As a grown-up with nieces and nephews, I was subjected to the question “Why?” Why is the sky blue? Why does a dog bark? Why is snow cold? Truth be told, sometimes I gave the correct answer; the sky isn’t really blue. It actually just reflects the blue spectrum of white light and absorbs all the other colors. Sometimes I made stuff up; dogs bark because they have very short memories and quickly forget all the words they learn to say.
As a writer, the question I most often work with is “what if”. I’ll see something and ask, ‘what if’ and then take it to its oddest extreme. What if we could travel to the center of the earth? (Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs tackled this one.) What if a person’s portrait aged instead of them? (Thank you Oscar Wilde for The Portrait of Dorian Gray). My first novel, Parlor Tricks started with the question; what if Atlantis wasn’t a lost continent from the past, but a place in the future?
What if you woke up one morning with no memory of your past? The book I’m working on now, Memories of an Autumn Rose, deals with the question of someone who opens her eyes one morning but has forgotten her entire life before that moment.
Those questions can be innocent from children or add incentive to creatives, but they can cause heartache for some people as well. Why becomes a circle of recriminations we can’t resolve.
Why does someone die young, when there are horrible people left in the world? Why does someone feel they can mistreat people who are a different race, or religion, or have different sexual preferences, or have a disability, or a different gender? Why would someone walk into a school with a gun and shoot children? Why would someone want to strap a bomb to their chest and kill people they never even met? When that disaster came through, why did that person die, while that person was spared?
We build our anxieties around what if. What if I never meet my significant other? What if we divorce / split up? What if I quit this horrible job? What if I get fired from this horrible job? What if that person dies? What if they live? What if I get out of bed and everything has changed? What if I get out of bed and nothing has changed?
We can sit and contemplate each question that arises. Journal. Paint. Sing. Write poetry. Turn it into a story or a play. It just seems to me like life is always about asking questions and finding the answers — which usually leads to more questions. The trick I guess, is to enjoy the exploration without becoming too invested in the outcome.