Safe in Uncertainty

“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down”

Credit to Lily Tomlin for the typically witty advice.

I’ve been floored by a lurgy – the culmination of a couple of weeks sliding grimly under the weather. The b*gger of it is that it’s a big work week with family obligations. But as you all know, if you keep applying the technique that got you here, nothing’s going to change.

So. Surrender it is, and daytime comfort reading. Two books, as there’s no chocolate or kindly soothing to hand: Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus (which I’ve never read, ‘tho I love the film), and a collection of short stories by EF Benson – a treasured Christmas present.

Both writers are expert at keeping us safe in uncertainty. A genuinely “safe” writer, like Benson or Godden, (or today, Maggie O’Farrell, say, or Sarah Waters) holds the reader well; that is what I mean by the safety. Based on our relationship with them to date, we trust them. We might not always like where they’re going. We might even withdraw our trust. 

But if they’ve not let us down before, we’re more likely to stick with the story – their track record, and our judgement of them so far – matters. We’ve all had that feeling – the worried hope mingled with discomfort: please let this be good!  If we can cope with that uncertainty (sit with Keats’s ‘negative capability’), and stay with them, the rewards should be greater. Even if we don’t like it when we get to the end, we still heard them out, and made a judgement on the whole work.  The uncertainty is the price paid for the greater reward. But it’s one we don’t have to pay.

Writers we keep returning to have earned our indulgence; our trust. We extend it to them because they’ve banked it and in so doing, they create a new kind of predictability – based on your experience of regular reward from their work. 

And they need your trust in return, to let those characters, and their own writing voice, do and say new things. It’s a two-way trust, with the safety allowing space for flexibility. Look at the careers of Ishiguro (from realism in Remains of the Day to sci-fi in Never Let Me Go, to The Buried Giant and all its post-Arthurian myth), the aforementioned O‘Farrell and Waters, or – jumping worlds – that reinvention-meister, David Bowie. 

So, in my lurgy, I surrender to safe creative hands, who will scare me. Whom I trust. 

Here’s a ten-minute writing exercise for those who fancy it.  Write without planning. Just pen to paper, free-thought. Go!

Your narrator is waiting — for a bus, a person, a result, a sign.  For something. 

Something unexpected arrives. 

It’s also inexplicable. 

They choose: to stay or go.  trust it, or walk away.

Stay well, everyone.

-_-