Chapter 173: The Power of Ignorance
A former student called the other day to talk about story ideas. Talking about other people’s stories is one of things I love most about my job; as I tell students, both present and past, I will talk about any story as long as I don’t have to write it.
She began, as writers feel compelled to do, with pitches. And as I always do, I stopped her. Her ideas were fine, but felt small, given that she had won a generous reporting grant, which would give her the time and funding to go big.
She is working for a small newspaper and has thrown herself into the work, so much so that she was thinking more of stories for her paper and not, I felt, ambitiously enough. It’s often the case that when presented with a broad canvas along with time and money to fill it, journalists revert to topics. The result are stories that, to borrow from the king of hardboiled detective novels, Mickey Spillane, commits the cardinal sin of storytelling: No one ever read a story to get to the middle. In the end you need a good yarn to keep them reading.
I’ve come to believe that the only way to find the kind of story with the heft and reach she wanted was to start a conversation, a back-and-forth first in words and then in letters on a Google doc – better to have them all in one place – that might lead to something intriguing.
She is working for a paper in a southern state – she herself was from a nearby state, which meant she had a sensibility that I, a son of long-before-it-was-cool Brooklyn, lacked. I asked her about the people she’d met through her reporting, the ones she’d interviewed and seen at town council meetings. And then, without necessarily being aware of what she was doing, she confessed that she found them a “mystery.”
There are words that stop editors in their tracks, and mystery ranks high among them. A mystery suggests a big question that will inevitably begat many smaller questions. It also suggests a profound and unsettling lack of knowledge.
I could tell she was unsettled because rather than leap in to tell me all the things she had observed and heard she paused and said she needed time to think. She did not know what the story was, and nor did I. How could we? We didn’t know enough to know.
Nor did I see at that moment, the power in that lack of knowledge.
Her quandary was not hers alone, and I am not speaking only of being in the early stages of a story, a time that bedevils most writers. Rather I am speaking of all of us, regardless of where we live, what we believe, and who we vote for. I am old enough to remember unsettling times – the sixties, especially – but can recall no time like this one, when every day, and seemingly every hour felt so uncertain, so chaotic.
The moment brings to mind “The Truman Show,” the 1998 movie in which Jim Carrey plays a young man whose life from birth has been televised, for all the world to watch. He is blissfully unaware. Until he is not and things begin to unravel. The current moment feels like that movie with the camera simultaneously turned at the audience, leaving us to both observe and be observed. We are living the drama, even as we watch it.
The natural impulse when engulfed in a relentless, ubiquitous drama is to rush to find answers that will allow us to impose some order on the universe. Given the nature of our work, that need is felt acutely by writers; it compels us to find stories that can offer ourselves, and readers, clarity.
That is what I was hoping for my former student as she begins the long and difficult process of making sense of her own, vexing mystery.
And perhaps, I now saw, for myself as well.
I am feeling overwhelmed and know I am not alone. There is no escaping conversations that begin with “do you hear…? And “did you read…?” Yes, I’ve heard and read. No need to share any stories; I already know. Much as I try to avoid looking at my phone to see the latest, I cannot bring myself to turn away, and for that I am rewarded with variations on the headline that reads: None of This is Normal.
So the other day I walked down the hall and knocked on the door of my colleague, Jonathan Weiner, who I knew I could count on to be wise and generous. Jon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer; I was hoping he might be able to steer me toward clues that science might provide in identifying a different lens through which I could observe what was taking place around me.
I told him about the conversation with my former student, and how struck I was by her use of the word mystery. That’s what I’ve been feeling, too, I said. Like her, I need to solve it.
Jon understood and better still, had a suggestion. There was a book that might help, he said. Its author was a neuroscientist at Columbia, Stuart Firestein. Its title was at once compelling and, given the author’s work, counterintuitive title: Ignorance.
Feinstein, he explained, did not mean it as a problem.
Rather, he saw certain kinds of ignorance as a gift, even a virtue.
Firestein opens his book by talking about how he used to teach. He had a textbook as heavy as an anvil that his students assumed, judging by its many pages, contained all essential knowledge. That it did not, and could not, got Firestein thinking that perhaps there was a better way to impart wisdom. He wrote that when scientists got together the conversation invariably moved away from what was known to what was not. Or rather, to what they did not know and were eager to find out. Not answers, but questions. “The exhilaration,” he wrote, “of the unknown.”
He continued, “I should teach them ignorance. Finally, I thought, "a subject I can excel in.”
There were, he wrote, different kinds of useful ignorance – a far cry from the willful ignorance that is the purview of the incurious and certain mind. There was knowledgeable ignorance, perceptive ignorance, and insightful ignorance. Taken together they represented where the excitement of inquiry begins. He cited the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who wrote: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
I am no scientist; after failing college physics I took it again and got a D. But I found in Firestein’s argument so much that resonated for me, both as a citizen and as a writer. Like the students subjected to that massive textbook, I am inundated with fact, not only in the relentless accounts of the events of the hour and day, but in the hasty explanations of what it all means.
In other words, I am drowning in what are presented as certainties, even as so little feels certain. I scroll and scroll looking for the assurance of a simple explanation, a grand theory of the case. And I am left feeling ever more uncertain, and with it more anxious.
Like my former student, I want to know what the story is. Right now. But perhaps by surrendering to the power of ignorance she, and I, and so many of us drawn to the writing’s power, might see that before we can impose order we need to acknowledge all that we do not know.
Because then, as Firestein writes of science but which is applicable to what we writers do, we can begin asking new questions. Nor necessarily big questions. At least not in the beginning.
Small questions can be a good place to start, so long as they begin not with frustration at not knowing but with wonder at all there is for us to find out.
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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.
It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.
Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture