On the Usefulness of Dead Ends
A new perspective
I have amblyopia, which means my brain favors one eye over the other. When I was in kindergarten, I started wearing glasses to correct this imbalance. I also had to do eye exercises with a patch over my dominant (right) eye. One of the eye exercises involved completing mazes. This was a challenge, because my left eye saw things a little blurrier—lines close together, especially in parallel, melded together in my vision. With practice, my left eye improved. And I grew to love mazes.
In time, I learned some maze-completing shortcuts, like how to look ahead on a path and determine if it is a dead end. A dead end meant failure to find the right path through the maze. I wanted to navigate perfectly on the first attempt.
I began to draw my own mazes. I discovered that dead ends were dead giveaways that a path was not viable. The best way to fool someone in a maze was to have no dead ends. Every path loops back to another path. Still, there is a way to detect if a whole path-loop is a non-viable option. When I did mazes in books that employed the looping trick, I could still make it through the maze with no errors.
Of course, it’s different when you’re physically walking through a maze. I went to local corn mazes in high school. Even with a map, it was sometimes a challenge to navigate through the maze. Which intersection had I just passed? Was I on the inside or outside path of these parallel lines? Dead ends are more frustrating in person. On paper, one can easily reset to the last decision point. In person, one has to turn around and go back—the scenery is changed. Everything is seen from a new perspective. It is disorienting.
Traveling through an unfamiliar city can feel like a maze, especially if you are looking at the map the wrong direction. Allison and I took a trip to England several years ago. The entire trip, I was an excellent navigator—except for one moment, when I misread the map. We walked quite a ways in the wrong direction before we realized it. We laughed about it, but it was still frustrating and disorienting.
One day, walking the trails in a park nearby my house, I found myself at a dead end. The trail was washed out; I had to turn around. I had planned a walking route in my head, and now I had to change that plan. I was annoyed. But a thought popped in my head at that moment: “Dead ends mean you get to see the road twice, from different angles.”
I like to be efficient. I don’t like to waste my time when I’m trying to accomplish a task. I want to take the quickest and least stressful route to work. I want to get through chores all in one go. I want the first draft of my story or poem to be as close to perfect as possible, to need only minor revisions at the level of grammar and word choice.
I’ve been working on one of my projects, The Lesser Light, for a long time. By “working on,” I mean false starting over and over; thinking about it but not actually writing; jotting notes and ideas, questions and answers. Part of the reason I can’t get past chapter 2 (even though the whole story structure is in my head) is that I want it to be perfect on the first go. By perfect, I don’t mean flawless. I mean that all the themes (even subconscious ones) would be wonderfully incorporated into the writing from the get-go. I mean that the structural problems and logical issues I anticipate would be smoothed out in the first draft. I don’t want to write a complete first draft with problems I have to address later. So I try to address those problems now, before I’ve written that far. In other words, I want to be efficient, and I don’t want to find myself in a dead end.
The story of The Lesser Light is set in King County, Washington. Mostly the cities and towns to the east of Seattle. I wanted to start the story just after the protagonist and his crew lose a decisive battle against “the Machines.” The hero is by himself, having fled the battle when it looked like all was lost. The battle took place in Carnation, a town where my wife used to teach, a town whose landscape I know well.
But the story starts a couple days later, a couple days of running away. Where could he be at this point? I looked at Google Maps. For some reason, I wanted him to be near a body of water. I found one. It looked like a good place for my protagonist to have arrived. I wrote my draft of the opening scenes. At the lake, the protagonist meets another person, and the two begin to walk south toward I-90. According to Google, there were a few roads that could be taken. I wanted to see the routes in person so I could describe them accurately. For example, was this route uphill or downhill? Was it forested or more open?
One day in the spring of 2021, I took an afternoon to drive out to the Cascade foothills. I made it to the road that led to the lake. There was a big, government gate blocking the road (the “lake” turned out to be a reservoir behind a dam). This was the only road in. I looked at Google Maps again. There were some logging roads to the north. I drove up the rugged road and parked at a gate. I walked down the road about a quarter mile before returning to the car. It seemed like hiking was allowed, but I wasn’t even sure if the road would lead where I wanted to go. I looked at Google Maps again. There were some neighborhoods to the south, with roads that looked like they might connect to the lake. When I got to the neighborhoods, I discovered those “roads” were just long driveways. I didn’t want to trespass. This was just one dead end after another.
I decided to try a different approach. I drove to the south end of the road my two characters would walk down. Closer to I-90. At the entrance to the road, there was a sign, “Logging trucks only.” There was no other road that ran parallel. So unless I trespassed, this whole geographical section I had used for my story would remain a complete blank. It was frustrating. It was a dead end.
The adventure was not a total failure, however. I was able to see my story in a new way. Perhaps these two characters didn’t need to have this long road to walk on before any action happened. I had written some dialogue between them, but what would they talk about during the remaining hours it would take to walk this route? Surely they wouldn’t be silent most of the time? I decided to start my story closer to I-90 to begin with. Of course, I could have fictionalized the route these characters took. But for this story, I want the geography to be realistic.
I also had fun on the adventure. I like exploring new places. I enjoyed what felt like a scavenger hunt. While driving around, I audiobooked my first Star Wars novel (Ahsoka by E. K. Johnston). This was my first foray beyond the movies and shows. It sparked in me the joy of good storytelling and the wonder of a galaxy far, far away. Most of my audiobooking occurs during my commute, half an hour each way. But on this adventure, I got to listen to about 4 hours straight. Overall, the trip was a good experience, even if I did not accomplish what I had set out to do.
I’m on my sixth or seventh attempt to write this story. I still have some major plot / motivation questions. I still have some logistical issues (like, what do the Machines even look like?). I still have many ideas that are only in note form. But this time, I have a different mindset. I do not fear the dead end, the digression, the idea that goes nowhere. Instead I approach my writing with curiosity: what does this idea reveal about the story, even if that idea is ultimately cut? If I do encounter a dead end, how does it allow me to see my story from another angle?
It may be that what we perceive as creative dead ends are actually loops. We end up back at familiar intersections, but we’ve changed because of the journey there and back. And maybe there is a treasure waiting at the dead end, a treasure which will serve us well in future projects. We won’t know until we start writing, discovering, and finding ourselves—that is, finding our very selves—at the dead end.