papers. Conversations. Things said in churches and schools. Public events that occurred before other events. Words that seem to travel from one person to another and eventually become something almost everybody in town seems to know.
That’s what the story requires.
But something interesting has happened while I’ve been writing these scenes.
I keep wanting Julian to know more than he knows.
I suppose that’s understandable. I’ve been living with this novel for months. I know where the story is going. Julian doesn’t.
So he’ll put one piece of evidence beside another, and I’ll feel the temptation to let him draw the obvious conclusion.
This caused that.
This person influenced that person.
This institution produced this result.
Then I have to stop myself.
Does he actually know that?
Sometimes he does.
Quite often he doesn’t.
That has become one of the more interesting things this novel has been teaching me.
What the Wall Knows
At one point in Julian’s investigation, he’s arranging information so he can see what happened before and after a particular date.
The chronology matters.
If something was said on Tuesday and a remarkably similar idea appears somewhere else on Friday, that’s worth noticing. If the same language then appears again a week later, that’s worth noticing too.
A pattern may be developing.
My instinct as a novelist is to help.
Draw the arrows.
Tuesday led to Friday. Friday led to the following week. This person influenced that person, who influenced somebody else, and now we’ve solved it.
Except we haven’t.
One of the notes I made while working through the scene was wonderfully plain:
No arrows. The wall did not know enough for arrows.
I’ve thought about that sentence several times since.
The wall knew the dates.
It knew what happened.
It could show Julian that one thing came before another.
It could even show him language appearing in different places in a sequence that was becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss as coincidence.
But it couldn’t tell him exactly how the words traveled.
The arrow would have been mine.
The Mind Likes Arrows
I’m not sure this is merely a problem for novelists.
I think my mind draws arrows all the time.
Someone doesn’t return my call, and I know why.
A person says something I disagree with, and I know what kind of person she is.
A business fails, and afterward the reason seems obvious.
A politician does something, the economy changes six months later, and depending on which politician I like, I can draw the arrow in whichever direction seems most satisfying.
Three things happen close together and I begin constructing the story that connects them.
Sometimes I’m right.
That’s what makes this difficult.
Patterns matter. Cause and effect are real. Evidence accumulates. If I refuse ever to draw a conclusion until every conceivable uncertainty disappears, I’ll spend my life unable to conclude anything.
That’s not what I’m suggesting.
What The Boaz Superstition keeps forcing me to confront is the space between seeing something and knowing what it means.
I’m not sure I’ve always respected that space.
Direction Is Not Destination
Julian has another problem I’ve come to recognize in myself.
Once the evidence begins pointing in a direction, every new piece of information becomes easier to interpret in that same direction.
That’s useful.
It’s also dangerous.
If I’m investigating why something happened, eventually I need a working idea. Otherwise I’m just collecting facts. But once I have that idea, I can begin noticing the evidence that supports it more readily than the evidence that doesn’t.
The pattern starts helping me see.
Then, almost without my noticing, it starts telling me what I’m allowed to see.
I’ve had to guard against that repeatedly while drafting Julian.
He can say, This is the direction the evidence is pointing.
He cannot quietly turn that into, Therefore this is what happened.
Not yet.
Maybe never.
I like that less than I expected.
Certainty is satisfying, particularly in a novel. I want the pieces to click into place. I want Julian to step back from his wall and finally understand what it all means.
Readers probably want some of that too.
But I don’t want to buy satisfaction by making the evidence say something it doesn’t say.
What I Know, and What I Added
Maybe there’s a useful pencil exercise hidden in that distinction.
Put a line down the middle of a page.
On the left:
What do I actually know?
On the right:
What have I added?
That second column interests me.
Not because everything in it is necessarily wrong.
It may contain my best judgment. It may contain a conclusion supported by years of experience. It may contain the most reasonable explanation available.
But it’s still useful to know which column it belongs in.
I wish I’d done that more often during my life.
I’ve been a lawyer. I spent years taking facts and constructing arguments from them. That’s what lawyers do. A good lawyer doesn’t merely hand the jury a box of facts and sit down. He shows how they fit together.
He draws arrows.
I’ve also spent much of my life thinking about religion, politics, business, family, and all the other places where we human beings become rather attached to our explanations.
I’m beginning to suspect we often forget which arrows came with the evidence and which ones we drew ourselves.
Leaving Some Space Blank
I don’t yet know exactly how much Julian will finally know when The Boaz Superstition ends.
That’s an interesting admission from the fellow writing the book.
He’ll know more than he knows now. Some things will become clear. Some conclusions will be justified.
But I don’t think I’m going to let him solve everything simply because he’s the protagonist and I’ve reached the final chapters.
Some blank space may remain on the wall.
I think it should.
Because one of the things this novel has been teaching me is that uncertainty isn’t always a defect in our thinking.
Sometimes it’s evidence that we’re paying attention.
Notice the pattern.
Question what it seems to mean.
Revise when the evidence requires it.
But don’t draw an arrow simply because the empty space between two facts makes you uncomfortable.
A pattern can deserve my attention without deserving my certainty.
I’m trying to learn where that line is.
Writing The Boaz Superstition continues to teach me that.
Continue with The Pencil’s Edge
A Pencil Practice
Think of something you’ve recently become fairly certain about—a person, an event, a disagreement, a decision, or simply why something happened.
Draw a line down the middle of a page.
On one side write:
What do I actually know?
On the other:
What have I added?
Don’t assume that everything in the second column is wrong. Just notice which conclusions came from the evidence and which required you to draw an arrow.
Read both columns once.
When you have finished, the practice is complete.
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