Moving The Plot Forward

In most movies, plays, novels— and especially advertising— nothing happens unless it is part of the plot. If someone coughs in a play, you know they will get sick and die. If there is a close-up on a clock, that time will be important later on, or help you derive meaning from the scene. Every moment, every event, moves the plot forward. It leads the characters to where they need to be for everything to happen the way it is written. There are no accidents.

Real life is a lot messier. Accidents happen all the time. But lately I’ve been thinking: if I pretend that all the events happening around me are moving the plot forward, if I infuse them with some significance, then I can use them to shape my own experience.

For example, by using my imagination, I can insist that the kick-plate under the car came loose so that I would have some quality time with my wife. First, we took our car to the dealership. While we waited for the repairs, we walked through the winter slush to the mall. We sat and relaxed, and drank coffee. We talked about our lives for about forty minutes— forty wonderful, connected minutes we wouldn’t have had otherwise in our crazy busy lives. The crappy, broken car was giving us this moment. In a book or a movie, this would be the moment we would make an important decision about our lives that would alter our destiny forever! But in our case, we just sat comfortably and enjoyed each other.

Then, in a David Lynch-ian fashion, an old man came by and announced to anyone with ears how wonderful it was to be retired and eighty-three. Would this character be reoccurring? We dropped in to Winners and by some fluke they happened to have the compact car power usb adapter I wanted, for a great price. Again, if we were in a movie, the camera would push in on the car adapter and the audience would know that it was an important future plot point. Perhaps it will be…

Later, the dealership screwed us over on the price of the repairs. Who was writing this drivel, I thought to myself. The plot had become so predictable. This made me smile. I actually smiled in a car dealership. The alternative was to get upset that the car broke. The alternative was to get upset that we had to walk to a crappy mall in the cold and wait there for an hour. The alternative was to get upset that I was being overcharged, and then argue with my wife about who could have haggled down the price better. The alternative was to let this course of events upset me. I’m so glad it didn’t turn out that way.

Life throws curves at us constantly. It may not be perfect fiction, but flexing your imagination muscles and infusing those annoying events with a cinematic sense of purpose, can make life more enjoyable. Keep moving your plot forward.