I\u2019m writing a novel set in the afterlife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I got passionately, avidly interested in the afterlife after my boyfriend died in 1991. Grief can make you nuts and my interest in the afterlife at that time was probably a little nuts. But it was also grounded in my solid sense that a whole person cannot just become nothing like a machine that\u2019s been turned off, that a person must be more than a machine-like body. I read everything I could find about the afterlife and I asked everyone I spent time with whether they believed in life after death. Some people said they had never thought about that and made it clear they weren\u2019t going to think about it now. At least one person said he saw no point in thinking about it, since there was no way you could know whether there was or wasn\u2019t an afterlife. My favorite answer came from my dead fianc\u00e9\u2019s mechanic, a fat funny down-to-earth guy with a slight southeastern-Iowa accent: When I asked him whether he believed in life after death, he said, \u201cUp to a point.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew exactly what he meant. Until my boyfriend died, I believed in it up to a point too\u2014that is to say, sort of, but not really. I hadn\u2019t thought about it enough to get to really. But after the suicide of my boyfriend, someone I couldn\u2019t let go of and couldn\u2019t live without, believing in the afterlife up to a point didn\u2019t work for me anymore. I wanted to know about it in the real way you know about real things: Did it exist? Did this boyfriend I couldn\u2019t live without go somewhere and if so where and what was it like there, what was he doing there? So I set about trying to find answers those questions. I went where I always went back then to look for answers to all my questions and solutions to all my problems: the library. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It isn\u2019t true that the afterlife is something you can\u2019t know anything about. There are all kinds of accounts of the afterlife lining the shelves of the library. I know because I\u2019ve read them all. You might not think they\u2019re legitimate, the sources may seem questionable: Is it really possible that some medium channeled this book-length message from some dead person? Is this psychic who reportedly has a 95-percent accuracy rate the real thing? Is this research by Raymond Moody about near death experiences something to be taken seriously? I, of course, wanted to take it seriously, and it seemed to me that anyone who read those books with an open mind would, maybe not the channeled descriptions but surely the Raymond Moody research, the accounts of psychics whose messages put their fingers so squarely on facts about the still-living people consulting them\u2014things that could only be known by the dead person sending messages through the psychic\u2014it was hard not to believe there was something to it. I still feel that way, although I\u2019m a little embarrassed to admit it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe that\u2019s why nobody wants to go there\u2014the embarrassment. There\u2019s so much cultural and religious baggage attached to the afterlife, so many ideas that have been floating around for generations and currently in the movies and popular culture\u2014heaven and hell, angels, pearly gates\u2014it\u2019s tempting to dismiss the whole thing, throw the baby out with the bathwater. And if you say you\u2019re interested in the afterlife it automatically seems to other people like you believe in, are even endorsing and promoting, all those cultural-baggage things. I myself think that the afterlife is just another piece of regular life, that its existence could be explained through contemporary physics if the scientists weren\u2019t too embarrassed to spend their time researching it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I still sometimes read stuff about the afterlife, anything that seems to say something new or that particularly catches my interest, but my obsession with it has mostly gone into remission. Nevertheless, my earlier foray into inquiry left me with an unwavering belief that it definitely exists (and, I have to admit, exasperation when people take for granted that it doesn\u2019t exist, that it might be okay to kind of believe in it but it\u2019s silly to really believe it). And when I was looking for a writing project and decided to write a novel after years of writing memoir, I decided to set my novel in the afterlife. It started with a single sentence I had been carrying around in my mind for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Light in This Place<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years ago my friend Mary Beth, who lives in Milwaukee, said to me on the phone, \u201cI\u2019m not getting any writing done.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m not either,\u201d I said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was the year I broke my shoulder and I had been sitting in a chair watching episodes of Downton Abbey and trying to cope with the discomfort of the injury and having my shoulder trapped in a brace, for four months. Mary Beth is one of my fast-writing partners\u2014that is to say, she and I generate new material by writing as fast as we can for a short period of time, together, in a certain way. I felt vaguely responsible for Mary Beth not getting any writing done because we hadn\u2019t been fast writing since February and now it was May. I said, \u201cLet me think about it,\u201d and the next day I came up with the idea to do twelve minutes of fast writing every day on the weekdays. