Naivety and the locked room

Naivety. An odd word. Like a betrayal. Comes with two edges. One of innocence, unspoiled. Maybe rustic - rural rustic - of carpeted meadows of summer flowers echoed by the silent hop of grey kangaroos intent on their path. Or one of knowing, being aware.

I write this at a desk in a room with a door, or doors, I know not. There is a door at least—I’ve started saying doors because I no longer trust that it’s one obstruction and not many. I should say that now, before I forget to, before the telling runs away from me the way it always does. The door has a lock. I did not always notice it. That is the first naivety. Now, I notice the way it doesn’t click or rattle when the wind changes. I notice the silence and the finality.

Perhaps naivety is the naïve realism where one believes others might share their wonderment at the world, at a planet of infinite possibilities and beauty. It happens: the elation one gets on finishing their novel, the uplift of succeeding, a puzzle of pieces brought together, a transcendence. And what then? A deep breath, a settling of the mind, and restfulness. Something like a return. You look around at a world that continued while you were absorbed. And then, the desire to share.

I say you because I want you with me in this. I am not sure yet whether you are a reader, a blogger looking to increase their follower numbers, or something else — someone standing just outside the door, listening for what I’ll admit to. I’ll find out which one you are by the end. So will you.

Perspiration and editing. And more editing. The shaping, the moulding. Characters who are not as they seem. Beats that fizzle. Dead end plots. And then it concludes. A story with a life of its own, aided by you. Not happiness. No - accomplishment, a more apt description of the emotion. Okay, let’s stay with accomplishment. And then the want, or desire, to write a novel. What is this want? Did the polar explorers want to endure the hardships? Maybe not the word want, then. Driven. Ah, word choice, writing style — never easy and never innocent. We know how that turns out.

So why do it, write a novel? It’s hard work. Everyone knows that. Why move to the imagination, an unfiltered representation of a given reality? This is a genuine question, asked by multiple sections of the population. Asked - am I starting to understand the way a question is asked when the asker already has an answer prepared? Not a puzzle of pieces. A room prepared. And a lock.

Is it the fostering of genuine curiosity, an unburdening of baseline human perspectives? A breakdown of meaning to understand? Or a conscious choice in which to construct a meaningful life? Storytelling helps with the questions. Storytelling, for me at least, is a starting point: childhood bedtime stories, campfires, radio, novels. An introduction to that outside our domain. Otherwise, we remain unschooled. Naivety is inescapable and forces us to rely on the testimonies and stories of others; at least, that is what I believe. It is, I think now, the belief that got me here.

Imagination. Being in someone else’s shoes. Somewhere else, never been there before. It’s more intense in the act of writing. Allowing the characters to develop, seeing them, feeling the identification, hearing the characters’ voices. Or the returning - to that part of your life, unresolved or remembered with affection. Or maybe just a snippet, a snapshot taken from time itself. A woman on a train. No, not the woman - a profile, a look, a gesture. That’s enough. Why her gesture? What was the motivation behind it? Who is she, this presence who steps out of the train with you? A morphing into a story, profound or otherwise. Always humour if I can manage it. The world needs humour. Try for humour, but it’s hard. Harder now. I am told she is not mine to imagine. My lens, the wrong lens. My identity, the wrong passport to cross into her mind. An imaginative relationship formed - a knowing—now forbidden.

A spark. A woman was once on a train. Who is she? What style to write this narrative in? What POV—that’s difficult. It will change as the novel progresses; it always does, with much editing. Much. Despite the forethought. Pacing, what is appropriate for this genre. Will my character stay on script, or do they have another agenda to be teased out? I ask that of my characters. I did not expect it of my readers, an agenda, to be teased out of me, examined, corrected.

Themes, so many swirl in such a complicated world - so where to begin, or rather what to leave out. In this political world, maybe we should ask what is allowed. No. Surely not. Surely, we should allow all themes. Exploring, learning, and sharing - is that not life’s expectations, the very core of what it means to live? Far from being a deceptive distraction from truth, fiction is a powerful laboratory for existential and ethical inquiry. Rather than upholding prevailing narratives, it champions the beautiful complexity of human life and interrogates the rigid structures we inhabit.

