Sorry that this week's NITM is a tad late. It's been a bit of a mad week...
It's also been a week
of changes. Not for me, but a several
friends and the phrase "a new chapter" has been banded about a fair
bit (admittedly I've been among those banding it about!).
And that got me
thinking. As a writer, I've come to
consider a change in a character's status quo as the subject for an entire
story, not just a chapter. But I don't
think people would really get it if you said to them "oh, how
exciting. It's the start of a whole new
book for you!".
A chapter sometimes
finishes on a cliffhanger and I guess that starting a new job, moving house, or
starting a new relationship is a kind of cliffhanger. We rarely know what exactly will happen next, although we may have a rough idea of how it will pan out, or how we hope it will pan out. It can be scary, exciting, or a bit of a let down, or just the next step.
The only way we find out what does happen is to live that next part of our lives (oh, what it is to linear creatures in space-time!).
For a fiction writer, the plot of an entire story usually follows the age-old formula of Character X is living their life in a particular way - the status quo (no, it's nothing to do with the rock band). An inciting incident then disrupts that state and they are thrust along the a path that challenges their world view, behaviour, or current state with obstacles until they emerge at the end of the story with an altered world view, behaviour or new state of normality.
At the end of it all, Character X's life is different to the life they had at the start of the story and can't go back to that old way. Either they've changed forever, or their world has. I know that not all stories follow that formula, but a fair number do.
And in amongst all that, there will be different chapters that take them along that path. So, when we say that when someone is facing a next chapter in their lives, is it that we think of those chapters as a small part of the book of their entire life? That would make sense.
I certainly don't feel like the person I was ten, or twenty years ago and my life has been split in to very clearly defined phases and adventures and I consider them more like books within a series that's made-up of multiple stories as the hero learns and changes with each new adventure rather than just chapters.
Perhaps that's just me. Perhaps I'm over-thinking it and I should instead just celebrate the exciting new possibilities and adventures my friends are about to face. I wish them all the very best and, as Doc Brown says in Back To The Future Part 3, "the future hasn't been written yet". I hope for all my friends facing new a chapter, book, adventure, or whatever you want to call it, that it's a good one!