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wasn\u2019t immersed in any project and I didn\u2019t know what to write about so I decided to start with a sentence I had been carrying around in my head for about six years. The sentence was: The light in this place reminds me of the light at the end of those late spring days in Iowa. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve always thought there was something mysterious about the light at the end of the day, something numinous and transcendent, and I was thinking about that one day when I was out walking at the end of the day and I started thinking idly that the afterlife might be a place where there\u2019s numinous light like that. Or that maybe the reason we love that light so much is that it reminds us obscurely of that other world we\u2019ve come from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So I wrote down that sentence during the first twelve-minute fast writing session with Mary Beth, hearing it being spoken by someone in the afterlife. I added to the sentence later, trying to describe the light, and then I some added some more sentences trying to describe the light even more, trying to get at the sense I got from the light, a sense of something inexplicable, some indefinable magic lingering around the edges. After that Mary Beth and I kept writing for twelve minutes at a time on most weekdays. And that was how I came to be writing a novel set in the afterlife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDon\u2019t hurry. You are going to live forever\u2014somewhere. In fact you are in eternity now; so why rush?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a quote from Emmett Fox, a spiritual teacher whose lectures attracted huge audiences in Carnegie Hall in the 1930s and \u201940s and whose ideas were influential to the founders of AA. Every morning I read the daily reading in a book called Around the Year with Emmett Fox. (I love anything written by Emmet Fox, whose spiritual ideas are so fresh and radical, intelligent and sensible, they make you wonder how he knows this stuff, the same way Eckhart Tolle makes you wonder how he knows what he says\u2014is he a walk-in or what?). I saw this quote from Emmett Fox on December 8 and I\u2019ve been thinking about it ever since\u2014the idea that we\u2019re all going to live forever, somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s really not that much to be said about it, but somehow I want to say something about it, here at the beginning of this new year, 2023. 2023: A date that would have seemed unimaginable\u2014beyond the distant future, beyond futuristic, beyond even the scope of science fiction\u2014in previous eras, back in the early 1960s, say, when 1984 seemed like the distant impossible future. But here we are. It\u2019s 2023. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But maybe it doesn\u2019t matter what year it is. Maybe it doesn\u2019t matter how old we are, we Baby Boomers and everyone else, inching toward death, reading New York Times articles and watching end-of-the-year news-round-ups about all the people our age or just a little bit older who died last year. Maybe it\u2019s okay that people we love have died, some of them after living lives that ended too soon and\/or were full of violence, bad luck, or bad choices, lives that somebody might call wasted. Maybe it doesn\u2019t even matter that we ourselves are going to die and it might be sooner rather than later. Maybe none of that really matters because we\u2019re all going to live forever; we are<\/em> all in the midst of long, long, long eternal lives with room enough for everything: failure and success, health and sickness, fame and fortune, poverty and obscurity. I know this is not a popular view, not something you go around spouting at parties or saying to people you just met, but I believe it. I really do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Believing it is the natural outcome of believing there\u2019s an afterlife. Of course. If there\u2019s an afterlife there\u2019s no death, and if there\u2019s no death we must have lives that extend beyond the measly lives we have now. And I do believe there\u2019s an afterlife (of course, see the rest of this blog)\u2014it just doesn\u2019t make sense to me that we\u2019re essentially complicated machines that turn off and become nothing when the brain stops working. Even contemporary science knows we\u2019re more than that, because life itself is more than that, more than just the physical. It actually isn\u2019t even physical at all. (See below.