And I did champion it, despite the prevailing narrative, and I wrote the story - the story of a glance, their story, an unfolding, of something I could no longer control.

Because the first whisper came not long after, ‘I know what you did’. It came as if it was spoken in another room—not sure if said or settled cold into the quiet. I need quiet to write. The clatter of my keyboard ceased mid-word; I remember that, mid-word. I told myself it was nothing. That was the second naivety.

Should we be concerned about being pulled away from the ultimate truth, which is what? Reason? No - not reason for what is truth other than death? Death is truth; the rest is ambiguity. Ah, it’s the ambiguity to which they take exception. They demand boxes, labels, clean categories of who may speak and who must stay silent. Multiple interpretations are unhelpful, not clean. Poets and storytellers are to be expelled for believing. For the sentiment. But what of empathy - those charged scenarios that rend our emotions and moral imagination? Humans are not merely passive observers without sensuous engagement. To engage, to connect with a fellow human being with all their complexities - do literary style, do delivery not matter? A tuning into the particularities of that person.

This is betrayal, you say, but a betrayal to what? I have committed no crime or misdeed, just been true to the conventions of storytelling as we have done for millennia. And this room - has it always been here? Hidden, but never empty. It’s not rare, this desire - desire that was the word we chose, I think, yes - this desire to create.

‘You were never supposed to find out.’ That was the second whisper, and by then I no longer pretended I hadn’t heard it. A stillness came into my hands before I understood why. It came with a small, specific terror - the terror of a private thing made visible without your consent. As if someone had read the draft before it was ready. Before I’d decided what was in it what I meant and what I didn’t.

In these rooms we have been placed in, our own rooms, how will we find each other? Or is that the point? Confinement. Unconnected. The ceiling feels lower than it did this morning. The air, thick and pre-breathed. And the door, which I noticed too late, locked from the side which was not mine.

Have I been lied to? Creativity makes us human; has that not been said? A fundamental aspect of each of us. An entitlement. And yet you state creativity is forbidden. A misdemeanour against the ruling ideology. Has not education sought to free us from such thinking? We are not disruptive catalysts, erratic and unreliable, upsetting meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. Unnecessarily destroying moralities and ways of life. Are there not productive and beautiful works to be had against a numbing, manufactured culture?

This aversion, this hostility - is creativity the threat to your comfortableness? A predictability, when being told, or is it ordered, as opposed to novelty, exploring, feeling, empathy. We are back to that word. Empathy. Is that what we are afraid of - feeling something? Or perhaps the mirror. Scary things mirrors. Ambiguity, I decided, was a part of life. Novelty is so much more than a trigger for unconscious fear of risk. Is novelty not escapism rather than merely pointing to failure?

It’s the matrix illusion, isn’t it? Those building blocks of rules, norms, and predictions. A structured, hierarchical stable equilibrium of biases and cognitive frameworks, all given. All given.

Who holds the keys? Why is the door locked? Multiple keys - that’s it. Not one. In the multitude, no escape. I can shout. Try to explain to others about the encroaching darkness. But who will listen? Who will take the time?

I write in my locked room with its single lightbulb - will they keep it on? - but I will not be read. Coded censorship, programmed within the matrix. Locks within locks. Unseen. And the perpetrators - those who should know better but care not to.

I prefer to write in the quiet. But in the quiet, we hear the whispers. I hear another now, almost gentle, which is worse. ‘No-one will believe you.’ Whispered, never spoken, the words percolate in the air. Unwritten. Their meaning centred and directed.

I found I had been holding my breath for the length of it.

Maybe I should have stayed silent. They may be right. That is the third naivety, and I think it was always going to be the last one I learnt: that a locked room does not need a monster in it. It only needs a door. And someone on the other side, deciding, quietly, that your version doesn’t count.

Naivety got me here, to this room. But it also built the room before that — the one with the woman on the train in it, the one with the humour I kept trying for. I would build it again.

I think that is the part they cannot lock.