AC Grayling

I was listening to a podcast the other day in which the philosopher A C Grayling was talking about a moment of high anxiety he had in his mid-20s: he was convinced, for various reasons, that he was going to die. He managed to calm his fears with the thought that when you die, all you really lose is the present moment, because the past is gone and the future hasn’t happened yet. As that particular present moment was pretty awful, he didn’t think his death would be such a great loss. But then he thought some more and he realised that the present moment is really a junction point between your past and future selves and as such it’s a lot more significant than it may at first appear.

Every action or inaction is a 'sliding doors' moment,

The roads not taken

This got me thinking about the momentousness of ordinary moments: of how, with every action or inaction, we are indelibly creating our past, and at the same time writing our future – with equally permanent ink. We’re making history, and mapping the course of our lives. What about all those turns we didn’t take on life’s road? What about all the people we might have been? What happened to all those other Alex Woolfs?

Limited time

If we’re lucky, we might live a total of 700,000 hours. 160,000 of those are spent growing up, and 220,000 are spent sleeping, leaving just 320,000 potentially productive hours. How much of that time do we waste, I wonder? I’ve spent too many of my allotted hours watching the tennis at Wimbledon this week. This is not untypical for me, sadly – I’m easily distracted. No one will remember me because I watched Wimbledon. In a few weeks’ time, even I will have forgotten those matches I watched. I could have spent that time crafting a great short story – something that might entertain someone a hundred years from now.

As writers we are like gods playing chess with our characters' lives.

Living through your characters

Speaking of stories, one of the ways in which they’re not like life is that nothing is indelible. Like God you can flit around in the background of your characters’ lives, zipping from past to future, adjusting things as you see fit. Your characters can make the choices and live the lives you want them to. If you really want, you can live vicariously through them. And if you do all that, you would be a very poor writer! If you want your characters to be like real people, then they must make their own choices, and their own mistakes. And they may end up wishing, like we do, that they could have made better decisions, and led better lives.