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n So it makes sense to think we are all going to live forever, somewhere, but somehow it wasn\u2019t until I read the words coming from Emmet Fox that I really took that in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What seems noteworthy to me about it is not the idea itself, but its ramifications. Or maybe just the feeling that believing the idea\u2014not just giving it lip service but genuinely taking it in, getting it through and through\u2014can generate. The feeling it generates in me. The relief and hope and relaxation, the letting go of all sorts of despair-inducing ideas that are floating around in the collective consciousness: that life is meaningless, that our brief existences end in a deep maw of nothingness, that fear of death is inevitable. That fear itself is inevitable. It\u2019s hard to let go of those thoughts, those feelings, for more than a few moments\u2014they are so baked into the cultural cake we live in, they so make up the water we swim in like fish being swept downstream\u2014that it\u2019s virtually impossible to really go there. But when I do really go there, even for a few moments, I feel some decades-old, centuries-old fear and tension, the fear and tension of many lifetimes, flowing out of me, and in its place is warmth and light, relaxation and pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s what I want to say at the beginning of this new year, as we head into the deep winter and the unimaginable future. Maybe everything really is okay, and we just have to figure out some way to get ourselves to believe it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At some point while I was writing the novel, it came to me that I should try to find a book that offered a scientific explanation for the possibility of the afterlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I feel like there either is or isn\u2019t an afterlife and if there is one, it has to be something real\u2014a part of the whole picture\u2014not just a religious concept or mostly a fantasy. I kept wishing some scientist would come up with an explanation, and then one day it came to me that maybe some scientist or group of scientists had come up with an explanation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I looked for books on Amazon and found something called Afterlife: Near Death Experiences, Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, and the Increasing Evidence for Life After Death<\/em>. I ordered it and it came and I hated it. It had chapters about the Shroud of Turin and about what the ancient Egyptians and Romans believed and about what it says in the Bible about Lazarus, all delivered in a somewhat breathless, isn\u2019t-this-the-most- convincing-thing-you\u2019ve-ever-heard tone. It seemed like exactly the kind of book that makes skeptics think that anyone who believes in the afterlife is a na\u00efve idiot and that anything to do with the afterlife is nonsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I considered giving that book away or throwing it away but in the end I just stuck it on my bookcase and decided to figure out what to do with it later. And then something made me look just a little longer for another book, and I found something that offers exactly what I\u2019ve been wanting. It\u2019s The Physics of God: Unifying Quantum Physics, Consciousness, M-Theory, Heaven, Neuroscience, and Transcendence<\/em>, by Joseph Selbie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The title is remarkably like the title of the other book, but the content\u2014the writing, the entire feel of the book\u2014is entirely different. This book comes from a physicist who is also a forty-year meditator. \u201cHe is known for creating bridges of understanding between the modern evidence-based discoveries of science and the experience-based discoveries of the mystics,\u201d it says on the back of the book. And, as it also says on the back, \u201cHe does an excellent job of dispelling the myth that religion and science are incompatible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This book didn\u2019t disappoint me. It\u2019s exactly what I wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reason we don\u2019t believe the afterlife is possible\u2014the reason we think it\u2019s ridiculous to think there\u2019s some other world where the dead people are\u2014is that we don\u2019t understand the nature of this world. This is something I\u2019ve suspected and have been saying for a long time, mostly when I thought people were looking at me like I was a na\u00efve idiot when I said I believed in the afterlife. This book confirms the idea that most of us don\u2019t have a clue about the true nature of this world, confirms it in spades, by describing and explaining the most recent updated physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not even going to try to write here what that book says\u2014practically every paragraph has some interesting idea in it that it would take me weeks to intelligently paraphrase. But there are a few things I do want to try to get down, with the caveat that I might not be getting it right. One is that there is no actual, nailed-down material, physical anything\u2014even subatomic particles are actually made of energy and the space between them is full of energy\u2014i.e., what most of us think of as nothing\u2014and our whole world, as the author says, is an illusion, a three-dimensional light show like a movie projected on a screen\u2014the screen of our minds. And underlying the three-dimensional light show illusion of this world is a non-local two-dimensional pre-space of information and energy\u2014Selbie calls it an energy-verse\u2014which