My Exile Is Changing My Characters

I hope they bleed more, like I do

A baby changes everything. And five months in the NICU in a depressing city, no end in sight—well, that changes everything they taught you to expect about everything changing. Our baby was born into exile, and he remains here. So do we as NICU parents.

What should this writer do in exile? How should he live? What will become of his characters?

I’m no stranger to exile. I’ve been here before. And I think my characters are getting better for it.

Let me share a bit of my experience, then apply it to the process of crafting fiction.

My first exile

Ten years ago, God placed me in a marketing career that I didn’t seek and, frankly, didn’t want. He had me writing articles about cat diarrhea and hustling to generate results with miniscule billable hours. I swore the whole thing was a diversion on my path to becoming a big, important writer, and I muddled through, hating the clients and their topics, until an examination of Jeremiah 29 put me in my place.

Everyone knows Jeremiah 29:11 and the wonderful plans that God has for them. Fewer people know the context of this famous verse. God’s designs for Israel at the time included seventy years of exile in Babylon. While God promised them a future and a hope, he didn’t place these things in immediate view. He even told the Israelites to seek the welfare of the city where he would send them into exile. Wonder of wonders, he said that in that city’s welfare, they would have welfare.

This passage wrecked me. I knew at once that I wasn’t seeking the welfare of my metaphorical city. I hated the clients and didn’t actually care if their revenue grew. I didn’t care about my employer’s business results either. But God changed me. He gave me a new heart that cared and a mind that started trying. The cat diarrhea client stuck around, but within months, a great man whom I deeply admire took note of my work and headhunted me. He set me on a career path that I never would’ve envisioned, and my income has grown in multiples since then. By my reckoning, I’ve literally generated millions in revenue for those who’ve employed me.

I firmly believe all this happened because I started to care about the welfare of my city. And a funny thing happens when you start to care. Exile stops feeling like a foreign land. You even find you can build houses here, as God instructed the Israelites to do in Jeremiah 29.

That was my first exile. I got used to it—even forgot about it. Then our dear son came into the world.

My second exile

The birth of our son at 24 weeks profoundly dislocated our life. We’re “only” an hour away from home, and we can go back whenever we want, but “home” has become a noun with a fragmented referent. Our son’s room is half-assembled, and he isn’t there. Our house is beautifully quiet and dark compared to the sleepless lights and cacophony of the city, but it also contains a gaping hole. He isn’t there.

Our room at the Ronald McDonald House has become familiar. We’ve built a shelf in it, our own little version of building houses. But it’s not where we want to be.

The closet thing to home that our son experiences is a room that he never leaves. It’s actually pretty nice as far as hospital rooms go, but we have no privacy there. We’ve lived through multiple times when he almost died in this room, so it will always be a place of trauma as long as he stays there. The space is his home, perhaps, but a poor substitute for the real thing.

It’s easy to focus on these concrete pains, but our exile is so much more than that. We had to throw out, or at least set aside, all our pictures of what baby life would look like.

No sleep during newborn days?

Forget about it. We can leave the NICU and return whenever we want. We can spend as much or as little time there as we desire. We could throw self-care out the window and sleep in our son’s room. We could lean hard on self-care and visit only when it’s convenient. No one will tell us if we’re doing this right. How’s that for moral ambiguity?

The logistics of getting there and staying there are complicated. It feels like we’re suffering plenty, but it’s hard to know if we’re suffering for him, as we should. A lot of times, it feels like we’re suffering for us, which is less noble. We make trips to the hospital more complicated because we try to bring decent food—for us. We make trips home more complicated because we like to have certain stuff with us—for us. Are we making this harder, or is a bit of self-care making us stronger and more available for him?

Pffft. Who knows. We just continue muddling through in a foreign land, trying to stay faithful to God’s calling, as one amazing nurse suggested. And we try to remember this: Seek the welfare of the city where I am sending you into exile. For in its welfare, you will have welfare.

Seeking the welfare of the city

My current career was my first major experience of exile and its redemption-without-resolution. I’m still not a big, important writer (LOL), and so in a sense, my first exile never ended, and one might say God has added exile on top of exile with our son’s struggles and our forced relocation. But it doesn’t feel like God is piling it on. It just feels like he’s moving. And I want to move where he moves.

Ultimately, I want to keep seeking the welfare of the city. That means family, friends, and church, plus anyone I encounter in this literal city. But it also includes those in my digital city—my colleagues, my online pen pals, writer friends whom I’ve never met, and so on. To say this is a harrowing experience is quite apt. A harrow is a plow. God is surely planting something in my city. And I am the broken ground.

The Harrow of Shaddai, by William Blake, whom I admire for his artwork but not his theology.

Rather than nursing my wounds, I’m thinking about what they’ll mean for my future characters. Because my first exile changed my approach to characters forever.

