Name a novel you’d love to model your life after.
I love these kinds of prompts that ask me about my personal views on things like favorite pieces of media because my brain immediately forgets every single song/book/movie/show I’ve ever encountered. Novels? What are those? I’ve never read a single book in my life. How could I pick one to model my life after?
Maybe I’m just not thinking creatively enough for this one, but a novel isn’t exactly ideal for modeling your own life on. For one thing, how do you model your life on the interactions of a multitude of characters? You can pick a character you’d like to emulate, but when it comes to having the supporting cast in your life, you would have to be very selective with the company you keep. Even then, there’s no guarantee that they would “play” their roles properly and your novel life falls apart.
I realize I’m being incredibly nitpicky and pedantic about the phrasing of this prompt. That’s part of what I do, particularly when the prompt doesn’t inspire anything in me. Can’t get a story or idea rolling? Let’s pick apart the prompt itself to find the root cause!
I suppose this might be easier if I read more contemporary fiction. Novels that take place in our own reality and not fabricated, speculative ones. But I do read so much fantasy and science fiction, and all my favorite books are fantasy and science fiction. It would be awesome if I could model my life after the techno-magical world of A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe or the fantastical dragon filled world of the Dragon Riders of Pern, but the closest I can come is mimicking the lives of my favorite characters from those novels.
A novel is too complex a starting point, in my opinion. A good novel will have several plots happening at once with many different characters. In the books I would want to model my life after, there is typically a supernatural or evil element driving the conflict that would be hard to replicate in my own life. (Unless I just go haring off to fight Nazis, and honestly, who wouldn’t?)
They also tend to be snapshots. If you want to look at the big picture of a novel, it rarely covers an entire lifetime. They start when something changes in the world or the MC’s life and only follow along until there is a return to normalcy. It might be a few weeks, it might be a few years, but it’s almost never a whole lifetime. How do you translate that snapshot into the basis for the rest of your life?
I don’t think this is a bad prompt, really. It has me asking questions. How do I make this work? Even if I don’t have the answer to that question, I did sit and think about it and write out my thought process on it.
That’s about all I have for this tonight. I am not even here right now anyway. By now I am on an island in the Pacific Northwest enjoying my first taste of Pacific air and meeting some extended family for the first time. It’s still Thursday though, so there’s one prompt left for the week. It will be up tomorrow as usual! Have a great night and a wonderful Friday!
PS-Like these prompts? Like the short stories I write based on these prompts? Want to show your support? Give the blog a follow! Leave a comment! Buy me a coffee! I put a lot of time and effort into these posts and your support means the world to me! Ok, now go out there and write!
Closet Full of Notebooks 