On Curiosity: Surrendering our idea of the story to let the larger story emerge (on the page and in life)
Lit Salon on the power of "What If?" and the glory of letting ourselves not know, plus three valuable exercises for increasing our writerly curiosity over time
“Our job as writers is to be curious as a child, to see things for the first time and to never assume. We must always be willing to surrender our idea of the story to allow the larger story to emerge.” — Alan Watt
I love this quote from Alan Watt (and yes, it is Alan Watt, author of The 90-Day Novel, not Alan Watts, the British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer”). Watt’s words express my own feelings exactly. And yes, our job is also to make language capable of telling the truth again, but we cannot do that without curiosity. Indeed, lack of active curiosity, and from that dry well, lack of active questioning, is part of how language lost its grip on truth in the first place.
Without curiosity, our writing cannot be alive, because curiosity is the life force that animates the text which can otherwise only ever be two-dimensional. And the more curiosity we can bring to the work, the more alive it can become. As literary artists, our commitment to this aliveness in the writing separates our work from mere communication. No matter our genre, if we are writing as an art, the writing must move, and to move, it must be animated, and to be animated, it must be alive, and to be alive, it must be born and nourished with curiosity.
When we bring curiosity to our work, we have room to experiment. We can allow ourselves to not know. We have a right to try more than one thing. And we can grow when we release the need to do things perfectly out of the gate. We can be, in our art, like children, saying, What if? What if? What if?
Importantly, we can bring curiosity to the page through (at least) three distinct portals—the first is curiosity about what we are writing, the second is curiosity about how we are writing it, and the third is curiosity about the effect the writing has when read by someone else.
In other words, in addition to being very curious about the topic of our writing, we also need to be curious about the words, grammar, syntax, form, structure, etc. we’re choosing to convey and contain that content, and why we’re making those choices, which in turn should be refined and amended based on our curiosity about the effect these choices might have on a reader’s experience of the work.
Put another, much simpler, way, we must, when it comes to the craft of our writing, be very curious about why we’re using one word instead of another, or why we’re using first-person instead of second- or third-person, or why we’re using present tense instead of past or future tense, or why we’re writing a sonnet instead of a haiku, etc., etc., etc. The possibilities are, of course, infinite, so obviously we’re mainly going to apply these questions to what feel like more pivotal decisions, but in reality, all of the decisions are at least a little bit pivotal, and the more we become consciously aware of the cumulative impact of the multitude of decisions we’re making in our writing, the more agency we have in creating the most luminously alive work we’re capable of creating. Even if sometimes the answer is going to be, “because I don’t know how to do it any other way,” or, “because I don’t feel like doing it any other way right now,” the question why remains one of the most valuable words in the encyclopedia of our artistic development.
Also our human development. This—the inextricable link between our practice of creative writing and our practice of life—is something I’ve written about repeatedly, most recently in this post, Writing = Living: Here’s Why (Ten ways creative writing intersects with building a better, richer, more meaningful life).
And just one of these areas of overlap is the benefits we reap both in our art and in our lives when we approach both with more curiosity and a greater willingness to ask why—not with judgment, but with genuine curiosity.
Since Jon and I we have five grandchildren who range in age from seven (Esme) to four (Z), that’s a word we’ve been hearing almost nonstop for several years. And while I know the why phase drives some parents crazy, it has never bothered me. I actually find it rather delightful, and lately it’s been a quiet pleasure to see just how long one series of whys can last with Z.
Here’s an excerpt of a recent conversation:
Z: Where is PopPop?
Me: He’s sleeping.
Z: Why?
Me: Because he’s feeling sick today.
Z: Why?
Me: Because he caught the flu from Nana.
Z: Why?
Me: Because sometimes we pass each other sick germs.
Z? Why?
And on it goes, Z’s face a perfect portrait of Sara Teasdale’s “children’s faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup.”
Wonder … curiosity’s close cousin and a prerequisite for any genuine experience of awe. All three of these qualities and states of mind feel central to the deep work of writers and artists.
The important thing is not to stop questioning… Never lose holy curiosity,” is how Einstein put it. Holy curiosity—that feels exactly right to me. Because everything, and I mean everything, truly begins with curiosity.
Most likely, I am preaching to the choir here. However, the part I think takes some writers by surprise is the part that’s most important here, and that’s this: more familiar the topic we’re writing about, the more curious we need to be about it.
As Stephen Jay Gould (American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science) said:
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question.
This is because we need amplified curiosity as a safeguard against writing from a place of unexamined assumptions or one-dimensional oversimplifications or even overt misunderstandings. We need extra curiosity in order to see a familiar thing anew, from an angle or in a light or through a lens unlike any before. If we aren’t able to do this, we will only see the thing as we think it is—as we assume it to be—rather than as it actually is. We will see the story we already believe about it, rather than the story it now tells.
I can think of a few simple practices writers can use to deepen their curiosity in ways that can be both cumulative and sustained.
The first is a five-minute daily sensory incantation that, when practiced consistently, will gradually heighten your powers of perception and reveal new details, textures, and nuances of the exterior world such that you will come to see everyday elements in deeper and more alive ways.
The second is a simple but profoundly powerful question exercise you can do as often as you wish. This exercise, if practiced regularly, will not only encourage your mind toward a natural state of embracing questions, it can also generate interesting new material or useful new insights into your work in progress.
The third is a more complex four-step writing exercise I call Choose Your Own Adventure, which involves interrogating a known story (whether that be your lived story or, say, the story of a character in your fictional work) and experimenting with a number of different ways things could have gone at different decision points. This is a device that Carmen Maria Machado used to incredible effect in her absolutely brilliant memoir, In the Dream House. So, you might get some interesting, usable material out of it. However, that’s not the main point. The main point is to cultivate more curiosity and wonder in yourself in order to infuse your work and your life with those deeply necessary forces. (To note, I linked above directly to the four-step exercise, but you can find more context on it in the full post here.)
Much Love,
Jeannine
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Curiosity is the root of living with vitality. How does it feel to move my body this way? What if I did not do that thing? I appreciate this prompt to remain curious and open in my living and my writing.
Jeannine,
I wish (again) I could join your community for the silent write-ins, but that's the exact time I need to pick up my kids from school. Sigh.
Oh, but you know what? I have been doing the daily incantation and absolutely DELIGHT in playing with words and phrases again. It's interesting, because I do this practice in different settings and at different times of day. At first, my images were mostly of nature, but I once sat in the school parking lot and ended up with myriad urban sensory descriptions, which DELIGHTED me. (Yes, I am using that word intentionally today, as I finished Ross Gay's THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS on Saturday and am still riding on that high, I guess.) Today I wrote the daily incantation while sitting in the lobby of my ENT's office, which also surprised me.
Which is to say, delight, for me, often involves a mixture of pleasure and surprise.
Your explanation of curiosity about what words we select, and why, reminds me of NINE GATES by Jane Hirshfield, which I began reading while sitting in the lobby of my ENT's office this morning. I had only then thought how changing "my" to "the" completely alters the intimacy of a poem (hadn't thought about that before), which was the primary example she was using in her section on rhetoric about how one word shifts the meaning of what we are trying to convey, and I loved that.
All this to say, I am feeling some sort of new thrill and awakening this year when it comes to word play. Could it be DELIGHT? Yes, I think so!