A Better Story
I made a little mistake recently. I was waiting to find out whether or not something I thought would be helpful to me was going to happen, and without intending to, while I waited I began slowly believing that if this thing happened my life would be substantially better. This has always been a very seductive idea to me – the arrival of The Great Event. It’s exciting, and imbues life with a heightened sense of meaning.
Of course, this thing did not happen. I was disappointed at first, but I quickly saw that I needed to make a decision. My disappointment, I decided, was not because something did not happen, but because of how I had portrayed this event in my imagination. I had allowed some idea of happiness to become fixed upon a single point, in this case an event.
As writers, we are always waiting for news about this or that event: the event of the agent, the publisher, the advance, the review, the movie deal. If we allow ourselves to becomes fixated upon any one of these, our life and all its meaning is squeezed into some spot on the horizon, as if we were all marooned on an island, scanning the empty sea for the first sight of a ship.
On the day I learned that this thing would not happen, many other things happened to me, all of which contained potential for still more things to happen. In the end I decided I was lucky that things turned out the way they did. Had I gotten what I thought I wanted, I might have traced any future happiness back to this one event. Nothing in the world is worth that narrow view of life to me. I would never write a story about a character whose happiness depends upon one love, or one job, or one decision—why then would I want this story told about me?