I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
In his memoir and writing guide Plot Twist, novelist Harlan Coben writes, “Everyone has hopes and dreams.” Every person has a complicated inner life that you don’t have access to. In his book Six Years quoted in Plot Twist, Coben elaborates:
Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lusts and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy.
This idea, “everyone has hopes and dreams,” can help you approach other people with more respect and compassion.
And it has implications for fiction writers, says Coben:
As a writer, it is a great way to flesh out your characters. I ask myself this about every character who inhabits my books—good guys, bad guys, heroes, villains, protagonists, supporting players, tertiary characters, people who just stroll through a page or maybe two. Everyone has hopes and dreams—what are theirs?
Take this a few steps further. Have those hopes and dreams changed over the years? Does your character still have a chance to achieve them? Did those dreams wither and die? Do they still think about them when they’re alone in bed at night? Did they achieve them and yet they didn’t bring the fulfillment they hoped for? Do these dreams now, today, make your character happy or do they crush their soul?
Maybe I want to write fiction
Last night, reading Plot Twist, I thought: I want to write fiction.
I’ve had this idea before, multiple times, concocted a plot, and started writing. I’ve never gotten very far though. Why? Am I just not meant to be a fiction writer? I don’t think that’s it. I suspect it’s because fiction writing is really difficult and I haven’t allowed myself enough time to learn how to do it. I want to do it well right when I start.
Other things I’ve learned to do took a lot of time, and I started out without any skills. I swam on the Cherry Hills Country Club swim team from age eight to age twelve (my parents made me continue that long otherwise I would have quit). Now I can swim all four strokes passably well. That involved a lot of swim practice, many swim meets, and plenty of swim coaches telling me how to make a stroke or kick my feet.
Learning to paint with acrylics has been a decade-long affair, with trials and tutorials and experimentation.
The starting out without any skills — that’s the hard part. And with something like writing fiction, when I’ve read so much fiction in my life, it seems like I should just be able to do it without any effort or learning!
But I just realized: I don’t really want to write fiction. It’s not that it’s hard. I do lots of hard things. It’s that it doesn’t engage me like options trading, nonfiction writing, swimming laps, and building software.
What I really want to do that I’m not doing is share my work, especially the work I’m doing around building a retirement investing approach that reduces drawdowns while still keeping me invested during bull markets.
Back to the dream questions
What are my hopes and dreams right now?
And, to borrow Coben’s questions:
- Have those hopes and dreams changed over the years?
- Does your character still have a chance to achieve them?
- Did those dreams wither and die?
- Do they still think about them when they’re alone in bed at night?
- Did they achieve them and yet they didn’t bring the fulfillment they hoped for?
- Do these dreams now, today, make your character happy or do they crush their soul?
I have some idea of the answers to these questions but not yet ready to share.