Welcome to Writing Insights 2.1!
This is where we discuss my experience as a fiction writer, a little bit on the craft of writing, and review the latest installment of my serialized novel, GONE STAYS GONE.
If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning of GSG, HERE.
Let’s get on with it, shall we?
In Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, Block, played by Max von Sydow, challenges Death to a game of chess in an attempt to escape his own fate. And much like the deputy sheriff and Marty in Ch 2.1, all three are in a desperate attempt to evade an existential inevitability through manipulating time.
Block eventually commits a good deed in distracting Death while his friend escapes his own demise, and the deputy battled God for five long years in anguish over his wife’s demise from breast cancer. But as he figured out himself, “Half a decade is a blink of an eye. God plays the long game.”
The deputy sought peace during those years. But maybe he was supposed to go through his torment for a while. Who knows what we learn in those periods of despair, and what others learn from us during that kind of mourning. Look where that delay in time led Block.
I remember needing this profound moment to elude Marty when the deputy opened up to him. Or at best, become too difficult for him to fathom. Maybe time is indeed irrelevant to God. Marty is literally in the midst of dying himself, which added to the confusion and sense of anxiety.
Marty is a meat and potatoes kinda fella. So when he told the deputy, his own “game isn’t over,” and disregarded the element of time and potential healing, it became significant for me as the writer. I was sick at the time myself, as mentioned in a previous post. I just wish I had seen this chapter a little more clearly back then. I think I wrote it with a sense of ‘fuck the world’ rather than dissecting the deeper significance.
Funny how a few years can change the obvious context of this narrative. I was clearly wrestling with time. I’d been deep in a chess match with God, but more like checkers. Who am I to outwit God? But like Marty, and maybe even Block, I needed more time, desperately. And like the both of them, I was convinced it was running out, but I didn’t care as much as either of them did.
Today, I do care. A great deal. I have my health back and good people who surround me with love. What I lost in a 27-year marriage, I gained in respect for myself and a genuine sense of what matters in life. The deputy and Block surely felt the same way. Might that be God’s plan, to help us find love on a scale only those who suffer first can truly appreciate? What say you? Do we need some kind of loss in order to know what we possess?
The bridge and deer incident was another cathartic moment I may have overlooked. The more I reflect on these two moments — with the deputy, and the deer, the more I can see just how badly I needed help at the time. I was certain death was around the corner, but I was desperate to stay alive to see my kids again.
I couldn’t fathom suicide, but I could certainly appreciate Marty’s moment hanging over the bridge, contemplating the idea. He was dying, and though desperate to find his son’s body, there was this siren call, beckoning him to end it all and allow death to wash over him like the rivers he fished.
As I re-read when he crashed his truck, I can’t help but wonder, maybe I was asleep at the wheel too, metaphorically. Those days are a blur, maybe intentionally. I was angry at the world and didn’t seem to wake until my cardiac ablation, but by then, it was too late. I’d lost a substantial portion of my soul along with my wife.
Something about that stoic buck staring back at Marty. What made Marty step back onto the bridge? Was the buck some kind of harbinger, beckoning him to see the reality of loss as the buck was experiencing in the same moment? What a tangled mess we writers can be, right? I was so stretched thin and at my wit’s end, trying to find a way back into my truck to hit the road again.
Thank God I did.
Ciao for now,
Rakkhita
➡️ The Next Scene From, Gone Stays Gone: Chapter 2.2, Coming Wednesday, 10/1/25
PS These Sunday “Writing Insights” will soon become a benefit for paid subscribers. I’ll be covering the craft & business of fiction writing and discussing the installments of Gone Stays Gone in detail. Please feel free to jump in beforehand: