Living Life in a Narrative

I’ve given myself a heavy dose (bordering on overdose) of Aaron Sorkin this week. First, I started watching his Masterclass, which I had on my to-do list for a few months, where he talks about screenwriting and his writing process. Second, I re-watched Steve Jobs (he wrote the screenplay). And just earlier today, I heard him on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast, where was talking about his career and writing the Broadway play To Kill A Mockingbird.

In both the Masterclass and the podcast, Sorkin said the following sentence -

“People don’t live life in a narrative.”

As I type this, It’s 9pm on February 7, 2019. It’s been an interesting week in storytelling and it’s only Thursday.

First, the whole AJ Finn scandal came forth (if you haven’t heard of it, read this article in the New Yorker). He was at JLF, and we were scheduled to post his session on the Jaipur Bytes podcast (which we did do today, you can listen to it here).

Second, is a conversation I had earlier today with Ravi Shankar Etteth, author of a book called Killing Time In Delhi, for my other podcast Storytalking With Lakshya. We talked a lot about creating stories and characters, and specifically about exploring life through stories. His episode of Storytalking will be available on Saturday.

Third, the whole Sorkin thing I mentioned above.

I have had all this swirling in my head today, and I shared the above details of my week to give you the context of why I’m obsessing over what Sorkin said (which is why it’s the guide title!). So I hope you’ll allow me to figure out what it means through this guide.

I was hoping to make this guide a short one, but whenever I’ve said that, they are anything but short. Let’s see if I am wrong again.

So, let’s start with the AJ Finn thing. In case you didn’t read the whole thing, let me quickly summarize what happened. This guy who wrote this super popular book that people are comparing to Gone Girl and The Girl On The Train - turns out, he’s a compulsive liar. He’s lied about having cancer, about his mother being dead, and a few other things that may have been harmless on their own, but combined with everything else seem quite ridiculous. Oh, and he’s also blamed it all being bipolar.

So, what does this guy have to do with what Sorkin said? Well, first of all, his name isn’t AJ Finn. It’s literally a persona he created. The persona of a ‘novelist’. Secondly, and more importantly, based on what I’ve read in the article, the rest of his life seems to be chock-full of ‘stories’. This man seems to have literally created a narrative with the mask of a life.

A part of me finds that to be quite an accomplishment. That would be the objective part of me, the one who kill random people in video games like Grand Theft Auto or PUBG, because it’s ‘not real’. And because I’m not one of the people affected by Finn’s lies, anything I feel about what he has done is purely gossip, and of no help or harm to anyone.

What does interest me - the subjective side of me, the guy who thinks and writes what he thinks - is what makes a person do what he did. Creating fictional universes is one thing, but creating one that co-exists with the one we already live in - that’s… something else entirely.

Earlier today, in the podcast recording with Ravi, we touched upon the topic of writing when you’re young, and how when we do so, we’re basically trying on different voices and personalities to see which one fits. Eventually, we find a few that we agree with, and the stories start flowing.

The basic concept of a narrative contains two key components - a series of events that are connected, and an ending outcome.

Let’s start with the first component.

A Series Of Events

Let’s set up a basic assumption here that you and I can agree to - life is a series of events. Makes sense right? Good. Because that’s one thing that life and a narrative (or in this scenario, you can also call a narrative a ‘story’) have in common. Things happens, in both.

However, narrative becomes something newer, using the same ingredients, when it takes it upon itself to create a connection between these seemingly and unknowingly series of events. When you say this happened, and THEN that happened, you create a causal relationship between the two, which to an observer will look like this happened BECAUSE that happened before it. There is a big, big difference now. Life says - things happened. Narrative says - one thing happened after another thing happened, so they must be connected.

The reason narrative is able to get away with doing this is because it doesn’t require proof, just faith. In fiction, narrative can literally create an infinite amount of events come out of one event. However, in nonfiction, i.e. life, narrative doesn’t have the freedom of choice. So it just says - two things happened, and because I’m narrative and I firmly believe in connecting things, these two events are now forever connected. And because no other event took place after the first event, there is no alternative narrative possible. Hence, proved.

What I just described to you above is how I am thinking this whole thing myself, so it’s okay if it all sounds kind of obvious. I literally just narrativized my point.

Let’s jump to component #2, i.e., the culprit.

An Ending Outcome

This is where a difference of opinion becomes the problem.

The very nature of a series of events is that they don’t end. Why? Because time. Has time ever stopped? So how can things stop happening? Everything is happening, all the time, for all time.

This is where human ingenuity comes in.

From time to time, we like to do what we believe to be something super important - introspect. Checks and balances. Weigh things on a scale. Basically, we like to pause - only to ourselves and in our mind - the series of events at a particular event. Then, we look at the set of events we have, which from infinite and now become finite, and we try to see how different things became from event 1 (the first event in the set) to event 10 (the last event in the set). Whatever is the difference between the two, produces an ending outcome.

The ending outcome exists for us to understand if the end was any different from the beginning. If it was, then good. Things changed. The system works. If nothing changed, well, that’s okay too. It’s still an ending. We learned something. The system’s purpose is still intact.

It’s only when we connect the ending outcome to be the conclusion of the series of events that things start to become interesting and exciting (and dangerous).

Let me give you a very, very easy but criminally simplified example of life vs. narrative.

Let's use a mathematical example. Because aren’t those always fun?

