Here at the Ficlets Blog, we’re always looking for new ways to get you closer to the craft of writing – to open the door and let you look at how successful writers wrestle with their own writing process. With that in mind, I’m happy to announce the debut of a new, occasional feature called The Big Idea.
What’s it about? Simple: In every TBI feature, you’ll hear from an author talking about one of the “big ideas” in his or her featured book, and how the author transformed that big idea into a book – how the book developed around that idea, and what challenges the author faced in going from a big idea to a completed work. It’s a feature about ideas, but also about the practical experience of turning the idea into a finished book. Yes, we cover a lot of ground here.
For our debut TBI, I’m extraordinarily pleased to introduce you to Christopher Barzak, whose debut novel One For Sorrow is being compared by critics to both the work of master American fantasist Ray Bradbury, and to the work of J.D. Salinger – a nice comparison if you can get it. In this installment, Barzak describes how One for Sorrow became a journey into the mystic – and a surprise journey at that.
Enjoy the exploration.
Christopher Barzak:
One for Sorrow can be read in a lot of different ways, but one of the ways with which I myself became fascinated while writing it was discovering that, at a very foundational level of the book, I was writing a narrative about the path of the mystic. Many mystic traditions bump up against each other in our contemporary, global society, so much so that we often come across items and artifacts, lectures and gossip about the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed and Lao Tzu, sometimes all in the passing of a day. Without much hesitation, we follow Harry Potter out of his mundane life into a realm beyond our ordinary senses, leave the Shire for the dangers of the wider world, venture through the wardrobe, open the book that allows us to perceive the realm of those that live under the hill or among the nameless, eternal gods on the mountain. We live in a scientific age, yet we still tell stories about discovering and understanding new pieces of reality – which is what science is supposed to do – through means that aren’t accredited in the empirical world of the senses.
I didn’t immediately know I was writing about a mystic journey in One for Sorrow. At first I thought the book was about a rural working class boy who is trying to escape the difficulties inherent in that population: the family bonds frustrated by poverty and the blinding miseducation most people in the lower classes receive. I thought I was writing about friendship interrupted, about a boy trying to learn how to love in a world set on teaching him how to fight, how to self-destruct. I was writing about those things, too, but somewhere along the way, the archetypal journey of the mystic – the veil between worlds being lifted – is the path the narrator, Adam, unwittingly takes as his route to seeing a world beyond the one he was born to.
In many traditional mystical journeys, a psychopomp – a guide for the soul or spirits who are leaving this world – leads the mystic through various places in the reality beyond the one our eyes can see. They can be angels or demons or ghosts or gods, depending on the culture from which the story has originated. They are the mediators between worlds. When Adam finds his own life to be something to despair over, something not worth living, he calls out to the ghost of his recently murdered friend, Jamie Marks, and is answered. Both Adam and the Jamie’s ghost need something from each other – Jamie needs Adam to continue existing in a semblance of the life that was taken from him by his murderer, and Adam needs Jamie to take him out of the life he finds confusing and hurtful and without hope. Instead of journeying through the wardrobe into Narnia, they pass through the closet door into the realm of death, where the souls of those who refuse to leave the living world completely linger, wasting away as they attempt to linger.
It’s on this journey down railroads that do not diverge from their course that Adam begins to die. This is yet another traditional rite in the shamanic and mystic tradition. It can be a metaphor or something very close to reality, but however it is presented in other stories of people who transcend the boundaries of the world our senses can perceive, it has meaning. In order to see beyond, you have to let the life that binds you die away. You have to give up the social blinders we’re provided with as we grow into adulthood in order to receive a vision of something else, something different, some other way of being.
Adam does this, and in journeying to the bridge of death with his friend, he realizes that, despite the difficulties life has presented him and his family, those difficulties are worth trying to change. And as in the Christian mystic experience, this involves love of the Godhead. In this case what Adam feels for Jamie is love, and that love is transformed into a love for the living world by the end of the book. He wants to remember as much as possible about this world to bring it to Jamie when they meet in death. Like most who take the mystic journey, he returns home with new knowledge, a surer sense of himself, and with a sense that he will be able to forge a path for himself, that he’ll be able to make a place for himself in the world, a place he had a choice in making.
When I wrote One for Sorrow, I didn’t intend to tell a story about a boy who travels beyond life into the realm of death in order to understand the greater reality outside of the one he was born to, but that’s one of the stories I ended up telling. That it was not my intention somehow seems proper. Returning from mystical journeys, one always brings back something that remains a mystery. For me, writing is a little like walking that path, going into the empty page, coming back with a story about what I saw beyond that blank veil.
Visit Christoper Barzak’s blog. Also, read the short story that served as the basis for One for Sorrow, “Dead Boy Found,” which is available here.
You need to be logged in to post a comment. Go sign in now.