We Don’t Live Our Lives Inside a Novel
Lately I’ve spent some time looking back. It’s often a mistake for anyone, especially at night. Nevertheless, I guess because I write novels, I recently tried to fit my life into some kind of format, using the traditional three-act structure, with the climax naturally at or near the end.
It didn’t work.
The beginning is easy, especially since I have very vivid memories of the earliest days of my life. Things make sense, and the story is off to a good start. But it quickly gets messy, complicated, even chaotic. It’s almost as if the author doesn’t know where the story is going.
And I’m still not sure where this one is going. Or on what page it’s going to end. How long is my life’s book? Am I a 250- or 300-pager (I think I’ve already exceeded that one)? 500 pages? Or an epic, Stephen-King-length novel, clocking in at 1200 pages? They say the ideal size for most novels is somewhere around 300-350 pages.
Uh-oh.
Then, what’s the genre? Romance? Doesn’t seem like me—although I do love a few people and my dog dearly.
Thriller? Doesn’t seem right either. After all, I’m not a spy or a cop or a detective, and I haven’t been wrongly accused of anything I need to clear my name for.
Certainly not gothic or horror (not yet anyway). Fantasy doesn’t seem to fit my life either, unless you count certain delusions.
Could it be that my life is non-fiction? I seriously doubt that, especially since I’ve spent a lot of time trying to see beyond the facts as we know them. For example, when I sit in church or a synagogue, I’m always trying to figure out (and have been since I was a child, back in Act 1), how so many billions of believers could be so wrong—or so right.
Maybe . . . science fiction? That often involves space travel, feats of engineering and things like artificial intelligence, which recently left the realm of science fiction and is becoming the story of our lives whether we like or not, and opening doors to futures we can’t even imagine. Writing about AI has made me very cautious with it in real life, so no, not science fiction.
After much late-night thinking, I’ve concluded that our lives aren’t lived inside novels. Not just for the reasons already mentioned, but also because we don’t know what comes after. It could be nothing, or nothing much, just a quiet conversion from one state to another, or … it could be huge, dwarfing even the longest Stephen-King-novel of a life here on earth so far. It still seems amazing to me that no one has figured that one out definitively in the entire course of human history. (Although we may find out in my novel to be released later this year, titled, Where Did They Go? Stay tuned for details.)
For now though, I believe that—unlike in novels—our lives seldom have neat plots with equally neat endings. They have loose ends that probably won’t be tied up, chapters we can’t rewrite, dialogue that isn’t always clever—and a climax that may already be behind us—or just moments away in our future.
And, one last thought on this: If we view our lives as a novel—I wonder who the author is?
EJS
P.S. If your life were a novel, what genre would it be? Would there be a villain? I’d love to hear from you! ejsimon@ejsimon.com
Then, what’s the genre? Romance? Doesn’t seem like me—although I do love a few people and my dog dearly.
Thriller? Doesn’t seem right either. After all, I’m not a spy or a cop or a detective, and I haven’t been wrongly accused of anything I need to clear my name for.
Certainly not gothic or horror (not yet anyway). Fantasy doesn’t seem to fit my life either, unless you count certain delusions.
Could it be that my life is non-fiction? I seriously doubt that, especially since I’ve spent a lot of time trying to see beyond the facts as we know them. For example, when I sit in church or a synagogue, I’m always trying to figure out (and have been since I was a child, back in Act 1), how so many billions of believers could be so wrong—or so right.
Maybe . . . science fiction? That often involves space travel, feats of engineering and things like artificial intelligence, which recently left the realm of science fiction and is becoming the story of our lives whether we like or not, and opening doors to futures we can’t even imagine. Writing about AI has made me very cautious with it in real life, so no, not science fiction.
After much late-night thinking, I’ve concluded that our lives aren’t lived inside novels. Not just for the reasons already mentioned, but also because we don’t know what comes after. It could be nothing, or nothing much, just a quiet conversion from one state to another, or … it could be huge, dwarfing even the longest Stephen-King-novel of a life here on earth so far. It still seems amazing to me that no one has figured that one out definitively in the entire course of human history (although we may find out in my novel to be released later this year, titled, Where Did They Go? Stay tuned for details).
For now though, I believe that—unlike in novels—our lives seldom have neat plots with equally neat endings. They have loose ends that probably won’t be tied up, chapters we can’t rewrite, dialogue that isn’t always clever — and a climax that may already be behind us—or just moments away in our future.
And, one last thought on this: If we view our lives as a novel—I wonder who the author is?
EJS
P.S. If your life were a novel, what genre would it be? Would there be a villain? I’d love to hear from you! ejsimon@ejsimon.com