You are watching a conveyor belt in a factory. The belt is taking pieces of chocolate from one end of the room to another, and as the pieces go across the belt, a machine is wrapping them up. Each chocolate is wrapped individually, and then put back on the belt. This machine is working at all times, all the time. But you, being a human, can’t watch it at all times. You’re the observer. You’re in charge of making sure the machine does its job. It’s never failed before, but that’s because you do your job right, right?

However, you do need to clock out sometime. You have to sleep. So how do you decide when to do that? You come up with a simple system.

You create a system that turns off the machine manually. Then every day at 8am, you press start. The belt starts. The chocolate comes from one hole in the wall. The chocolate gets wrapped. Then chocolate goes to the other hole in the wall. Then at 8pm, you turn the machine off. You count how many pieces were wrapped, and that’s what your progress was that day. You started with zero in the morning, and you ended with X in the night. X minus 0 is X. You made X today.

Your series of events is the conveyor belt’s journey from 8am to 8pm, and your ending outcome is X.

Sounds pretty mundane, right?

Let’s change a couple things then. See if we can dial up the interesting.

Let’s say that it’s 50,000 years ago. And instead of a conveyor belt, you have a forest. And instead of chocolate, you have a tree that gives you fruit. And instead of a clock, you have the Sun. You, are still the observer, just a human from 50,000 years ago. Everyday, when the sun up, you wake up. You go to the forest. You find the tree. You take out a couple pieces of fruit. You tell the tree ‘hey, tree, thanks for the fruit. I’ll come back tomorrow. Please make more fruit for me, okay?’ You go back home. You come back the next day. You get more fruit. Life goes on. But one day, when you reach the tree, it’s not the same tree anymore. There was a storm, and and the tree got uprooted. It’s dead. No more fruit.

So what do you do? Well, you curse the sky, of course. It took away your tree. You wonder why it did that though. Did you do something that made it mad? Maybe you forgot to thank the tree yesterday. Oh yeah. That’s what it was. You swear you won’t do it again.

You find another tree. You thank it every day. In fact, just to be safe, you start doing a little prayer. Sometimes, when the fruit is really ripe, you put a little decoration around the tree to show it how much you appreciate what it does for you.

You don’t ever, ever, want to make the sky angry at you again. Nor the tree gods. You love the tree gods. And they love you back.

Your wife used to ask you why you pray to the tree gods, and you tell her that it’s not just about the fruit… but just the act of praying makes you feel good about your deeds. It makes you feel good about taking the fruit too. Eventually, she starts praying too. And so do your kids - their parents do it, and who are they to question their elders?

However, there is a problem. One day you meet another man in the forest, and he has his own tree, but he seems to be praying to the soil gods, and not the tree gods… in fact, he even says that he doesn’t believe that your tree gods even exist.

How are you going to react to that?

What I just described above is the narrative our homo sapiens ancestors created so they could forage and gather resources from the forests. They created gods, and then they obeyed the gods.

Are you feeling like this guide has derailed a bit? Why did I just go on this sidetrack of chocolates and fruits and gods?

When I was a teenager, I started questioning God quite a lot. Eventually, I was pretty sure there was no god. However, it didn’t stop me from making connections and conclusions. If I wanted something, and I didn’t get it, I would torture myself for hours and days thinking about why that thing didn’t happen. I created connections between things even when there was no proof of there being any connection. And whatever happened, I called it an ‘ending’. Saying things like “that’s the end of that” or “I’ll never do that again”. I didn’t know it then, but all I was doing was building narratives. A narrative of my family life. A narrative of my love life. A narrative of my academic life.

Events, connections, conclusions.

Don’t get me wrong. I still do this. My career is a narrative I started 7 years ago and still invest in to this day. My relationships have all had very entertaining narratives and endings.

Many, many times, narratives help us. They help us so much that we swear by their importance. Because they have always helped us grow. Learn. Become better. However, sometimes we depend so much on narratives to grow, that we look for them in everything. These two things must be connected, right? She did that because I did that, right? I’m not a good person because I didn’t do that, right? I’m not a bad person because I didn’t mean to that thing, right?

Seemingly unconnected events, and a very weak ending outcome. That’s the dark side of narratives.

Wow. This guide seems to have taken a dark turn on it’s own. And to be honest, it seems like it’s narrative structure has been quite loose. Maybe I should fix that. Or maybe I shouldn’t.

You know I’m not going to.

I’ll end with a little bit of context. When Sorkin said the sentence that sparked off this guide…

Remember the sentence? Here it is again: “People don’t live life in a narrative.”

… he was trying to justify why his stories are so well structured, and why his dialogue is so unique. He was trying to say that lives are much messier, and disconnected, and people are usually not as quick-witted as his characters turn out to be.

Mr. Sorkin… I didn’t expect I would ever say this to you… but it looks like disagree with you a bit.

We live our lives in narratives. We create them. We even destroy them when it pleases us.  Some teach us. Some harm us.

I guess the only real difference between life and narrative is meaning.

When life lacks meaning, introduce a narrative and maybe, just maybe, the sky won’t be mad at us again.

That’s the end of this guide.

I hope it felt meaningful.

P.s. and FYI: Turns out, this is our 100th guide. I had no idea until I posted it. I guess some things do become meaningful my accident sometimes, don't they? And then we create the narrative in reverse... how interesting.