Writing harrowed characters

I’ve called myself an author since I was a kid, but as an adult, my character writing lacked deep reality until I experienced exile. I wrote boring characters who were really just names on the page. I got excited about scenarios, not people. Since I hadn’t yet been harrowed by God’s plow, I couldn’t write characters who’d been harrowed. And harrowing is the truest mark of a character who’s worth following. Without an agonizing sense of dislocation, who even is a character?

Thinking of it this way, I can’t help but notice the lack of harrowing in many characters whom I read or watch.

In some cases, the writer has conceptualized the facts of the character’s dislocation, but she tells us about them in a factual way rather than using close point of view techniques. Implementing these would require her to undergo several years of study to learn how to write from within the emotions of exile rather than from without. Who has time for that? Not the uppity writer who thinks she’s going places.

More often, when a story makes me shrug, I suspect it’s because the writer hasn’t undergone harrowing. She hasn’t written from lived exile, but rather from a place of comfort and striving for attention. Her protagonist isn’t longing to return home, whether literally or metaphorically. Her protagonist doesn’t yearn to be whole, to recover the nameless lost something which, perhaps, she never actually had but was born desiring. The writer can’t envision a better city, and so her protagonist is asleep and comfortable spiritually and emotionally, reflecting the state of the writer who almost started to imagine her.

It all goes back to the author. Her writing will only be as big as her lived suffering—yet she can’t place herself in exile. Self-flagellation is fruitless. Only God can harrow her with his inexorable plow. And if he hasn’t yet broken up her fallow comfort, there’s not much she can do. Indeed, comfort is her deadliest enemy. It renders her nothing but an empty name on the page of her life, a consumer, a passive instrument of cultural forces who isn’t deeply real. In such a state, she can’t possibly write a deeply real protagonist.

Processing exile and harrowing

For the writer, even exile isn’t enough if you don’t have a submissive spirit—if you don’t learn from your dislocation. Only once a writer has processed exile to a place of contentment can she write a great exiled character. Before I had processed my first exile, my characters remained vapid and passive, lost and angry, never believing in something on which they could stake their entire plot. They didn’t know who they were, and they didn’t dream of a New Jerusalem. They were caught in a net of terrible plot circumstances, and the novel ended up an intellectual polemic against culture rather than someone’s story. Without that vision of the better city to be both created and attained, my characters had no hope and, ultimately, no agency.

So what does it take to process your own exile, to turn it into blood on the page?

Having gone through this myself, I believe a writer must undergo all the stages of grief before her harrowing can produce narrative crops.

I think we’ve come through all the stages of this grief, though new griefs continue to arise in dizzying succession. It was shocking, before our son was born, to be told that the NICU doctors would talk to us about our baby’s chances of surviving at 23 weeks. It was shocking to see him for the first time, a tiny being the size of an action figure with just as much muscle definition and no fat on his body. It was shocking to move all our hospital detritus and scattered belongings into Ronald McDonald House and realize, this is it. This is another locus of that fragmented word, “home,” for the next season of life—a season which still hasn’t ended.

From shock, we probably moved through denial, anger, bargaining, and so on. None of them changed anything. Our son still can’t come home, and our exile from the “normal” family life we desire is real.

I think we’ve reached acceptance—even contentment. We live in a foreign land, having traded silence and backyard birds for constant sirens and disturbed persons yelling from the bus stop out front. This isn’t a life we would have chosen before it came. If God had said, “You can have the baby the normal way, or you can have this crazy NICU experience,” we never would’ve chosen the NICU. But now, living through it and learning contentment, we are becoming more deeply real.

This, I think, is the quality of maturity-in-progress that I want to see in characters. And I don’t think you can write these characters if you aren’t living it yourself.

Embracing exile and harrowing

You can’t invent your own exile. You’ve either been kicked out of your beloved land, or you haven’t. But I imagine most of us do experience exile in some way. Perhaps some writers just need to get real about who they are—to face the exile that they’ve downplayed, brushed aside, or boxed up in expert terms that afford them a comfortable, intellectualized distance from their intrinsic soul-wound.

To admit one’s exile is to rub right up against that incurable wound. It’s humbling to acknowledge that you aren’t where you want to be, that there might be blood under the pristine surface of your Instagram. The onslaught of social media content whispers, “There’s no exile here. Everyone’s moisturized, thriving, taking trips to Europe, drinking great coffee. You too can have this life.” But we can’t fall prey to this. Our exile is real. The hemorrhage is ongoing. This isn’t our true home. Abraham went out to a place where he was to receive an inheritance, groping toward the incomparable city that he had never even seen (Hebrews 11). One could even say he sought the welfare of the future city that would issue from his body.

We ought to do the same. Let’s go out from this culture, bleed, and seek the welfare of our literary descendants—i.e. those who will be changed by our stories. Let’s write characters who are more real than our sleepy readers. That’s my plan. I hope you’ll join me in the endeavor.