And why that’s okay
As deciduous trees lose their leaves in fall, they relinquish their lush green opulence. For a short time they gleam yellow and orange, but after a few windstorms, that’s gone, too. The only leaves still clinging to them are dessiccated brown husks of their former selves, doomed to wither the winter away on spidery twigs. No longer do these magnificent organisms we call trees enfold and comfort within the haven of their branches; no longer do they possess any signs of their former vitality. They’ve retreated into their roots, and all we can see up top are stark and skeletal forms. Death.
But this is fine! Good, even. If trees never showed us their other selves, their dark sides, those of us at higher latitudes wouldn’t appreciate summer quite so much. We’d get so used to their green sameness that we might stop seeing trees altogether, each of them disappearing into forests like blades of grass into a field. If these giant beings can change so dramatically, then surely all of us more ephemeral creatures can appear as one thing today, and quite another tomorrow.
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We know this well in writing. Characters evolve and grow or regress and fail over the course of a story. We often discover new facets of characters that turn out to be crucial to the plot. Their ability to startle us—as readers and writers, both—is partly what keeps us turning (or writing) the pages. During the process of that writing, my characters flourish as if by magic, like buds from soil. They’ll take charge of the plot and direct it where they want it to go. Resistance is futile. I must listen to what these personalities are trying to tell me, even if it involves taking the story in an entirely new direction.
But this is great! Exciting, even. I say this despite being a staunch plotter by nature. Before I begin writing, I work up a full outline, so detailed it appears my unwritten future book is set in stone. Yet during the course of actually writing it, my characters surprise me. Always. I find myself reorganizing the outline, adding new bits, sometimes heading in a direction I’d never anticipated. Even within a carefully structured framework, the delight of finding hidden layers to my characters keeps my creativity flowing.
Dogs, too, aren’t always what they seem. When you acquire a new dog, how many of you have been convinced you know just how it’ll act based on its breed, age, initial behavior, and all of your years of experience with many other dogs? Surely I’m not the only one who has fallen into that trap. Over the years, I’ve had four border collies who enjoyed dog agility. Every time a new one came into my life, I was convinced that this one would be easy. After all, I knew everything about training agility foundation by that point: how to motivate a dog, how to progress from one challenge to the next, how to raise the threshold of difficulty oh so gradually, until we were ready for competition. And then we’d be instant rock stars in the dog agility world!
Right? Um, no. With each dog, some things got easier, but other things got harder. One dog would bark and bounce right out of the weave poles, another would snarl and snap at the other dogs waiting in line for their turn, another ran fast at home but inexplicably slowly in competition, and a fourth decided that staying at the start line was optional. Every dog presented a different training challenge.
But this is wonderful! If I hadn’t had to learn how to overcome those difficulties, I wouldn’t have learned half as much as I did about dog training. Or about how to help other dog handlers through similar issues. I wouldn’t have experienced the euphoria of myself and others at last overcoming our obstacles. Most of all, I wouldn’t have discovered that indefinable, individual essence of each of my dogs. They never fail to astonish me, and I wouldn’t trade any of them for a second.
Whether it’s trees, books, pets, or something else, I wonder what surprises lie in store for us today? Here’s to being astonished and delighted…
Happy Tales!
