151 / Now Is The Time Of Choices

I received many kind and thoughtful messages after the last letter — thank you. Many of you are familiar with the fog, and your wise words and reading recommendations have helped me immeasurably.

Please continue to send your questions via this link.

Maybe it’s a stupid question but what’s on your mind right now?

Robert, Berlin

💭

Dear Robert,

A truth about writing stories — because it is true of life as well — is that if you want to know someone’s True Character, not just on the surface, but deep down; if you want to really understand them, you must force them to make a choice.

And it can’t be some quotidian decision (Cheese and Onion or Ready Salted?), it must be a dilemma. It could be a choice between two irreconcilable goods or the lesser of two evils; either way there must be something to lose.

They’ll say whatever they need to in order to fool people and themselves – but high-pressure dilemmas offer your hero no escape.

The decision your protagonist makes under pressure reveals who they are in their heart — in a way they themselves don’t even realise.

Seen in this character-centric way, stories are essentially a series of escalating choices for your heroes, building towards the crucible of self-knowledge.

The time of choices

Robert, I’m thinking about this principal often, as I write stories, but also as I look out on the new, unsettling world we are in.

It seems to me that we are living in a time of choices: a time when even the small decisions we make suddenly carry moral weight.

If you want to see the above dramatic principle in real life, look no further than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s choice to bend the knee to the new regime, before it even entered the White House. His ‘masculine energy’ flex fools no-one because his True Character, in all its sickly greed and cowardice, is right there.

Zuckerberg has made his choice and now we get to make ours.

I deleted my Instagram account this month; WhatsApp is next (I closed my Facebook years ago). These are very small sacrifices, but today I believe they carry more weight than they used to. I certainly won’t judge anyone else for keeping their Meta accounts or driving a Tesla, but I do think those choices are meaningful, illuminating of True Character.

This time demands that we all sit down, alone or with our families and have a quiet conversation about our values. What do we care about? What are we willing to sacrifice to defend it? Where are our red lines?

At some point in this chapter of history, many of us will face this crucible. There will be heroes, there will be cowards and traitors, we won’t know what we are until we meet the choice.

As I write this, Robert, I am facing a most awful dilemma in my personal life, a kind that has me lying awake at night whispering “Please don’t make me choose”. I am being called to some unknown place but to get there I must give up everything. It brings me utterly to my knees.

Until another Sunday soon,