The Quest in the Quest
By Donald Maass | June 3, 2020 |
Are you satisfied?
What a question. Given our situation, is there any answer but “no”? Who can be satisfied when a world pandemic has us quarantined? And at the same time intolerable injustice has us on the streets? When economic collapse has us waiting in mile-long lines at food banks? When our vote may not be counted?
Is there any other answer when we have never had more voice and never had less influence? When Hate Militia are on the march and the Thought Police are abroad, meting out punishment and shame? When the Troll in Chief spews lies amplified as truth? When our stories are published into a void? When our very language has been twisted into Newspeak?
When there is so much wrong in the world, can writing be right? Are we helping others by staying at home? Are we truly changing anything when we choose a concrete noun or an active verb? Is being passive an act, when acting is futile? Do our stories truly matter when we do not?
Read on.
What is The Quest?
Every story portrays conflict. Every protagonist has a problem. In a story, things happen. Things are done. A struggle grows harder. A crisis arrives. Choices are made. Success is achieved. At the same time, an inner journey is underway. Change is brewing: change inside. When all of that melds, comes to a head, and results in a resolution, we arrive at a happy ending.
But are we satisfied?
Stories have a moral basis, and when a principle is affirmed or a belief is challenged—that is, when a story fulfills its purpose—we ought to be content, settled, secure, empowered, uplifted, inspired.
When justice is done, we ought to be relieved. When a monster is slain, we ought to feel safe. When the world is saved, we ought to feel mighty. When love conquers all, we ought to be happy. When a wound is healed, a burden is lifted, a destination is reached, or wholeness is achieved, or peace is found, then we ought to feel finished.
But we are not. We still are not satisfied.
Why not? It is because the mechanics of plot are insufficient. It is because the inner journey is not the final destination. It is because the fulfillment of the story’s purpose is good but once again says that the cause of all that ails us is other people. It is because the cure for our malady is up to us. It is because we are desperate for a cure in the first place.
The reason that many stories do not fully and finally satisfy is that we have misapprehended the human quest. We imagine that it is to solve problems. We believe that it is to fix what is broken inside. We trust that as storytellers we are supposed to affirm principles, or test beliefs, or speak truth to power, to portray what is righteous, to forgive what is fallible, or to reflect what is human. All of that is good, yes, but none of that is enough.
We are still not satisfied.
The truest quest is not to fix anything. It is not to journey, to solve a puzzle, to win a battle, to obtain a prize, or to return in glory. It is not to slay a monster or save others. It is not to vanquish inner demons, or to find peace. Our journey never ends. There are puzzles with no solution. There is always another war. A prize is just a trophy. Glory never lasts. Monsters ever rise. There are always more who need rescue.
Inner demons may go away and we may feel at peace, but that is only for a time. If we believe there is an ending, then we will never reach it. The true quest is not material. It is not psychological. It does not result in rest.
The truest human quest is for ourselves. Not just self-awareness—immersive POV writing is a feast of that—and not just self-understanding either. Knowing what makes us tick does not by itself buy us any grace. The truest quest is to know ourselves so profoundly that we make our choices in full awareness of who we are, how we got that way, and where we can go.
Our truest quest is for freedom: from fear, from the past, from the judgement of others, from the tyranny of beliefs, from the need for armor, from the desire to be invincible, from the illusion of a perfect world. The world is not perfect. It never will be. Neither will we.
What we can be is ourselves: fully knowing, fully capable, fully reconciled, fully free to act, fully able to choose what to do based not on what is valorous, or righteous, but on who we are. When trouble is no longer troublesome, and blame no longer lies with others, then we become strong, wise, caring, able and willing.
When we are mature, we solve problems, yes, but we ourselves are no longer problematic. We love not answers, but questions. We slay monsters but we also make friends. We do justice, aware that it is flawed. We are healed because we did not need medicine. We stop blaming others. We protest but we do not hate. We give to others because in our poverty is abundance. We create because we can. We journey to new worlds because we have already reached our destination. We love others because we first love ourselves.
Quests make good stories. Inner quests are their hearts. The truest quest, though, is not to go somewhere else or to win a treasure inside. The truest quest is not journey at all, nor is it a treasure to be found. The truest quest satisfies not because it ends, but because it is a beginning. The end of such a quest is right where it started: with oneself.
Commencing the True Quest
A quest has to begin somewhere, but where is that when the quest isn’t going to cover any ground? How, in a story, do you establish the need for something when that something can’t be precisely defined and how to get it is only through experience?