interpenetrates the three-dimensional world, like water in a sponge. This is not some farfetched fantasy, it\u2019s a scientific concept based on mathematics, quantum physics, and string theory. It suggests that the physical world\u2014what Selbie calls the \u201cthree-dimensional holographic projection of the universe\u201d\u2014is organized and informed by the two-dimensional energy-verse, which is eternal, coherent, intricate, and intelligent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What this means to me is this: A human being is not a body, a complicated biochemical machine that turns off when the brain dies. A person can\u2019t <\/em>be only a body because there\u2019s nothing<\/em> that\u2019s only a body. \u201cMatter is not the fixed immutable substance that it appears to the senses,\u201d Joseph Selbie tells us. \u201cIt\u2019s the \u201cintelligent organization of energy.\u201d And \u201cdeath\u2026is only a shift from sensory awareness of our physical body to a more complete and more subtle awareness of our ever-present energy body.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe body dies but the spiritual quantum field continues. In this way I am immortal,\u201d Dr. Hans-Peter Durr, former head of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, has said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I highly recommend The Physics of God<\/em>. In the meantime, I keep working on my novel, trying to imagine my way into that other world, to create a story involving people who have challenges and emotions and lives and experiences there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing Fiction, Writing Memoir<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almost every time I tell someone I\u2019m writing a novel set in the afterlife, they laugh. As if the afterlife is a joke, or as if stories about the afterlife are automatically funny. I guess it makes sense, given our cultural history with the idea of the afterlife. But I wanted to write a regular literary novel and just set it in the afterlife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For me the challenge wasn\u2019t writing a novel set there, it was writing a novel at all. It\u2019s been a long time since I\u2019ve written fiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I got an MFA in fiction-writing from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop in the 1980s and I wrote some short stories back then, a few of which got published in decent literary magazines. But I didn\u2019t know how, or learn anything about how from the Workshop, really, to write fiction. I was one of those writers who couldn\u2019t make up a story. I based all my stories on my own experience, and those experiences didn\u2019t transform into finished pieces that had elegance and meaning and became that mysterious thing, fiction. Fiction that worked, as we said in the Workshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When something happened to me that was so shattering it eclipsed every single part of my reality\u2014when my boyfriend killed himself in 1991\u2014I knew I had to write about it, and I tried writing it as fiction. I wrote two short stories, and I sent one of them to an old friend who was teaching fiction in an MFA program in another part of the country. I sent it to her as a way to tell her what had happened to me, because I didn\u2019t have the energy to tell her about it in any other way, and instead of reading it that way she critiqued it like a writing teacher. That experience was so awful I gave up on writing about the suicide as fiction. Then my friend Jo Ann Beard started writing creative nonfiction and I started writing it too, with her, as little exercises. And then I had one of the biggest ah ha moments of my life: I decided to write the story of my fiance\u2019s suicide as a memoir. That was back when people were kind of rediscovering the memoir, at the beginning of what would come to be called the golden age of the literary memoir, in the 1990s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I found that I was really good at writing memoir. I couldn\u2019t make up a story but I could turn events that had happened to me into a story; I could make them compelling and engaging. And my memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, was published by a major publisher and I got a bunch of money for it. I spent longer than I care to say writing a memoir about my childhood that didn\u2019t sell and I\u2019ve been writing personal essays for years, turning everyday events into little memoirs; my collection of those, The Deep Limitless Air, will be published in May of this year. I thought I was probably never going to write fiction again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll never stop writing personal essays, but there are only so many book-length memoirs you can write, and when I wrote that first sentence, The light in this place reminds me of those long spring days in Iowa,<\/em> and then turned it into a paragraph, I decided to just keep going and see if I could write a novel. And I found that I had kind of learned how to write a novel, in the time between the last time I wrote fiction and now. I had learned it in some magical way that partly had to do with reading many, many novels\u2014I have a weakness for well-written mystery