The Nib

Lost in Blunderalnd

Recently I borrowed a DVD remake of Alice in Wonderland from the local library. It struck me, as I watched the young heroine tumble down her particular rabbit hole, what a fitting metaphor for writing Alice's misadventure could be. As a writer I tumble into literary rabbit holes all the time. That's half the fun and half the frustration of being a writer.

For example one of my present works in progress is Stained Glass. It's not really about the art of painting on glass, or soldering glass fragments together to make a window, but that's one of the rabbit holes I expected to tumble into as I worked on the novel - and so I have. For the past few days I have been reading about the types of compounds artists mix to paint on glass, the tools and brushes they use, how their works are fired, how they are mounted, and so on.

Once I've climbed out of that hole, back into the main warren, I will have acquired a sense of that aspect of my story. But, as I said, the book is not about stained glass per say. Stained glass will be at most a symbolic element in the larger context. Fun and necessary as it may have been for me to stumble into the rabbit hole marked 'Stained Glass', that is not the most important rabbit hole. Nor was it the first.

In fact, the plight of the writer is far graver than what Lewis Caroll imagined for his delightful character. For the writer there's a virtual mine-field of rabbit holes, and there are rabbit holes inside the rabbit holes he may topple into. Every second word an author taps out on his keyboard may open up like a trap door to a whole new world of research, his novel proliferating into a three-or-more dimensional maze of bewildering proportions. To name a few of the tunnels I've galumphed down so far researching Stained Glass: the history of the Anglican Church; The Cariboo Gold Rush; frontier prostitutes in the Victorian era, modes of transportation in the Victorian era.

The trick is to dive into every one of those rabbit holes, and to keep on going until you find out how they are connected to the main tunnel. That requires imagination, intelligence, a sense of adventure, determination, but above all deep humility and patience. If I hurry toward what I think may be the light at the end of my tunnel, I miss all the rich detail and meaning that can be found in a complex series of fascinating digressions.