A story of experience is good, but isn’t that every story? In a way, yes. To be sure, some stories are intended to be an experiential journey. The Stranger. Travels with My Aunt. Siddhartha. The Outsiders. Cat’s Eye. Another Country. In such stories, it’s hard to escape the feeling that plot is not the point. The point is a human being learning about self. The ending entails not a solution, but acceptance.
However, in part that can be true in any novel. How is that intention signaled to the reader? How is any character’s need for the freedom—that is to say, full maturity—established? Obviously, it becomes evident due to something inside. Something missing. A discontent.
Timeless quest-for-self stories frequently begin with a yearning for authenticity in a world of phoniness, emptiness and ennui. At the beginning of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), young Holden Caulfield enumerates his complaints against the world. (My favorite is, “The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has—I’m not kidding.”) Holden heads for New York City, where over the next three days he has many disappointing experiences with people. Only his sister Phoebe is able to challenge him, and whose innocence, riding the carousel in Central Park, finally gives him a measure of happiness, allowing him to carry on.
John Fowles’s The Magus (1966, rev. 1977) features a similarly disaffected young man, Nichola Urfe, who as the novel opens immediately launches into his catalogue of complaint:
I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.
Nicholas takes a job teaching English at the Lord Byron School on the Greek island of Phraxos, where he becomes so bored and depressed that he considers suicide. Then he is befriended by a rich recluse, Maurice Conchis, who is at first friendly but whose friendship devolves into psychological games called the “godgame”, in which Nicholas participates and which he ultimately discovers are re-enactments not of the Nazi occupation and Conchis’s collaboration with evil, but coded messages about Nicholas’s own life.
John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012) is about two teens, Hazel Lancaster and Augustus Waters, who are dying of cancer. Hazel has plenty to complain about. She is dying. Really, how are you supposed to feel about that? The bromides of her support group are hollow. Only Augustus seems to share her honest fatalism and mordant wit.
There is hope, however, in a Dutch author, Peter Van Houton, whose book An Imperial Affliction, about cancer survival, echoes Hazel’s own experience and feelings. Hazel and Augustus go to Amsterdam to meet Van Houton. Unfortunately, he is a miserable and cruel drunk, but even so through him Hazel comes to accept her cancer and, finally, to be happy with her choices of whom she lets into her life, even though their deaths will hurt her.
The Practical Quest
Making a true quest a practical reality on the page, then, involves three things: 1) an inner discontent, especially with oneself, 2) a means to make sense of bad experience—typically a person who is the agent of change, either through positive example or through a malign intent which nevertheless provides insight, self-awareness, and acceptance, 3) experience itself, which is to say the stuff that happens.
Discontent is tricky. A sour protagonist can quickly alienate readers. It is therefore useful to make the discontent entertaining, which is to say witty, smart, refreshingly honest and/or undeniably true. Rich kids can lack a moral compass? Middle-class, mid-century English life was stifling? Dying of cancer just plain sucks? Are we really going to argue? When a discontented hero has truth on his or her side, we tend to be in agreement and therefore favorably inclined.
The means of making sense of oneself works best when it’s not randomly found but deliberately sought. Holden Caulfield goes to New York City. Hazel and Augustus fly to Amsterdam to meet an author whom they hope will impart to them wisdom. Nicholas Erfe meets an antagonist whose target is Nicholas himself and whose intent is to confront Nicholas with everything about himself that is weak, doubtful, groundless and self-pitying.
Experience itself: To be transformative, it’s not enough to put a protagonist through just any old experience. Experience that could happen to anybody is neutral unless it wounds, shakes, taunts, humiliates, rattles, disappoints, devastates or in any number of other way puts a protagonist through a wringer custom-designed to hit a protagonist where it hurts.
And where does it hurt the most? Where a protagonist’s self-confidence, faith, sense of identity and spirit are the weakest. You can’t get well until you are sick. You can’t get up until you are kicked down. You can’t discover what’s at the indestructible core of yourself until someone else takes away all that you have, strips away all of your armor, exposes all of your self-deceptions, and utterly destroys everything that you believe yourself to be.
Responsibility for inflicting such painful-yet-liberating experience upon a hero or heroine belongs to the author. That’s you.
The Quest in the Quest
The quest in your story—the true quest—is therefore rooted in a need to be free. In what way is that true of your protagonist in your WIP? What straight-jacket is he or she wearing? What has made him or her cynical, self-defeating or frozen? How does your protagonist blame others? At whom does your protagonist direct hate? How is your protagonist self-aware and attuned to his or her condition? What does he or she do to shake things up, try something different, run away without escaping, test himself or herself, or pretend that everything is jolly? Who is the agent of change whom your protagonist meets? Who sees through him or her and either accepts your protagonist warts-and-all, or decides to demolish him or her?
The quest for oneself is the highest and most human quest of all. Self-understanding, self-acceptance and the freedom simply to be oneself is a human imperative as old as Greek philosophy and as fresh as any newfound faith. Take your protagonist on a quest for the Self and it is a quest for us all. It’s a quest for the ages.
When it’s done, we’ll be satisfied.
What does your protagonist need to go through in order to be free, and why?
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
My protagonist needs to manage the 5 stages of grief, overcome betrayal, and decide if she’s going to follow the path she believes her parents had planned for her during era where words like peace and harmony are from a fairy tale long forgotten. She must do this without the aid of the people she had confided in most, her parents.
She’s psychologically disconnected from people, stuck in self-pity, and the responsibility of leadership for an entire village will fall into the hands of her and her brother.
Brian,
“…an era where words like peace and harmony are from a fairy tale long forgotten.” It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a lot about my protest days in the early 1970’s. The intolerable wrong was the Vietnam War.
Now feels like then. Will we again simply cycle through another turn of the wheel of history? Fifty years from now, will our great-grandchildren be on the streets?
About your heroine, I love that she’s stuck but consider making her *aware* that she’s stuck. Self-awareness is the key to dark characters. When they know they need to change (even if not how) then we have hope that they will.
Good to see you here.
Great analysis! Once again you’ve provided an inspiring set of questions to take back to my WIP. Most significant for me is the idea of an agent of change and their role–more nuanced than simply thinking about allies and antagonists. I see I’ll have to introduce my protagonist’s agent of change earlier than I’d planned. Thanks!
Ask me, the best villains get under the skin of the protagonist. Go for it.
Once the truth comes to light, both my girls need to forgive. Therein lies true freedom. Their best revenge is living without shame, without hiding, without lies. I didn’t realize this until after I finished writing the story but what a powerful revelation it was to me, not just for my story but for my own life too. Thanks Don.
It’s funny how much comes clear after a draft is done. It’s like you can see what you want to say until you’ve tried to say it.
I’m drafting a second book in which my MC has just come off a summer of dragon-fighting. She has accepted a scholarship in Edinburgh, which she plans to use to to re-invent herself. Sick of being the outsider, she means to fit in amongst her fellow-students by passing herself off as a normal person. The plan becomes her straightjacket. Her mistaken belief that being normal will free her is going to blow up in her face. You said so many powerful things in this post, but the one that jumped out at me is that true freedom lies in our acceptance that nothing is guaranteed. Thank you for starting my day with inspiration.
Passing herself off as a normal person. Love that. We can all relate! I look forward to reading how she accepts in a “normal” world (university?) the abnormal person she truly is.
Among other things, my protagonist needs to go through humiliation and come out the other side to realize that enduring the harsh judgment of others is far more satisfying than avoiding the harsh judgment of others.
And Don, thank you for this post. It was not about plot, but it sparked a clear idea for me of what plot element could achieve this goal.
Exactly, Erin. Plot is not the point, it’s the means to an end.
A general believing sincerely that militarism can effect world peace… a brilliant woman cruelly cut off from fulfillment as well as family, and bitterly resolved on revenge…a boy dreaming of heroic manhood while unknowingly being betrayed by his adult heroes… these are my freedom-hungry protagonists, bound up in misguided beliefs, in my historical fiction trilogy WIP. Your words and questions, Donald, are firing up my own quest to make their quests more boundless and beautiful.
Freedom-hungry protagonists…perfect. What I especially like in your brief character capsules is that each is set up for a fall–a fall in which they will find their true selves.
Hey Don – Whoa, lots to chew on here. The sort of stuff that’s so meta we’ll all be working on it all of our lives (or should be).
It’s funny, I’ve been on a music stint the last few days, revisiting 70s progressive rock, and as I read the opening sections of your essay, What Goes Up, by The Alan Parsons Project randomly played, starting with:
“What goes up must come down, What must rise must fall
And what goes on in your life, Is writing on the wall!
If all things must fall, Why build a miracle at all?
If all things must pass, Even a miracle won’t last…”
Which caught my ear for obvious reasons. But once I was attuned, I heard the last verses of the song as never before:
How can you be so sure?
How do you know what the end will endure?
How can you be so sure,
That the wonders you’ve made in your life will be seen
By the millions who’ll follow to visit the site
Of your dream?
