Anticlimax

In an odd coincidence of scheduling, I’m going to be writing the final scenes of the novel that I’ve been planning and writing for the past four months at the same time as I’m taking finals. At first this seems like a nice way for things to work out: just as all the plot threads and characters arcs that I’ve spent so long planning converge in the climactic episodes, my classes will be reaching a similar kind of conclusion. But I’m not exactly looking forward to it. Part of the reason is because I tend to get into high-intensity writing binges during the end of the story, and I just don’t have time for that during finals week. The larger reason, though, is that I know that the two won’t line up as nicely as I would like. Unless I veer wildly off from my plot map, my story is going to follow a nicely laid out wave of rising and falling action which will hopefully leave the reader, or at least me, with a firm sense of closure. If that’s what I’m hoping for my semester too, then I’m damned to disappointment.

The disconnect between stories and real life has been bugging me ever sense I started reading the Harry Potter books back in elementary school. While I understood that the magic was fiction, I unconsciously expected that my school years would follow the basic plot beats of the novels. And for the most part they did: summer ended, I went to school, I took some classes, there was some drama between my friends and some vague foreshadowing of dark events just outside of sight. But then the last days of school came and went without a master of evil magic arriving for a showdown that tied up all the themes and mysteries of the past year. Instead, final exams came and went, I got stressed and then calmed down, and things ended.

I know that it shouldn’t be surprising that life isn’t particularly well paced, since there isn’t any writer watching over my life to make sure that it conforms to the three-act structure. But, when you live surrounded by stories from childhood, you start to expect that life should follow the tropes of fiction. Sometimes it felt like I was stuck in a poorly written world, waiting for whoever was in charge of my story to die so someone with an iota of narrative intelligence could take over.

And, when I realized that my writer, pathetic as he was, was going to cling onto his worthless life with everything he had, I started trying to write my own climax into my year. I would pretend that final exams were the difference between life and death for me and listen to the soundtrack from boss fights in video games as I studied. I would even try to identify the villain in my year’s story who it would be my duty to confront before things wrapped up (though usually I chickened out before actually facing them, which is probably a good thing, because most of my villains turned out to be pretty decent people in the long run).

I lost sleep and sanity worrying that finals week would be the moment that my whole life had been leading up to. When I turned in my last exam, it really did feel like I’d slain some kind of monster. But the feeling only lasted a couple of seconds. In minutes I was just looking forward to having an evening free from studying, and within a week of vacation I was already bored.

It should go without saying that I’m glad that I don’t live in a story. Most characters in the fiction that I read and write go through more trauma and stress than any human being should ever have to suffer. Moreover, if my life were a story, then what happens after the last page? Even if it was happy ending, there’s no way that I could live in the kind of euphoria that you feel at the end of a novel forever. Eventually, it would get boring.

I suspect that I’m the only one who has grown his life around expectations that life reflects fiction. Actually, I know that I’m not. In my Victorian Literature seminar, I learned that nearly every novel written in the Victorian era ended with a marriage, especially if the protagonist was a single woman. I might think that the way fiction brainwashed me is bad, but it must have been worse for a Victorian woman, learning from the cradle that marriage is the culmination of everything in your life, only to be left wondering “What comes next?” after the ceremony.

I don’t want to say that fiction is evil or manipulative or that we’d be better off without it,  and I really don’t want to discard the concept of the linear plot entirely because, even if it doesn’t  perfectly reflect life, it’s so damn satisfying. Maybe all that I can say is that it’s worth it to think about these things every so often, and to give a little thanks that life keeps on going, even after the final scenes of the latest arc.