As I begin my second novel, I’m gradually realizing that I need to come to better terms with the concept of conflict as the driving force of narrative, which means developing a better understanding of my own particularly bad relationship with it. Conflict — the friction of people bumping against each other as they move in different directions — really made my childhood miserable. I grew up watching my family members all taking turns hating or fearing each other, or running away and coming back, like they were unable to escape their orbits around a radioactive planet. Like all humans, I was born without conflict — I only wanted to love, and to be with, and to share with, people and the world. I just happen to remember what that state of being felt like. That’s a big advantage for a creative person.

Since that time I think I have tried to avoid conflict — by seeking and studying philosophies that aren’t driven by conflict, by trying to act as a conciliator and a communicator, almost like a grease to reduce friction between grinding people — which of course means that all I am is something that gets caught between things. So I thought I could write in ways that avoided friction too.

So I picked history. Nonfiction. Non-friction.

But nonfiction, I discovered, isn’t really like that. Well, good nonfiction, anyway. Things in history didn’t “just happen.” They happened because people saw themselves in conflict with other people, with nature, with themselves — the “classic plots” do apply to reality. Otherwise, nothing would happen. This is a roundabout return to the central premise of my future novel The Human Algorithm. And simply the heart of the Buddhist precepts of “nonaction,” “nonduality,” etc. as I perceive them. It’s the difference between passive voice and active voice, between systems and people.

I need to look at my relationship to conflict and to take from that examination the tools I need to write fiction without fear. I personally believe that the challenge-reaction way of responding to conflict is just silly. In other words, conflict — like shit — happens. It’s our way of treating conflict as a challenge, a threat, a negative thing, or whatever, that’s the problem. Someone once described story as the effort to move from a position of imbalance to one of balance. Someone else described it as the impulse to wholeness. There are many ways to return to balance and wholeness, though our culture’s penchant for kitschy Romantic, Nietzscheian heroic Man Versus God Wagnerian melodrama has conned us into believing that there is but one way, the Struggle Against.

Yeah, right.

With such a deep resentment toward conflict and what it has meant for me — the destruction of a world-view that was very pure and whole — I have avoided conflict, and I have tried through my spiritual awareness not to be a cause of more of it in the world. But I have to come to some sort of real peace with conflict if I am going to be able to understand it as a writing tool. That is my challenge, that is my real quest. Because to understand it, really fully understand it in my life, is to be able to use it most wisely. And my writing will then be even more truly of me.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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