Of Wigs and Creative Writing
What does the study of Law mean for my writing? Is it an aid or an encumberance, or a ‘middlesome interlopper?’ Does it make me see things clearly, or form a cloud over my eyes?
My only response to this arises from a simple purport of conflict and resolution. Law is concerned, in my view, with the ‘creation’ of conflict and the attendant resolution. Indeed, as Niran Osotuyi agrees, the purpose of making laws is to break them. In this relating wondering, it is only logical that if Laws were made to ‘engineer’ the society, it evinces and predicts a ‘de-engineering,’ a breakdown of such laws. It makes no sense, therefore, to contemplate the existence of laws without contemplating the existence of the breakdown of such laws.
And then, if it is agreed that Law is as much a tool for the creation of resolution as it necessitates a consideration of conflict, I must then find how my writing can be found within the threshold of conflict and resolution.
Writing, I daresay, is the art of making meaning out of life’s conflicts and life’s
resolutions. The challenge, however, is that unlike Law, the system of resolution I try to create in stories has no appex, no Supreme Court in which to end all appeals.
The question I must address is whether life presents a complete resolution. Is there an end to all conflicts? Agreed, the fact that there are hundreds of unlitigated cases illustrates the fact that Law does not prescribe a life of no conflict. But the challenge becomes that in individual lives (of individual litigants who take cases to court) the law contemplates an end to conflict. But in a story, not even the death of a character ends conflict. All stories are rewritten, reinvented, re-transcribed.
So, which do I choose: the Law or the creative life? It has always been a simple choice to make, until now. Now, at the threshold of becoming a Lawyer, I find that I am looking too much for the end of conflicts. That, like Law, I am increasingly disturbed by a world with conflicts. I find that I engineer a story too much, and I get tired w hen a character suddenly acts without civility, try as I did to create order.
In the end, I must begin where I once began. I must define my writing by other standards; not law, not conflicts, not resolutions. But a quality of living.
I’d find what this is; sooner, later, or never.
Nice piece. My sense is that your desire for an end to conflict will be far more frustrated in creative writing than in law. I am reading a book titled Story of an African farm for a Victorian literature class. The writer says that the difference between life and the stage is that the story of life never ends. There is never a moment when all the actors comes back on stage and bows signaling a conclusion. Life is always a bit more messier than that. Sometimes I think that the strength of the creative writer lies in the capacity to write the never ending, inexorable conflict that life is.