The One Point: Aikido and the Point of a Story

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Shihonage, Aikido throw
(photographed by Magyar Balazs)

A great many of the things I write begin in my mind with a philosophical question or idea.  A story forms when I envision a character and then throw them cruelly against that question or idea and see what happens.  This is the essence of my particular slant on psychological suspense: a dark story that begins with the tension between individual psychological and transcendent human philosophical questions.

Just the same, I don't make care of the idea of boiling any story down to a theme, a topic, a moral, or (perhaps worst of all), a "point."

Instead, I think it's like something we talk about in Aikido as, "the one point." In Aikido that "one point" is both the source of energy and center of action.  You might link it to the center of gravity.  You might relate it to the focus of psychological centeredness.  At the core, the one point is both the drive and the pivot point for everything we do in Aikido.

The one point isn't static.  It's dynamic.  It moves and shifts with the person.  It changes with the context.  The one point also isn't a physical X, Y, Z coordinate.  It's not something that everyone can look at, touch, and feel.

That's more like the role of the philosophical quesiton or idea that starts my story. It's the driver and the pivot point.  It's always there, and it's source of energy and the center of action -- but it may not be apparent.  You may not be about to see it, touch, or feel it.  You, as a reader, may sometimes see it as clear as it.  You, as a reader, may never know it's the there.  But that's okay, because it may be the one point, but it's not the point of the story.

.Nevets.