novels, I\u2019m somewhat embarrassed to admit\u2014and was partly a result of teaching other people how to write novels, as a writing coach. That is to say, I had learned how to tell a story, and I had learned that writing a novel has to be first and foremost about telling a story, no matter how literary the novel is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was hard to come up with a story in my novel about the afterlife. But I think I\u2019ve done it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Plot in the Afterlife<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve learned that the way to create a plot is to pose a question in some artful way toward the beginning of the story and answer that question over the course of the story. I\u2019m talking about a what-happened question, a narrative question, not a psychological question like how or when or why did a certain character change or what is a certain setting like. The narrative question might be the least profound and important part of the story but it\u2019s what holds it all together, like the string the crystals cluster around in rock candy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The reader will keep reading to know the answer to the question. In mysteries the narrative question is usually who killed the dead guy and how is the investigator going to figure that out, and in thrillers the narrative question is often are they going to catch the psychopath before he kills the main character. With other kinds of novels the narrative question is probably subtler but it\u2019s still there, or should be there, I guess\u2014this is what I tell my coaching clients. It\u2019s something that gives the story forward moving, keeps the reader reading, keeps the story from being static\u2014variations of the same thing happening over and over\u2014or all over the place. And it helps you, the writer, know where you\u2019re going, where to go next, as you write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I knew I had to find some narrative question to make my afterlife novel work, but I was confused about what that could be. And I\u2019m not very good at creating narrative questions in fictions, although I can do it pretty easily when I\u2019m writing about my own life in a memoir. I\u2019m about to publish a collection of short pieces and when I looked at that I saw that every single one of those personal essays poses and answers a little or not so little question. Like how was I going to (how did I) get those bees in the hive when my scary mother was in the house, or how did I manage to fly to New York and give a speech when I had a phobia of flying and a phobia of public speaking, or what did I do when I got stuck overnight in the Denver Airport. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Asking and answering questions is something I seem to do naturally, without thinking about it, when I\u2019m writing about things that happened to me, maybe because life itself unfolds in a series of questions and answers if you stop long enough to notice it through writing. But when it comes to fiction, narrative questions don\u2019t seem to come to me naturally. And it was even harder to come up with a narrative question, a problem that could be solved over the course of the narrative, in my afterlife novel, because what kind of problems could they have in the afterlife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The afterlife itself poses its own question: What is it like there? (Assuming there is a there there, which I do, of course, in this novel, and actually do in regular life too, see my earlier posts.) What are the conditions? What do people do there, assuming they do things? (You can\u2019t write a novel where people aren\u2019t doing things, right?) Partly I wanted to write this novel to answer my own questions, which had been floating around in my mind since my deeply loved boyfriend killed himself, thirty years ago now (I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s been thirty years): Where is he now? What is it like there? And, the most burning question to me, what is he doing? <\/p>\n\n\n\n So partly this novel has been about trying to answer those questions. I wanted to imagine life as it takes place in the afterlife, assuming there is an afterlife. But I still had to come up with a narrative question, and that was harder (and the other part, imagining life in the afterlife, wasn\u2019t easy, more about that later). In the end I came up with a plot involving a young dead woman who was shrouded in a kind of mystery. All the other characters in the story are involved in solving that mystery. Even I was involved in solving that mystery. I didn\u2019t know the answer to my own narrative question when I started or for most of the way into the writing of the book.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m writing a novel set in the afterlife. I got passionately, avidly interested in the afterlife after my boyfriend died in 1991. Grief can make you nuts and my interest in the afterlife at that time was probably a little nuts. But it was also grounded in my solid sense that a whole person cannot … Continue reading Writing the Afterlife<\/span> What If We Have Eternal Lives?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
The Science of the Afterlife<\/h1>\n\n\n\n