You're Supposed To Not Know
The writer’s job is not to know—it’s to not know, and be fine with that. That is the audience’s job as well, and if you do your job, they’ll be able to do theirs too—if you don’t go through the journey, you can’t expect them to. If you want them to sit in uncomfortable silence, wondering where this all is headed, then you need to do that to. It has to be equal.
Sometimes you have inklings—but that’s all they are, don’t read too much into them. Sit down and see what comes out—and listen to your characters, of course. Those inklings are likely inklings the audience should be having as well, at that stage in the story, but not necessarily anything they should see come to fruition. The point is for both of your journeys to be close enough that they are convincingly one and the same. Plausibility deniability, in essence.
One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard about writing—and I can’t remember where exactly I heard it—was that if you want to write a convincing murder mystery, one that will genuinely be mysterious for the reader, you as the writer should not know who did it until you have to write who did it. That way, you are not unconsciously leaving little trails of who it specifically is in your writing, such that anyone reading will know right away who did it, because you knew right away who did it too. I extrapolate that philosophy to all of writing, whatever the genre.
Sometimes the ending does come to me along with the initial idea—I don’t particularly relish that, but sometimes that’s just how it is. When that happens, I just forget about it as much as possible during the writing process—in fact, I deliberately do things that will not bring me there, for as long as I possibly can. I have faith that if the ending is really the right ending for the story, I can do damn near whatever I want and the story will resolve to that spot eventually. That’s what works for me.
For someone who so few read the actual books of, I am often praised for my writing. I don’t take that personally—I know that people don’t necessarily want to imbibe writing in more traditional ways these days. People mostly read me through Twitter, or Substack, or my movies. Sometimes they wonder what my secret is—it really is just that I don’t know what I’m going to write. Not necessarily stream of consciousness—it’s more a stream of unconsciousness, a giving of myself over to something coming through me rather than from me. ‘Stream of consciousness’ seems to imply a recording of thoughts, whereas I don’t do much thinking when I’m writing, and if I do stop to think, it only gums up the works anyway. I am at my most productive and skillful when I am just simply writing—when I am professionally ‘not knowing’.
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