I'm very much not a fan of this line of thinking. Stories are narratively contrived. It's even a maxim of storytelling: "focus on the most interesting time in the characters' lives." Stories have beginnings, middles and ends and they have nothing to do with the lives of the characters. By thinking about your own life in terms of arcs you are forcing an undue amount of importance on unimportant events. More than that, you're looking for an end and trying to redefine your beginning. Finally, by considering your own life a narrative you're forced to consider the audience who, by the way, doesn't give the first fuck about you. I'd go as far as saying that considering your life a story is unhealthy to the point of detrimental. Life is a journey. You know when and where it started, you rarely know when and where it will end. Everything else is subject to change and if you're constantly trying to arrange your existence to please some external structure you are literally wasting your life.
I guess I didn't read it the same way. The way that I see it, is that my life is a story whether I like it or not. It has a beginning, things happen, and then there will be an end. Looking at it that way, I feel an impetus to make it one worth relating. I definitely don't worry about arcs. That would probably just be an avenue for excuses, and I don't buy into an Owen Meany kind of purpose. What I do feel, is that if I spend a day on the couch watching TV, then that is one page of the book that wouldn't likely survive an editing process; but there is no editing process, so the story is just a bit worse off for it.
It's the "a story" that bugs me. To the people I went to school with, I was a happy kid, then a depressed teenager, then I disappeared never to be heard from again in the most amazingly weird car my town had ever seen. To the guys in my engineering classes, I was the angry dude who transferred in, taught them welding and then threw my life away by never joining them at Boeing. To the guys in the club, I'm the guy with the annoying girlfriend that skunked Switchblade Symphony and then succumbed to the 9-to-5. To the people I knew in consulting, I'm the former club engineer who couldn't take the pressure and ran off to join the circus. To the guys I know in location audio I'm the guy who bailed on TPS reports but can't quite hack it mixing live so I have to mix post. To the guys I know in post I'm that dude who is wasting too much time on writing a novel. To the guys I know from screenwriting I was a promising talent that eventually threw in the towel when he failed to get anything made after seven years. We won't even discuss Reddit. Well, we'll say this - I used to get hate mail making fun of me for not being Unidan. Again - you don't get to pick your perspective. It's really easy for me to see myself as a failure from seven different directions but the fact of the matter is I mixed Death Cab before they were Death Cab, Slash between GnR and Velvet Revolver and Christina Aguilera on a Wendt X5. I've been featured in Mix Magazine, The Economist, Wired and the Daily Beast. I optioned two screenplays, am represented for fiction by one of the best boutique agencies in the world, ride an Italian hyperexotic and learned to skateboard at 40. And I'm "daddy." The whole line of thought is toxic - if I had to pick a narrative out of the mess above I'd be hosed. Everyone else will pick based on what they can see, not on what they know and if I choose to worry about that I'm choosing to fret over meaninglessness. I get what lil is trying to say - "look for meaning in your life." There's a hell of a difference between "meaning" and "story." Seen Julie & Julia? For Julia Child, it follows the heinously boring period between not working for the OSS in India, China, London and Istanbul and not becoming the country's foremost expert on cooking to two entire generations of women. It's literally the "huh, I'm bored, maybe I'll edit a book" chapter of her biography. I'm a storyteller. I can make anyone's life interesting or boring, purposeful or meaningless. Turning this process into some sort of Zen exercise accomplishes nothing. I finished the car and drove it 1800 miles. I arrived at 4am, having successfully navigated a vehicle I built from the frame rails up from home to my uncle's house and to college. I had 36 hours before I could head to the dorm... and literally nothing to do for the first time since 8th grade. So I slept until noon, took a shower and watched a Johnny Quest marathon until the sun set. I still tell that story.
Thanks for your comments. Also in light of your comment, I changed a line to make the idea clearer.if you're constantly trying to arrange your existence to please some external structure you are literally wasting your life.
I agree with this 100%. I do NOT suggest contriving a story out of your life while you are adventuring. That would be ridiculous. Life is a journey.
Afterwards, though, a person might want to look back and see a narrative in that journey. Doing that might help them see that their choices, issues, and struggles may also have been an allegorical journey from fragmentation to integration (and perhaps to fragmentation again).
But why one? Why "a" story? A skilled storyteller can pluck a cornucopia of tales from one set of events. Everyone's a villain, everyone's a hero, everyone's a martyr, everyone's an oppressor. Yeah - as you near the end you better be able to look back and find some meaning... but in the end, it isn't up to us to write our stories, it's up to our loved ones.
I was driving to work today. I took a long meandering drive because it's Monday and I was early and I could afford to be a little lazy and enjoy the drive to work. The drive goes past my parents' house and I used to take every day. As I was driving, I thought: Parallel universes where every option is explored, eh? Many stories. Not quite what you meant but still, also, interesting to ponder. I write a lot of "What-if" scenarios. Like, "What if this exact thing happened...but then this?" There is a _refugee_ who didn't move out of her parents' house this May. I wonder what life is like for her.
He could also have said, "I went to work with the belief that my story could speak in some way to how growing up on an island affects how one lives in the world." or any number of entrances. In any event, I'm not so much talking about writing our story (although perhaps it doesn't become a story until it is told or written). This meditation is more on taking the randomness we experience and finding a structure in it - seeing it in stages that take us from innocence, say, to experience; from a fragmented to an integrated self. I speculate this: If there is no grand breakthrough and no change, if we keep destroying ourselves in the same way over and over again, it might be difficult finding an allegorical journey in our story or even a point. This particular question arose from another one that I am working on called, "When did you smarten up?"But why one?
Yes, there are many stories. If we are writing it, we have a multitude of entries to choose from. In the preface to Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father (p. vii, 2004 edition), he writes this: [I] went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.
Beginning with that mission and that belief, he chose aspects of his story that particularly addressed race, identy, and culture.but in the end, it isn't up to us to write our stories, it's up to our loved ones.
Yup, especially if we're gone. Some people, though, want to make sure they have their say.
I reject your structure. I reject your meaning. I reject your integration. My wife was bored one weekend she was home from college. She took a class in MS Access at Comp USA. It meant nothing until three years later, when that one weekend class caused a division that wasn't hiring at a place she interviewed at (for a completely different job) to call her in. She ended up as a software architect for a great lady that ended up leaving after being sexually harassed. Three years later, though, my wife performed the wedding ceremony for her ex-boss and her new husband, whom we ended up going to Vegas with. Then we didn't see them for a while because they moved to Arizona. Then they moved to Los Angeles and we saw them every six weeks or so. Two weeks ago they moved back to Washington - they're going to beat us there. Our relationship with that couple is driven almost entirely by coincidence but it started with a free weekend seminar at CompUSA twenty years ago. How will it end? Who knows. I'll say this - when we were worried about trademark infringement with a large grocery chain, the husband called up the legal counsel of the large grocery chain because they're golf buddies. I would literally go insane if I had to parse our relationship for meaning.