BU Today: What started you down this path of writing a novel?

Wildman: I write a lot of complicated books that not many people read—highfalutin philosophy of religion. They are part of a conversation with experts in a certain group of specialties, but I feel as though what I’m writing about should be relevant to other people as well. So I’ve made two attempts in my career to reach a broader audience through writing. One is nonfiction books that are supposed to be accessible to a general audience. But even those turned out to be a bit too scholarly for the average person. I just can’t quite shake the scholarly training, I guess. The second approach is to try and create fiction, which is even further from what I normally write as a scholar. So I’ve written a bunch of short stories and some novels, and the first is just published. That was my last best hope of communicating to regular people about my philosophy of religion, about my humanistic existential perspective on the depth dimension of reality.

When I started, I had a little iPad, and I found that I could actually write on it comfortably using a portable keyboard. It felt lovely under the fingers, in a coffee shop, on a train or a plane, on my back deck at home, in bed, wherever. I was doing a lot of traveling, so whenever I was on the road I would work on the novel. I produced a completed draft of it eventually, but it had to go through the wringer many, many times. I wrote it and rewrote it, with advice from patient friends, until it was ready to send to a professional editor, who kicked my rear up and down the street all over again.

BU Today: What was the biggest hurdle for you about writing fiction?

Wildman: So many things were difficult. When we’re writing technical nonfiction, we’re trying to juggle a lot of information and to get it properly organized on the page—systematically arranged so that people can follow what the information is and what you’re arguing in relation to that. It’s a really important and interesting skill, and I enjoy exercising it. By contrast, a lot of what’s going on in fiction is not on the page. It’s happening in the imagination of the reader. So, you have to evoke in them feelings or inferences rather than just telling them what’s going on. I had to learn to be more indirect in my prose. 
 
Then there are challenges such as voice. Choosing a voice and sticking to it, in nonfiction—that’s easy. But in fiction, I found it difficult to stick to a voice and hold a perspective rather than jumping around and trying to tell some other aspect of the same story. In the case of The Winding Way Home, there’s one voice for the whole book. It’s one particular perspective. That means there’s a lot of things the character doesn’t know, and there’s a lot I as the author can’t say. Learning to be true to the perspective is a critical skill. 
 
And then of course there’s the “show-don’t-tell” thing, a maxim of fiction writing. That was difficult for me as well. When I got exhausted, instead of narrating a scene, I’d try and explain something. Big mistake. And I found it difficult to root out. Explaining was and is a very strong instinct for me, and I had to learn to diagnose it and resist it.
 
But I’ve enjoyed the process of learning to write this way—despite the pain that’s involved and the feeling of being a complete duffer, an idiot. You’re used to being an expert at something, and all of a sudden you take up something else and you find yourself to be just the worst in the world. Then you fight your way out of that honest recognition to create something that actually can be recognized as high-level writing. It was difficult and painful. But overall, I enjoyed the learning process.

BU Today: What inspired you to write The Winding Way Home?

Wildman: My very first motivation was the idea that writing fiction might improve the clarity and force of my academic nonfiction writing, so it was a kind of training exercise. But once I started in earnest, I discovered another, deeper motivation.
 
I have developed in my nonfiction a philosophical-spiritual worldview. It is potentially valuable to a small but growing number of people who need support, who don’t have many people speaking for them or about them. This worldview is humanistic, existential, and naturalistic, so it has no supernatural beings or gods or anything like that. It’s also highly attuned to scientific ways of understanding the world. And it’s deeply resonant with things like poetic and artistic visions, beauty, and aesthetic complexity. This worldview is not just ideas, it’s actually a way of life. But it’s difficult for people to move from facts about the metaphysics or the epistemology of a worldview like that to really feel what it’s like to live it out in practice.
 
I had in my mind this character who lived that worldview, and through telling his story, I’d be able to illustrate what it’s like to live practically with a worldview like that, without having to do the normal thing that a philosopher would do—the metaphysical explanations. Explaining metaphysics doesn’t work in a novel. Everything has to be done through the story, through experiences and reactions to experiences, through relationships and events, scene by scene by scene. The motivating fire in my belly was something like trying to show people what it’s like to live this way. Of course, I live that way myself, so writing the story was a personal journey, in more ways than merely learning how to tell a story. The main character is very much not like me in most ways, but we do have similar worldviews. 
 
I sometimes meet people who get to know my worldview and feel completely baffled. Often that reaction has to do with suffering. Everyone in life suffers—that’s a fundamental Buddhist principle. People in Western cultures often think about suffering in terms of just bearing it, or if they’re Christian or Jewish or Muslim they might think in terms of a God who will protect them or will at least establish justice and make the suffering masses feel better in a blessed afterlife. Supernatural approaches to dealing with the problem of suffering really work for many people, especially the belief in life after death, but in my naturalistic worldview, that’s not available. So when people hear about the naturalist worldview, they might challenge me: “Well, how are you supposed to deal with suffering?” To them, a worldview just seems utterly hopeless if there’s no supernatural world, if there’s no afterlife to resolve everything; it all just sounds miserable. Famous BU sociologist Peter Berger, blessed of memory, reacted in precisely this way when our conversations exposed my existentialist humanism, aka religious naturalism. But I contend that a naturalist worldview doesn’t need to feel miserable—it can be intensely beautiful. Now, I can say that, and I can write technical books about it. But having regular people, or even the Peter Bergers of this world, understand the beauty and see it for themselves requires a story. And that’s really what motivated me to write the story in the first place.