What goes up must come down
What goes ’round must come ’round
What’s been lost must be found…”
The damn song’s a setup. Just when it seems almost a cynical dirge, or a surrender to meaninglessness, it switches to questioning us. How can we possibly presume that our work will be meaningless? How can we surrender our dreams? In spite of the seeming circularity and futility, what’s been lost must be found.
And, hoo-boy, does all of that feel fitting… to both my protagonists and myself. I think one of the reasons I’ve always sought to write epics, as in stories that encompass entire lives, is that I want to explore the meta questions. I suppose I’ve been seeking satisfaction from storytelling that only seems satisfying in the culmination you describe–in the surrender to futility that reveals that all is not lost. Not at all.
Indeed, it’s preposterous of us to presume our lives are meaningless. It’s not ours to decide. Only in that realization do we finally perceive that what’s been lost must be found. And it’s up to each of us to strive on. That’s very freeing. And it’s an exhortation to keep seeking. Circular and yet ultimately beautiful.
Back to work. Thanks–for helping to supply a lifetime’s worth of questions. Onward!
Pfft! Well, Vaughn, thanks for adding more chew to Don’s epic chew. Hmm, no need for meals today because Roycroft and Maass have placed an over abundance of food on my plate.
Om num num full belly!
Ooo, that’s what deep freezer are for.
And here’s my progressive rock go-to song: “Carry On” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young:
One morning I woke up and I knew you were really gone
A new day, a new way, and new eyes to see the dawn
Go your way, I’ll go mine and carry on
The sky is clearing and the night has cried enough
The sun, he comes, the world to soften up
Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on
The fortunes of fables are able to sing the song
Now witness the quickness with which we get along
To sing the blues you’ve got to live the dues and carry on
Carry on, love is coming, love is coming to us all
Another fave heard as never before! Nicely done.
Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
And just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Dont let the uncertainty turn you around
Go on and make a joyful sound
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
But you’ll never know….
(Jackson Browne)
You’ll never know…unless you story
(Story can be a verb)
Thanks for all your great insight.
Thanks Don. I settled on one thing that might be working per this engaging post: that my heroine’s guide was there all along. An older woman who knew the answers to major questions if only my MC would truly acknowledge her; not be afraid of her answers. Like the key was there all along but the heroine was distracted by something glittering or even sinister over there.
“My heroine’s guide was there all along.” Stuff of fairy tales, myths and legends. Wonderful.
Don, a banquet again, thank you. I liked your evocation of The Magus, a work I loved but haven’t read for 25 years. The quote from T. S. Eliot at the novel’s beginning seems to embody your statement: The end of such a quest is right where it started: with oneself.
Here’s Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring.
Will be to arrive where we started.
And know the place for the first time.
I’m writing a memoir of my wicked years as a high school shoplifter and my many moral (or amoral) mitigations from that time. My quest will be partially to answer, from the point of the good Catholic lad I had been, what the hell was I thinking?
A question for us all. What the hell are we thinking? That screaming will get people to listen? That we need leaders to get to a better world? That fingers point anywhere but at ourselves?
Your memoir is about growing up and gaining a mature perspective, especially on oneself. We all need that. Our whole society needs that. It’s the ultimate quest.
I love that Eliot quote. One of my favorites.
Don, you’ve been my hero since I first discovered The Fire in Fiction. Along with Writing 21st Century Fiction and The Emotional Craft of Fiction, your words have guided me through hundreds (maybe thousands) of drafts of my manuscript.
The heartbreaking events we’re encountering right now remind me of the political atmosphere in my story. It chronicles the life of an artist who struggles to grow into her own courage after her Seneca boyfriend (a rock musician) is drafted into the Vietnam War. My aim: to explore how unexpected cross-cultural connections shift the way she sees herself and those around her. Giving voice to the silent casualties of the Vietnam War and the damaged baby boomers left behind has helped me come to terms with my own past. Indeed, we were fortunate to have phenomenal artists creating life-saving music back then!
I started querying last week but stopped. Is querying at a time like this a good idea?
Well, I certainly hope that your manuscript has not been through thousands of drafts. Hundreds? Okay. But thousands–?
Seriously, your Vietnam era story sounds meaty. It’s my era too and after we lost the war, we had to come to terms with no only it’s wrongness, but the rightness of the soldiers who had nevertheless served and returned, wounded. The war left scars, but also understanding.
I wonder if we of the Boom have truly and finally forgiven ourselves and others for the tragedy that history imposed on us?
As to querying, of course it is a good idea! Our query inboxes are as full as ever. Why hold back when we need stories more than ever?
