The lens of literature

I went through a very confusing time once in my life. My thoughts were a jigsaw puzzle, my emotions a mess. Then one day someone gave me a book. When I started reading the book, the waters miraculously stilled.

The book’s content was not particularly related to my personal problems. But the story did offer a structure for the assorted pieces of the character’s life. Somehow, as I progressed through the book, through a mysterious process of the human mind, the elements of story started to order my outlook, giving form to my thoughts and a newfound sense of cohesion to my existence.

Then I lost the book.

I probably left it sitting on a bench or something. But when I lost the book, the glass menagerie in my mind came crashing down. Eventually I did climb out of the rut, and some time later I even stumbled across another copy at the half-price bookstore. It’s still on my bookshelf to this day.

I’ve had time to reflect on that mysterious process of the human mind that appropriated the character’s well-ordered narrative to, temporarily, clean up my mess. Fiction, I’ve come to see, is an act of empathy. It puts us in someone else’s shoes. The messes and roadblocks and losses in their life we see in the context of an epic arc that inevitably leads to a cathartic conclusion. If the characters are compelling enough, we can share their emotions. And, through the lens of literature, the epic arc in our own lives begin to pop out from the pages.

It’s a little bit like 3D glasses. When you’re watching the movie without them, everything is fuzzy. When you put them on, however, everything comes into focus. It is an illusion, the clarity is all in your mind, and when the glasses come off, everything is a blur once again.

That’s why I’m so intent on figuring out how to write this story I’ve been working on. I guess I think that if I can figure out the elements of story for my characters that maybe I will be able to perceive the elements of story in my own life – like being able to see a 3D movie – except without the glasses.