Exploration and Culmination (Introvert's Paradox)

Exploration and Culmination

Everyone is an author if you count emails and grocery lists, but we all have different reasons for writing. Take my experience in third grade: I submitted two stories to the Michigan Annual Elementary School Write-a-Book Competition. I wrote those stories because my teachers told me to.

Between the two entries, I thought Weird Animals would be the winner. It had a rainbow-haired giraffe, swimming cows, and fish with feet. So what if I ran out of ideas after three animals? I was a Midwest Catholic school kid with a shaved head and gap teeth. I didn't want to be an author. I just wanted to color that rainbow giraffe. Still, even my eight-year-old mind knew I couldn't just drop in to the land of colorful creatures on page one. I needed a plot device.

Weird Animals started a little like Alice discovering the rabbit hole. The stories' heroes found a tunnel hidden in the forest, followed it for a few pages, then used dynamite to blast their way out. Ascending, they discovered the verdant world of weird animals just outside.

I imagine the Write-a-Book competition judges had questions. The young author spent several pages following a tunnel, shouldn't it lead somewhere?

I didn't think so. You see, family road trips had taught me about the relative value of journeys and destinations. When I spotted Cinderella's Castle looming over Disney World after a three-day drive in the back of a Dodge Caravan, I was nervous. Raised expectations meant raised anxiety. I preferred jumping from bed to bed in roadside motels, racing down Holiday Inn hallways, McDonalds breakfast. Joy was at every interstate exit, and I pined to pull off.

The best children's stories have the same arc. Like a trip to Disney World, they culminate in a castle, but the end scene is no fun. Think of Alice on trial at the court of the Queen of Hearts—terrifying, arbitrary justice. Or Dorothy unmasking the Wizard and learning the grown-ups were never in control. In my favorite children's book, The Neverending Story, the Childlike Empress cries as the Ivory Tower collapses. Only Bastian—an actual child, not child-like—can rescue Fantasia.

When you reach the castle in each book, there's no more exploring, no more new friends, no more Munchkinland. The castle signifies responsibility—an end scene to the narrative and the end of childhood innocence. It is destination and destiny in one site, bildungsroman in a building. Even Elsa comes of age in one in Frozen.

With that lesson in mind, I didn't want the heroes of Weird Animals to follow the tunnel to a light at the end. I wanted a story about exploration without culmination. What would happen if we pulled the family minivan off at an exit and never got back on? What would Dorothy have found if she wandered off the Yellow Brick Road? I imagined it was something awesome, like weird animals.

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My second story for the Write-a-Book competition was more predictable. On page one, "The river started as a trickle down the mountain." I drew dinosaurs in the distance. Page two: "Over centuries, the river turned into a stream." Cave men sat around a nearby fire opposite the text. As the pages unfolded, time progressed and the river grew, flowing past ancient pyramids, medieval cathedrals, smokestacks, and finally my front yard on the last page. In my eight-year-old imagination, natural history and human civilization culminated in the suburbs of my midsize Midwestern city.

I wrote The River in an after-school program for excelling students. The teachers coached me on narrative structure and corrected my instinct to veer into the unexpected. Their lessons worked: The River won my region and was published in a local paper. Weird Animals was knocked out in the first stage.

The result confused me because The River seemed so uninteresting even as I wrote it. It had a clear structure and a lovely theme—time passed and the river grew—but no surprises, no complications, and no problems to solve. After each page, you knew what came next. Weird Animals was more inspired and more the product of my own mind. But, with its meaningless tunnel and random exit dynamite, it was incoherent and abrupt.