The war left scars, but also understanding. So well put. Soldiers serving and returning wounded–they still need us. Forgiveness and Love for ourselves and others. Definitely what this book–and all of us, for that matter–are about.
Thank you for this.
–Maybe it seemed like thousands!
Oh boy, oh boy, Don, you always manage to give me a headache. A good headache–if there is such a thing. LOL. So much to consider, for my WIP and my personal journey of life.
Like many of your posts, it’s now been printed. Highlights and notes (scribbles) surround your words like reckless vines in search of water. These scribbles make sense to me if no one else. They shed light and provide food for thought.
I thank you dearly.
Oh, and you ask what my protagonist must go through for freedom . . . she goes through every possible hell, and death, in the end, holds the answers. She’s on the same journey we all are. The quest to chose our story, our end.
Yours,
Dee
Yes, we’re all on that quest in our own lives as well as in our stories. Hope you’re well and safe out there!
Thank you, Don, for another thought-provoking article. The Corona Virus outbreak turned everyone’s life upside down and caused me to lose focus and energy for a couple of weeks. I could not put pen to paper – or keys to word processor – for quite awhile. My WIP needed my attention and passion and I felt I had lost it. Gradually, I forced myself to do some edits, read my notes, search for better words, and soon I was writing again. But it was painfully slow. By now I had hoped to be querying a completed manuscript, but I’m barely half done. Your post today reinforced what has been nagging at me: my MC has a true quest, but how do I make it meaningful, not just to him, but to the reader? Until I can break down that wall in myself I won’t be “satisfied.” And now the heart-rending George Floyd case, the demonstrations (such courage!), the palpable pain. I truly have almost stopped promoting my 7 published books because I feel almost embarrassed to plug my work in the midst of such turmoil in our country. I don’t know if any other writers have felt this; if so, I’d love to hear how they have transcended. Meantime, I’ll keep plugging away, a word, a sentence at a time until the light of inspiration shines again. Stay well and safe.
Promoting a book at the very height of a crisis does feel a bit unseemly, I agree Crises do pass, of course, so the time will come again.
I feel the same, Barbara. My current WIP is sitting untouched without a single edit. I give you a hand for continuing to work! Stay safe and well, too.
Plenty of writers have been derailed by world events, but plenty have also found writing affirming. I have. It helps overcome a sense of helplessness, at least for me.
Thank you, Cathee. I sympathize and empathize. One bright note: once I began to edit and try to stir the writing pot, I got the idea for an entirely new book. It changed my focus because I had something new to counterbalance my malaise. My current WIP is a suspense thriller, the “new idea” is a mystical romance. Polar opposites. So if one goes dry I can work on the other. I hope your muse taps you on the shoulder soon. Warm regards.
I feel the same, Barbara. My current WIP is sitting untouched without a single edit. I give you a hand for continuing to work!
Mr. Maas,
In one short column, a succinct and vivid description of our situation today, and a compelling blueprint/checklist for the kind of reading experience I want to bring my readers.
Thank you so much for putting what I was trying to find in words I could recognize and can now attempt to bring to life in a story. Whatever our situation, I believe that striving to provide an example of this quest is work I can take pride in.
I have largely retreated from the online world of late, Don, but when I venture out, it’s a delight to come across posts like this one. Lots to think about here, including finding a succinct way to describe my protagonist’s journey.
In essence, she fell in love with a good but ordinary man, but because of her backstory, ascribed to him a disproportionate number and degree of noble qualities. Now they are both truly stuck; he’s not seen for who he is, and she’s caught up in a self-destructive whirlwind, trying to be the wife a legend rightly deserves. By book’s end, she recognizes his imperfections and accepts her own. It’s almost a story of achieving marital harmony through slackerdom rather than heroic effort, which thrills the twisted, contrarian in me every time I think of it.
Hope that makes sense.
I’ve found psychoanalysis prods me towards a personal true quest. If the doctor could, she’d probably say something similar to the above. Noodling through my quest has improved my writing as well as my reality. The right questions at the right time throw up more questions that may not be answered, and I’ve found that that’s okay. Big for someone who’s goal was finding answers to all the questions.
I planned to give my character other inner quests in future books, and had worried she’d run dry. But I realize that’s not possible.
Thank you for this. I’m also printing it out.
Thank you for thinking of this and explaining it to us. It’s very important. I’m going to use it as a guide for my third novel.
Your words always give me greater insight into my work. I can see now that the fact that my mc is self aware (got that part right) can be played up to better effect.