Metacognition: The Long Journey of the Short Story

Entering the realm of the short story, I was extremely excited. It seemed like a soft cube of clay in front of me that was waiting for me to mold it into something beautiful, something meaningful. But, when I actually took the plunge and attempted to start writing, I scowled at my previous idealistic views. Truth is, the process was much more difficult than I had thought, and as I soon discovered, the way my story transformed revealed a lot about my own thinking.

Everything started with the quest to find a ripe idea, and even this was more difficult than I had anticipated. I’ve always prided myself in the fact that creativity comes relatively easily to me, but I started to draw from the creative ideas I had accumulated in the back of my mind, I was surprised to find that most of them, when placed in the role of a story, were painfully cliché. I remembered the words of advice we had been given at the get-go: “don’t make everything perfect for your character”. I decided it would be wiser and more fruitful to pursue a story idea which made me feel uncomfortable to some degree and thus begged some serious questions. Immediately, I fell upon the image of an ailing old man… a man with Alzheimer’s—an image which had always resurfaced in my thoughts and made me cringe. To be so innately and permanently disconnected from the people one loves was the saddest thought I could imagine.

With this platform, I pulled wisps of substance from here and there to try to build the skeleton of my story. I found myself with a clear vision of the story’s eventual meaning: I wanted it to have to do with understanding and listening to someone, even when the mere words they speak are unintelligible.

My first draft was submitted with this goal in mind, and it seemed like it was somewhat on the right path, but the characters, dialogue, and even the fundamental structure of it (it was told from the point of view of the Alzheimer’s patient who thought intelligently, but spoke unintelligibly) felt fabricated and fake. And that deep, warm satisfaction which I usually feel when I turn in a piece of writing just didn’t come. For the first time in a very long time, I longed to continue writing, to keep kneading the clay.

However, my initial changes to this draft were very conservative. As much as we were told to let go of our “weak” material, I couldn’t help feeling that there was a reason that I put that material there in the first place, and taking it out would leave my story with more holes rather than strengthening it.

It wasn’t until I was forced to shoot holes into my story that I finally recognized the potential value of such a step in the process. We had already completed four steps when this push to dramatically reshape came. Apparently, I had been working with no clear main character. Somewhere in the far corners of my mind, I had been whispering reassuring words to myself, trying to make myself believe that I would make it work somehow. I soon found, however, that it was this blind faith of mine that I would somehow make it out of the dense fog surrounding my story which was holding me back.

So… after highlighting approximately 1700 words and pressing ‘delete’, I started from scratch. And this time, I planned it out first. Now, my steps 2-4 had not been a complete waste… in fact, they played more into my final story than I had thought they would. Although my focus character shifted, and the tone of the story was altered, my initial question-igniting plotline became the glue which held it together. The result was shocking. Even through seemingly heartbreaking amounts of ‘delete’-key-pressing, the core questions my story was meant to bring up didn’t change, but the way those questions were posed was transformed. And, along with that, my view of the process of writing transformed as well. I experienced for the first time the feeling of deleting something yet not losing it. And, when I finally stapled all my drafts together, with my final one on top, I was relieved to feel that warm satisfaction once again.

Change of Mind: Unorthodox Love

Now, I’m not saying that I’m shallow… because I’d like to think I’m not. But, before watching the film Once, I had never spent enough time thinking about all the different types of unorthodox love to realize the deep impacts they can have on a person’s life. The idea that love could be unromantic, but still pure and heartfelt was not something I had previously considered.

In our society, the idea of “love” carries a lot of baggage. Just saying the word out loud immediately brings pictures of hearts, chocolates, kisses, embraces, and every hue of pink and red to mind. That is to say, in mainstream culture, “love” is pretty much synonymous with “romance”. And, this is the kind of love that is always represented in the blockbusters—that true love that breaks down all obstacles. It is interesting to note here, too, that this love almost always involves some sort of physical contact as well. Holding hands, a peck on the lips, cuddling, and many times, much more. That one passionate kiss at the end of the movie is what seals the deal, makes you look at the person next to you and sigh, and leave the theatre with a satisfied, warm heaviness in your chest. Right?

That’s why I was surprised when I found myself having that same feeling when the credits started rolling for Once. Not once in that film did the man and woman ever have a moment of profound realization and then declare their love for one another, and there was definitely no passionate kiss. But it was a love story. They meant a lot to each other. But, was their love not quite “true”?

Of course I had heard of different kinds of love in the past, and the many ways it could shape one’s life. Just last year, while reading Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy Romeo and Juliet, we identified more than a dozen different forms of love, ranging from maternal and familial love to “carnal” love. But in the end, nobody mourns the loss of the maternal love between Juliet and her mother or her nurse… everyone cries because the “star-crossed lovers”, the romantic lovers, can never be together.

So, what was the deal with Once? According to this standard of “true”, romantic love, everything about the relationship between the guy and the girl and the ending of the movie should have prompted me to stand up and shake my fist at the projector, cursing the movie for lying to us by saying that this was a love story. But I didn’t. And that was because, by the time I had reached that point, I was convinced that they did love each other, but I was confused as to what that meant.

They had touched each other, without actually touching each other. That sounds so cliché, but that’s the best way to describe it. They opened each other’s minds up to new possibilities in their lives and shared an intimacy through their music that no one else could have experienced with them. To me, nothing about this is cliché.

The very fact that the type of love the guy and girl shared is hard to put into words tells us that it is not something most people consider to be love. But after this film, I would argue that this is the truest form of love because they each gave a little bit of themself to the other person in order to allow that person to do what he or she really wanted to do, what was best for them. And neither of them expected anything in return. Perhaps their relationship ended up being unorthodox, and maybe some dissatisfied viewers may accuse it of not being love at all, but now I’ve come to believe it was a million times more heartfelt than that blockbuster kiss.