It Goes On

I posted on Facebook the other day a quote by Robert Frost: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

And this is why I don't outline.

I guess there's a lengthy thinking process in between that. And it goes something like this . . .

When I look back on my life at the very best of times, there have always been companion pieces of the very worst of times. To the point that, at times, I dread when things are going too well because . . . well, it can't stay that way. And from great heights, I can only say the great depths sucketh. And if could travel back to meet the girl I was as a teenager, the single mother I was in my twenties, at the sick woman in hospital beds over and over, at the worried mother in the middle of the night . . . I would have this tendency, if I could, to whisper in her ear, "You survive this." But the philosopher in me knows perhaps it's better that girl or woman NOT know, because maybe then she'll fight with all she's got. I don't know. And I haven't figured out how to time travel anyway, so I suppose it's moot.

But in my fictional worlds, I COULD, if I wanted, whisper in my characters' ears, "You get your happy ending." Except that instead I like to think not of happy endings but "new normals." I like entering my book and not QUITE knowing how it's going to end, or even if I know the end, how it's going to unfold. And I don't promise my characters rainbows and fireworks and happy endings, any more than I make those sorts of promises to my kids. Each one of them has, at one time or another, and especially recently, asked, "Are you going to die?" Or "this time is your disease going to kill you?" And my stock answer is, "I don't plan on it. But yes, SOMEDAY I'm going to die." I don't swear that everything is going to work out, only that life goes on.

And I know that even that which we think we can't survive . . . we do. Most of the time, we do. And even at spots where we think, "I'll never be happy again . . ." well . . . most of the time we are happy again. It's not the SAME happy. It's a different color and texture. It's a new normal.

And I like to think my fictional worlds mimic the real one. In my darkest books (The Roofer, Invisible Girl), the "happy ending" is merely a "new normal" and it comes with a pricetag, a pretty steep one, in fact. But it's just like life. The ticket to admission isn't cheap.

So no outlines for me. I like watching them figure all this out on their own. I like discovering what the new normal is going to be.

Thoughts?