The life of a writer is one part mystery, 9 parts action

Life has to make sense on the page.

Whether in an essay or a short story or a film script or a children’s book or a memoir, especially in a news report or a scientific journal or an expose or a personality profile, maybe even in a poem or a stream of consciousness, the dots must connect, the gaps must be filled, some questions must be provoked, even answered, some answers must be implied or suggested or left to the reader to imagine but not without some clues or some back story or some background information or the turn of events from which the reader can draw some viable conclusions.

Come to think of it, life’s not really like that. In real life, unlike in a novel or a biography, there never is an omniscient narrator who sees through us, who hears the voices in our heads, who reads our mind and our soul, and follows everything we do. Unlike a character in a piece of science fiction or in a vampire story, none of us need to be understood, unless we do something really great or something really terrible and often not until we die as a result of it. We ourselves cannot even explain why we are what we are, why we do what we do, let alone other people.

In contrast, in life, the loose ends need not be tied. Not all crimes are solved or justified. Not all mysteries are unraveled. Not all dreams are fulfilled and not all unfulfilled dreams result in something dramatic. In life, the characters are not always consistent. No one is all bad and no one is all good, yet hardly does a really good girl go bad or a really bad boy turn good in real life that when they do, eyes wide open in disbelief, we call their transformation “one for the books!”

That’s because, unlike on the pages of literature, in real life the only real protagonist is us and everyone else around is judged based on whether they are good or bad to us, whether they are in the way of our dreams or they help us make these dreams come true.

Sure, when life gets illogical or unfair, you can raise a finger at it, but no one is going to change the script, no one is going to rewrite the storyline, no one is going to revise the plot, except maybe you.

In the great books, the hero takes on the challenge boldly and we cheer on his larger-than-life moves, but in life in most cases, the great affair, as they say, is to move. Challenge after challenge, the great affair is to keep walking, keep moving, if you must crawl or plod on or just trudge along in the meantime. Just don’t expect people to always notice, much less take note of how you are tackling life the best way you can. There’s no accompanying music to highlight the everydayness of your struggles, nor is there any appropriate cinematography or some SFX. There is no voice over to let others in on your daily thoughts. And if you happen to be directly crossing their path, sorry you’re just not on the silver screen or on Netflix or a page in an epic—there is neither a production manager nor a stylist to make something noteworthy of the color scheme of your life or the cut of your hair or the sky above you. Whatever is happening to you, it’s just life. Everyone else has their own life to star in and in those lives, you play only a cameo or a supporting role at best, just as in your own life, you are the lead. Everyone else is just extra, and the gravity of the role they play is entirely up to you, even if they are your mother or your daughter or your lover or “the one that got away.”

Something mysterious does happen when you write. Maybe the Holy Spirit descends upon you or the devil possesses you. Maybe something else takes over, like the sum of all the writers you have ever read, or the muses you invoke to get your creative juices flowing. Maybe the universe conspires to make your words ring true and to make your sentences support each other as they take the reader along on a journey out of this world. In my experience, writing demands that all the elements on the page—the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, even the order by which they appear, even the nuances they carry between the lines—must all come together to create something wonderful or something so terrific or terrifying, or at the very least something intriguing or thought-provoking.

This is why, I guess, on the page, unless you were commissioned to write propaganda, to deliver outright lies, to rewrite history for the benefit of your employer, you can be the paragon of truth even if, in life, you are a pathological liar. You can be the voice of reason, even if, in life, you are unreasonable. You can expose the darkest corners in the mind of a serial killer, even if you cannot hurt a fly.

The next time you encounter a writer whose writings have inspired, enlightened, or empowered you, whose works have given you the impression that life is such a gift to live, fret not if you find him fall short of your expectations because where his words are clever and sophisticated on the page, he is socially awkward in life, where on the page he is caring and compassionate, in life he is brusque and abrasive and overbearing.

On the page, indeed, when a writer allows himself to get lost trying to fill it up, something magical happens and even if the story is true to life, good writing is always enticingly larger or impossibly smaller.

When he writes, when he is doing it with passion, with love, with near obsession, the writer turns into something else. What that is will always be among the mysteries of writing.