Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure
A 4-step writing prompt + how the word "why"propels our work from a literal & fixed place into the realm of multiplicity, complexity & limitless pssibility + the crucial nature of intentionality
Quickly, before I speak about this week’s writing prompt: some housekeeping about some other posts to watch for in the coming days!
First, I’m nearly finished writing a recap of my (incredible) solo writing week on the North Shore of Lake Superior. I’ll be sending that in the next few days. I wanted to send it sooner, but I also wanted to give it time so that I am able to really share with you not only what worked so well about my week away, but also how to emulate it for yourself if you want or need to do so in order to gain (or regain) your creative footing. So, watch for that upcoming free post. I hope it will be useful and inspiring for you!
Second, I’ll be reaching out to solicit your questions and challenges for a new paid feature of this Writing in the Dark Substack: The Lit Salon. In the Salon, which will launch in July, I’ll do my best to answer your questions one by one (along with questions you’ve asked in the comments, the chat, and via messages and emails). The Lit Salon is a place where we can dig deep into all aspects of the writing life—WITD exercises, specific elements of craft, time management, submission strategies, and more. I’m excited and can’t wait to launch this feature next month. And feel free to throw questions into the comments on this post, as well! Or any other post. It’s all material.
Third, I’ll be inviting you to participate in a new challenge! Like April’s 30-Day Creativity Challenge, this one will be structured and designed to help you produce inventive new work. Unlike the 30-Day Challenge, this challenge will unfold over a 12-week period during which you will write and revise a completed essay. I can’t wait to start writing with you this way starting in August, so be on the lookout for the Essay Challenge.
And now, for this week’s writing prompt, which explores intention, action, consequence, and the word why.
Ah, why. I wonder sometimes if there could possibly be a more powerful, compelling, or potentially empathetic word in the English language. Empathetic? Why is why empathetic? Because why is a word of profound curiosity–far more curious than who, what, where, or when. Why gets under the surface of things, gets through the veil of the literal and the singular, into the realm of multiplicity, complexity, and limitless possibility. Why gets behind and beneath our easy assumptions about the world and the people in it. Why is an insatiably curious word, in fact, and no one knows this better than the parent or friend of a three-year-old. The oceanic curiosity that why holds in its three small letters is infinite. And when we engage with why, we therefore engage with infinite curiosity. This moves us from judgment and toward something less definable, something that can transform toward understanding, and, if we press far enough, might soften into a genuine empathy.
Why is also a word and concept that intersects with intention and agency–especially in terms of creative work, which is all about not what we do, but why we do it. Indeed, when we begin to dissect the craft of creative writing, we will find ourselves having discussions about choice. Whether we are analyzing someone else’s work or our own, we will benefit from examining why. Why that word? Why this structure? Why that device? Etc. One of the valuable and powerful skills we can develop as writers is the ability to see the choices being made (by others and by ourselves) and examine their efficacy.
Turns out the same is true in life, too.
Choice and will–these deeply human predicaments–can be the most excruciatingly limiting or wildly freeing. Unexamined choices might lead to chaos, muddled plots, unclear dialogue. Examined and intentional choices might lead to purpose, clarity, deep and true connection.
Back to children (who are, by their very nature, such wonderful teachers). If you have ever spent any time with a toddler, you’ve witnessed their thirst for will. You might have seen how they wield their newfound power of choice like the hefty ax that it is–chopping and thrashing and stumbling their way through the brush.
Grown ups, of course, retain this thirst for will. We are, after all, just oversized toddlers a good bit of the time. We, too, carry our giant choice axes around hacking away at things hoping to eventually emerge and find the horizon. And part of what feels so satisfying and frustrating while reading creative works is the sensation of being carried along in the tide and currents of the main character’s choices (and this applies whether the main character is a real person or fictional protagonist). Watching another person navigate turbulent waters, witnessing their and the string of consequences those decisions unleash, helps us understand our own decisions and connects us to something universal and true that pulls each of us toward our own horizon.
In today’s prompt we’ll actively explore this concept of free will and choice in what might feel like a fun and freeing way (but it might also feel frustrating, because … art). We’re going to play around with the idea of “choosing your own adventure.” And you probably remember the iconic 1980s series published by Bantam Books, Choose Your Own Adventure which, while not particularly literary, provided an intriguing framework for exploring character choice and the contract between writers and readers.
In the Bantam series, each page leaves readers with a series of choices that will alter the development of the plot. Thus, readers become an active participant in the story formation. This same framework has been reapplied in other creative literary works, most notably for me, Carmen Maria Macado’s memoir, In The Dream House, which explores the trajectory of an abusive queer relationship. Machado devotes a full chapter to the choose-your-own-adventure structure:
Page 1, you wake up, and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes, and clothes, and dishes. You think to yourself, this is the kind of morning you could get used to.
When you turn over, she is staring at you. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. You don't remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly.
"You were moving all night," she says. "Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake." If you apologize profusely, go to page 2. If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to page 3. If you tell her to calm down, go to page 5.
Even without reading on, and I highly recommend this beautiful, heartbreaking, and structurally breathtaking memoir—you can listen to this chapter in full here—you can already feel the mood and the stakes of the story that is about to be told have been set. The possible choices in and of themselves, although giving the illusion of freedom, also serve to show how limited the narrator's frame is.
The overt choose-your-own device also serves to engage the question of why (even without explicitly using the word why), which in turn opens the door for empathy. And if, as Franz Kafka says, the role of art is to be the ax that breaks open the frozen sea inside us, well, then, you see where this can go.
Let’s give this a try. I’ve created a four-part prompt to walk you through your own adventure with choosing your own adventure. You’ll end up with the beginning of an inventive essay and/or an open door and even a smooth on-ramp toward something you might want to write about in another format. So give yourself a little stretch and a shimmy, take a deep long breath through your nose, exhale even longer through your mouth, and let’s go! I hope to hear about what happens for you with this prompt. So please do let me know in the comments. I really (really, really!) love to hear from you!