When some readers hear that a novel concerns itself with spirituality, their first reaction may understandably be: Oh dear. When the terms “spiritual” and “narrative” keep close company, they suggest uncomfortable traveling companions: a vaguely ethereal story line, an absence of significant conflict, or characters who seem more symbolic than human. But it doesn’t have to be that way. After all, novels such as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha or C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are classics that bring us through the other side of the wardrobe to experience the world from a new point of view. Which is, after all, what the best fiction does.
My reasons for writing a novel from the perspective of a Buddhist aren’t at all didactic. I write with a Buddhist eye on the world simply because that’s my path and I’m a writer. But just because I’m interested in Buddhist issues doesn’t mean that everyone else should be too. The challenge I face is how to engage readers who might not naturally be drawn to the kinds of ethical questions I find appealing. The solution: A good, page-turning story with characters (including, in my case, animals) that readers will care about. And as in any story, it’s important that those characters be strongly motivated, meet powerful obstacles to their objectives, and strive to surmount those obstacles as best they can despite their own blind spots, weaknesses, and fears.
This isn’t a particularly original idea, of course; Shakespeare, whom the critic Harold Bloom called the creator of character, picked up plots from other playwrights, but what distinguished his plays was the power and elegance of his language combined with close attention to the complexities of character. For example, an old king who makes bad decisions about how to divide up his kingdom and dies tragically; a young prince who comes to realize that his father was murdered, and that the murderer is now sharing his mother’s bed (and dies tragically). Or an ambitious young warrior with an even more ambitious wife who overthrows his king, descends into murderous paranoia, and dies in the ensuing civil war. Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth—Shakespeare’s characters seem so alive that they embody archetypes even in our society today. You could take such simple plot lines and make terrible, melodramatic works of theatre, film, or television out of them. Or you could give them richly motivated, tormented, fully human characters and turn them into classics.
So when creating such characters—subject to fully human angst and treachery and ecstasy and everything else—why leave out spiritual yearnings and experiences? For me, spirituality is at the heart of the human condition, as it raises important questions about who we are, how we got here, and what exactly is going on in a vast universe that contains unimaginable amounts of energy yet arose from an infinitely small singularity in a huge explosion 14 billion years ago. My own spiritual practice also leads me to investigate a question that I find important, relevant, and fascinating: how one can live a harmless and ethical life in a world that sometimes makes it extremely challenging to do so. In a sense, that’s the question at the heart of my novel, The Way, and I feel I will have succeeded if I’ve managed to make that question engaging for readers of all backgrounds.
To make such spiritual questions come alive for readers in general, I rely on another aspect of craft that I refer to as “levels of conflict.” The gist of this is that fully realized characters will ideally confront multiple layers of conflict, and through that conflict will come to a clearer understanding of their purpose, or place, in the world.
The first of these conflicts exists within individual characters’ minds, as they try to reconcile warring parts of their own desires—e.g., love vs. duty, action vs. inaction, rationality vs. emotion, survival vs. death. While this level of conflict is well suited to fiction writing, because of the natural interiority the form provides, it also creates the challenge of keeping the momentum going, since the “action” is all thought.
Another level of conflict is that between the character and those close to her—friends, associates, family members, lovers—and is ubiquitous in fiction. This involves a kind of psychological drama that can often be interior but is also played out through dramatic scenes. A third conflict level is that between the character and society, as we see in stories such as Beloved and Huckleberry Finn (in both narratives, conflicts are driven by the intractable presence of slavery); or, for example, in the works of Austen and Dickens, where friction between individual yearnings and society’s maddening socioeconomic stratification lights the fires of discord.
But the level of conflict that most interests me, and is most relevant to this discussion, is the one between the individual and the universe. This level brings matters full circle, because it overlaps with the first level, that of conflict within the mind of the character. From Oedipus onward, we’ve seen how ignorance, willfulness, greed, vanity, and similar traits bring one into conflict with the most profound aspects of our experience—whether manifested as fate, nature, God (or the gods), or simply as that vast expanse of space and time of which we have so little understanding, and which inspires us with wonder, humility, and occasional rage. I find this last level of conflict the most compelling, partly because it necessarily includes a reckoning with our mortality and the arresting brevity of our lives.
This relates to an aspect of craft I had to figure out when I was writing my first novel, Exiles, and is relevant to The Way as well. There are characters in both novels that are well along the path to enlightenment, and they’re based on real people I’ve known. But I found that I couldn’t make such characters the books’ protagonists, because when you’re at a certain point in that development, inner conflict begins to dissipate. For example, there have been lamas, imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese military forces occupying Tibet, who later said in all sincerity that their primary concern was that their torturers were creating such terrible karma that they would suffer horribly in their next lives. Such people provide wonderful examples of what Buddhists call bodhicitta, or great compassion, but because their own spiritual development has, in this profound way, largely eliminated any inner turmoil, they may not make the most compelling protagonists in a work of fiction. I like having at least one example of a person like that in my books, but I always try to make sure my protagonists are more like me—wracked by fears and insecurities, unsure of what to do next, trying their best against terrible odds, and doubting their own wisdom. Those are the characters readers can relate to most fully, for all the obvious reasons, so those are the ones I want driving my narratives.
Such characters, when fully formed, stop being mere cogs in the narrative machine. Instead, they climb into the driver’s seat and step on the gas. In the same vein, a spiritual or existential quest can infuse a narrative with as much dynamism as any other; it just requires a protagonist complex and interesting enough to carry it.
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