Are You Writing a Quest Narrative? (David Intro) (07/06/2019)

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A friend recently suggested that my work-in-progress might be considered a "quest narrative." I vaguely remembered such a term from my college English-major days, so I Googled it. Within the most scholarly of Internet articles — a top 10 list by the British historian, novelist, and writer Robert Irwin — I found a good description of the term:"A quest is a journey in the course of which one advances spiritually and mentally, as well as physically travelling miles. The quester leaves the familiar for the unknown. The nature of the goal may not be clear at first and may only become fully apparent at the end of the quest. It is an excellent plot device and ideally everyone's life should have a plot."Melville knew about quest narratives: Ahab's quest for the white whale (and perhaps Ishmael's quest in the telling of it). Pierre's search for meaning in love, career, and family relationships. In Melville’s work, he will often use some metaphor for peeling back layers only to find more and more layers, and finally, upon reaching the center, lifting the lid on that last buried sarcophagus, and finding it "appallingly vacant, as vast is the soul of man." Often, in quest narratives, you don’t necessarily find the thing you're searching for, but in the process, you find something else altogether.In my current work-in-progress, I'm using physics, the philosophy of language, and a few personal pilgrimages to some of this world's most spiritual and magical bodies of water as narrative devices to reflect on events in my life, and their relation to events in the lives of people close to me. Some might say the top layer of my “quest” is attempting to uncover a family secret that had nearly been buried, but which, ultimately (I believe) wanted to be known (as do all secrets).  However, the story is actually unfolding as I’m writing about it, and each day I’m learning new bits of information via old newspaper clippings, DNA research, letters, and photos. While I'd definitely say I'm on a “quest” for something more than just the answer to this particular mystery, I'm not entirely sure what that thing is. I do not know the "nature of the goal." Yet. What I do know is that the deeper I go into the research and writing — the more answers I unearth — the more new questions surface. There won't be an end, a center. And even if there were, I'd probably find it appallingly vacant. If it were definitive answers I was looking for, I don't think I'd ever get the thing done, or try.After my mom died, I found a ten-page autobiography she wrote as an assignment from her therapist about the forty years of life she had lived up to that point. In it, she writes, mostly with a tone of a historical distance, about many of the factual events of her life. Sometimes she goes into the emotions surrounding them. A move across the country. A marriage, two. A job. What I know now is that she got some of the facts wrong in that brief autobiography — whether on purpose or by accident, I don't know. She also left out some facts which, knowing my mom, had to have been traumatic and unforgettable for her. One of the things she left out was the loss of a 9-day-old child named Katherine. I knew about the child, that she had been one half of a pair of twins, that the other was stillborn. But I hadn't realized how far into life the second child had gotten. There had been a service for her, and her obituary can be found in the archive of a small-town newspaper, but it’s completely missing from my mom's “autobiography." This somehow seems more poignant to me than if she'd put it in.Everybody’s life has a plot, but it’s just not necessarily the plot we think it is or the plot we want it to be. A quest narrative — one where you dig, where you peel back, where you journey into the unfamiliar and unknown — can bring that out. I was very close to my mom and, until recently, I thought I knew the plot of her life. For years, like her, I thought I even knew the plot of my own. Turns out I didn't really know the full extent of either.Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.(Oh, and in case you're wondering, we still want your own quest narratives, if you have them!)David OlimpioPublisher & Editor-in-Chief

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