A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Seventy-Five

There is something quite interesting that happens when I am working on a piece of fiction and allow myself the freedom to not be entirely certain of what it is about.  I've spoken of this in the past, describing how a piece of fiction can take shape outside my awareness, and without my being certain what was truly planned, what was just an opportunistic choice or stroke of luck.  In the case of the story I am working on, I am finding myself discovering the power of maintaining faith in a piece of work, even as I find it challenging to understand what it is getting at.  The story is one that I began with a general sense of the events, but not a real direction for the ending, beyond a general one.  I did not have a real notion of what was happening in the story, beyond a general sense, and did not have a very clear concept of the world that it is taking place within, despite it being a rather science-fiction concept.  I have been taking my time with it, adding to it in drips and drabs, and allowing it to grow over time, but without any clearer sense of the stories larger shape or direction.  Indeed, I am still largely following the events I had in my mind when I first thought of the story, and have been slowing down as I approach the last I know of that path.  Tonight, I wrote a bit in which one character starts to realize a central piece of information about another character that has not been understood.  I knew, from the start, what that knowledge would be, but it was only when I stopped working tonight and reflected on it again that the entire thing opened up and I realized what was the center of the story, what it is that I am hoping I can create with it, and it shocks me how different it is from anything I had expected.