McGuffins

I like to joke with my students and clients that if they’re worried their lives aren’t interesting enough for memoir, they need only look at me for reassurance. My own experiences are the sole source material for my work, and my days are predictably uneventful. Fortunately, if I have anything resembling a natural talent, it’s the ability to see life and death in any moment. It’s a good skill for a writer, but it can make for some unnecessarily dramatic living.

I think of Alfred Hitchcock’s McGuffins. If you’re unfamiliar, a McGuffin is a narrative device, a thing – usually an object – characters have or desire around which the story revolves. Either they need this McGuffin to be happy, to be safe and secure, or they need to destroy it to be safe and secure. The One Ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is perhaps the most classic example. That great tale has good and evil, it has hobbits and elves and dwarves and orcs and wizards, all of whose actions, ultimately, are driven by the whereabouts of one little gold ring.

My own life has had more than a few McGuffins in it. Published books, for instance – the ring of power for many a writer. Sadly, if I were a character in Lord of the Rings, I would not have been Frodo or Gandalf, but Sauron himself, a hungry eye searching the world for the one thing he needs to exist again. Such are the games our mind can play with ourselves. How easy to see myself as incomplete until some game is won, some prize acquired.

This is the simplest way to see life and death in every moment: believe you really need something, anything, and your life seems to hang in the balance. It’s a tricky understanding for creative people, if you’re always making something, always enjoying seeing something emerge from nothing, feeling that satisfaction when it’s finally there before you where you can touch it and hold and point to it. Things are nice that way. But they are still just the result, the inevitable manifestation of being itself, what we actually are, a thing already complete, perfectly built to make all the McGuffins it desires.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

William KenowerWriting, William Kenower, Tolkien, McGuffin, ValueComment