Zeitgeist and Writing Your Own Story
11:44pm MST, 23 Jul 2002

Sometimes it's only when you finally figure something out that you see how many clues were out there pointing to the answer.

Kevin Savage lent me Bruce Sterlings' Zeitgeist, and it fits in with a concept I've been thinking about--writing your own narrative.

It's about heroes, role models and stories.

Often I'm fascinated by the stories of people who have accomplished things similar to what I would like to do. A painter can obviously benefit from knowing the life stories of great painters. Knowing where others have been and what made them great can help you on your path.

In addition to the stories of specific people, society provides archetypal role models. There are the widely accepted ones, such as the doctor, the executive, the scientist, the teacher; and there are the fringe examples, such as the struggling artist or even the thief. Each of these role models has an archetypal story. The doctor is very studious as a child, earns a monotony of good grades right through university, and suffers many sleepless nights before becoming a doctor. On the opposing end you have the thief, who stereotypically comes from a troubled environment, doesn't graduate from high school, and begins criminal life from an early age.

None of these stories delineates a single true path, but simply an aggregate of paths taken by real people. For many people, the life stories of the masters and the archetypal stories society offers both provide direction. Many people struggle to follow a story that isn't their own. Often we are offered multiple stories that fit the same role or destination. Harder still is to seek a combination of roles with conflicting stories.

An artist usually has to struggle to master the ways of others, but the purpose is to eventually derive an individual style. A dancer seeks expression through movement, learning the techniques of others but eventually learning to dance his own way. A writer may draw on an understanding of many influences, but the final work is the author's.

I think we have to see ourselves as the writers of our own stories. We do well to know the stories of others, the narratives that society offers us, but the final story has to belong to us. That's one of the keys to happiness--realizing that the responsibility for the story belongs to us.

It's hard to write a new story. As they say, there's nothing new under the sun. The hard part is not being creative so much as knowing what to leave out. A writer gets to compose many stories before developing an individual style. But for our lives, we only get one chance to write the story.

I feel like that's really the hard part--knowing what to take from other stories and figuring out how to piece things together into something new. But that's just a cheap replacement. Even more difficult is to tap into the part of you that knows how to write your own story.

Great biographies often sound like fiction. How do we write the stories of our lives the way we want to live them?

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