Last night hubby and I watched Stranger Than Fiction .  If you aren’t familiar with the plot, it’s about a guy who begins to hear a voice… narrating his life.  Turns out he’s a character in a novel, and with a few exceptions, she doesn’t tell him what is going to happen, but rather what has just happened or what he’s thinking, the way a good narrator would.  Then suddenly he hears “Little did he know, this would lead to his imminent death…”

Hubby rated the film somewhere between “watchable” and “compelling”, but not quite compelling, he was quick to add.  I suppose that falls in the category of “just a tad more than slightly interesting”.   (We use a complex scale in our house.)

Now I liked the idea behind the film, and have no trouble imagining this as possible, as ridiculous as it seems.  If it seems your life is too boring to be fictional, the “hero” in the film was a compulsive, awkward tax collector who counted how many steps it took to get everywhere and the brushstrokes he took when cleaning his teeth.  I’m boring, but at least my personality isn’t that painful.  So I qualify as character-worthy, at least on that front.

I think my problem is not my character, but my author.  She’s a real frickin slacker, and my life is probably stuck in the bottom drawer of her desk because she can’t decide where she wants the plot to go, so I’m not being properly narrated, which tells me why I don’t know what’s going on myself half the time.   Some people stress about wanting to know the future.  I’d be content to know what’s happening now.

My guess is, in fact, she’s probably taken some low-paying secretarial job where she ends up getting coffee for some overbearing, sweaty boss who doesn’t realise it’s not 1964 anymore.  She probably imagines writing plot notes that come to her in a flash of inspiration on cocktail napkins, and maybe even tells people that she does, and she probably carries a notebook with her for just such an occasion.  However… I think she’s deluding herself.  She hasn’t actually written a word in months, and doesn’t bother fantasizing about what she’ll wear for her jacket-cover photo anymore.

You’d assume that having created a character such as myself she’d be possessed with creative juices, or at least a nice mango squash.  However, she’s let herself get lonely and carved a rut, judging by the evidence at hand.

I’m not sure what one does to wake up their author, to say, “Pardon me, but life in your filing cabinet isn’t as stimulating as one might suppose.  Could we get some literary devices going please?”  Because I could use my narrator back, although I could gladly skip the the foreshadows.

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