What Story Will You Write?

There is no title, no table of contents, no introduction or acknowledgement. No copyright, imprint, or watermark. It's blank.

It is the book of life.

We all have one, handed to us, in some form, on the day of our birth. We fill the first pages with scribbles and blobs, stick figures and misspelled words, disproportionate cartoons of our idealistic misunderstanding of the world as seen through the eyes of a child. Simplistic. Naive. Innocent.

Years pass and the pages fill. Childish scrawl becomes more fluid, regimented, organized. Disjointed pictographs give way to properly framed depictions of reality. A true book begins to emerge. The book of our life.

Writing a book is not that hard. Hammer away long enough, and you can produce the 75-100,000 words necessary to qualify a work as a book. But a book is a story no more than a pile of bricks a house. A dictionary is a book, but a story it is not. There is no plot, no setting, no characters. No life.

Therein lies the art, and the heart, of writing.

So it is in our book of life. It is easy enough to fill our books with randomness and idle chatter, meaningless dialogue and cardboard characters. The pages fill, the word count tallies, but a story it is not. Not a real story, a story worth reading. That takes work. That takes heart. Courage. Perseverance.

Writing a story worth reading is hard. Hours, days, weeks go into each chapter. Words are agonized over, dissected, defined, replaced. Story lines are pursued, abandoned, retraced and recovered. Characters spring to life, only to fall spectacularly to their deaths or slowly sink beneath the page in a slow spiral of decay. Long hours pass when the words will not come. Sleepless nights are spent feverishly when the words will not stop. There is ebb and flow, rise and fall.

And so it is in life. A life worthy of being written happens no more easily than does a story worth reading. Every action, thought, word, and deed matter. Understand there will be mistakes, missteps, wrong paths taken. Characters will appear who seem to be on the side of right and good, but later reveal themselves antithetical to the purpose of the hero. And who is the hero of your story? Why, you, of course. Who else could it be?

So it is up to you to make corrections. While you cannot edit out lines already written, you can write anew. Start a new chapter. Create a new storyline. Bring in new characters. Everyone loves a redemption story, a nobody who becomes somebody, a villain turned hero. Maybe that's you.

I don't know your story, and I cannot write it for you. No one can. It's up to you.

What will your story be?