What happens next?

Sep 9, 2025

"What happens next?"

I've been working my way through the Five Novels collection of Ursula Le Guin novellas (Library of America, 2024). I'm three in - just started The Beginning Place - and as I have been reading, I've found myself asking What happens next? a lot.

Sometimes it's plot in the most literal sense: what will happen in the next few pages, and what will happen over the course of the rest of the work? Reading The Lathe of Heaven, pages were turned to a rhythmic patter of a questions:

What will George Orr's next dream be? Will it be better or worse than the last? Will he find his way out of the double-bind he finds himself in, with Dr. Haber? And if he does, will he be able to put the world back together again? Can he put himself back together again?

Sometimes it's the procession of ideas that keeps the pages turning. In The Eye of the Heron, the Shantih Towners attempt to win their freedom through very classical tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. But they are facing off against an enemy that is not just willing to use violence but that relishes violence, sees it as a necessity and a pleasure. Through this very basic setup, Le Guin articulates some of the most difficult conundrums that haunt direct action and peace work.

There, then, I turned the pages to find out what would literally happen next - in the story, to the characters - but also to continue thinking through the promise and peril of nonviolent resistance.

Must nonviolence always end with some amount of appeasement? Is there a way to practice radical nonviolence, as resistance, without lapsing into an unrealistic, foolhardy idealism? Is Lev's practice in fact unrealistic, foolhardy, naive, or will it lead to a strategic sacrifice that accomplishes something?

And then, of course, there is a what happens next that hovers closer to the writing itself, wherein my attention is drawn to the language and the cadence, the imagery and metaphors, the very sounds of the words. Or, at times, to larger structural choices: recurring words and phrases over longer passages; choices of narration and perspective; the way multiple threads of story are woven together so as to speak with each other and drive each other forward.

Here's the first sentence of The Beginning Place:

"Checker on seven!" and back between the checkstands unloading the wire carts, apples three for eighty-nine, pineapple chunks on special, half gallon of two percent, seventy-five, four, and one is five, thank you, from ten to six six days a week; and he was good at it.

What a whopper of an opening. How can you not keep reading? But it's not just a matter of style for style's sake. The near stream-of-consciousness style that propels that passage is not incidental to the story that unfolds. We are seeing the world from the eyes of one of our main characters, Rodge/Buck/Hugh, who we quickly learn is struggling with a world that seems to sound and fury without rest. The clip of that opening passage, which reappears throughout the first chapter, embodies his studied efficiency, an efficiency that "got him through the job daily but not beyond it." E

Efficiency as a coping. An efficiency that feels as though it is just barely hanging together, as though it may fall in on itself at any moment -- like thoughts run together and pared down to their barest essentials, intelligible yet precariously so.

The best moments of what happens next do not merely look forward to what is to come, of course. The reader does not ask what happens next to escape the present page. Quite the opposite: the best what happens next brings together the present moment of reading with what has come before and what will come soon, across multiple scales (sentence, section, chapter, part, whole). I can't help but think of an exceptional meal, where you simultaneously want to savor every bite yet cannot wait for the next. Where you fight the urge to demolish the plate without a breath and yet still eat just a bit faster than you know you probably should.

Where the distance between your hunger and the food seems to have collapsed.

And the best moments of what happens next find the reader creating with the author. The words on the page will not change. Our encounters with them, however, are wholly unique, made so in part by the questions we ask of them.

Among those questions, what happens next? seems so simple. But it is easy to forget how much work this question does in the context of art. Easy, too, to overlook how many varied forms that one question might take.