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WriteOn! Roads not taken [1]

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Date: 2025-04-17

The road not taken

(Robert Frost, 1915) Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. (Andrea Long Chu)

A story narrative includes a number of decisions by the protagonist and other characters. Most will have little influence on the future and be quickly forgotten, but a few will seem more significant with the passage of time, lost doorways to roads not taken and fates that never came to pass.

Sometimes, the character will realize that a decision was significant and irreversible almost immediately. This is the case in the sad and haunting story by R. M. Coates, “The Hour After Westerly,” where an ordinary man with an ordinary job and family discovers he has lost an hour of time in travelling home from work. All he can remember is a picture of a small settlement with a church and a clock. The memory stays with him, but when he finally finds the real place that corresponds to it, his nerve fails and he does not stop to ask the questions that might have told him what his relationship to it was. He returns later, but the spell is broken; the tiny settlement is dark and empty. There is nothing he can do but give up and return to his usual life.

Almost all the other cottages that he passed were closed for the winter, too, but the bar at the corner was still open, and in the growing darkness, the neon-lighted sign in the window shone out boldly….For a moment, he was tempted to stop there. But then he thought there was no need to, really. The man had given him good enough directions the last time: a left turn at the first traffic light, then a right and another left, and then across the railroad and onto the Post Road. And besides, it was far too late.

The dark, cold village had held the answer to an unknown question, but both the question and its answer have been lost forever because of the protagonist’s hesitation.

Especially if your character is old, they may pause to reflect on these decisions and what they show about themselves and their development. If what has happened since is not entirely satisfactory, they may regret the past, while unable to change it. They were free to choose, and made what might now seem the wrong choice. But in fact, it’s often impossible to determine whether a different choice would have brought with it a better outcome. The desire to change the past may simply be a way to signal dissatisfaction with the way things went.

Crossroads or branching roads symbolize this situation. Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is possibly the most popular piece of modern poetry in the English language, but its meaning is ambiguous and controversial, as Frost himself admitted. It was a casual piece, tossed off and sent to a British friend with whom he had taken walks on which that friend was never quite sure what path was the best and often regretted the choice that he eventually made. It is often seen as an ode to independent thinking, but contemporary analysis tends to reject this and claim that it is merely about hesitancy and indecision. Ironically, the friend that Frost sent the poem to joined the army soon after receiving it and was killed in World War I, which seems an excellent demonstration that all paths are not in fact the same.

I feel that whatever Frost himself said about the poem, the last stanza clearly seems to indicate that the choice did have a definite effect and that the effect was probably not welcome. One does not “sigh” for years over a trivial choice, or a happy one, and the choice cannot have been trivial if “that has made all the difference.” The objection that the speaker did not choose the path “less travelled by” because the paths appeared to be identical is not relevant; they may have discovered the nature of the path only after they were committed to it. Frost may have written it as a tease, but what came out turned into something different and more serious. What you write has a funny way of doing things like that.

For an exercise, I suggest writing about one of your characters, or a stock character, reflecting on or remembering a significant choice made, one that the character cannot change, but later wonders about or regrets. The emotional reaction can be almost immediate, or it can be seen against the perspective of years, or of an entire lifetime. Try to stay under 500 words.

“The Road Not Taken” is out of copyright and discussions of it are easy to find on the internet. “The Hour After Westerly” is still copyright by the New Yorker magazine; it can be read from their archives if you have a subscription, and it was published in an anthology by Ray Bradbury, Timeless Stories For Today and Tomorrow, Bantam Books (1961).

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