December 10, 2014, TGIW: Unhumping Hump Day!

“I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.” –Elvis Presley

The season has many old holiday favorites showing on television, one of which is “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart.

In it, George Bailey discovers that the failure he thought his life to be just wasn’t so…and that the impacts of his life thus lived had been blind to him, but huge nonetheless.

The movie reminds us that we can’t underestimate the extent to which every small or large act on our part extends to shape the lives and world around us.

In recent years, the field of chaos theory has presented this idea in purporting that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s called the “butterfly effect.”

One more lesson of the movie is that we all have a story which is continually being written. We all have a story which is continually being written. (I could write it again, but you get the point: we still don’t know the ending.)

Fiction readers thrive on the unexpected twist in a story, those things occurring or characters appearing which we couldn’t have predicted or imagined.

What if we all became great fiction writers this coming year?

If you had the pen (or keyboard), what unique, exciting and unexpected twists would you build into your life story…as a complete departure from the steady-eddie plot thus far?

Where would you throw in some flaps of your wings that would create whole new weather patterns in the world?

Got writer’s cramp?

“I used to think, ‘How can I write my life story? I’m still living it.’” –Frank Serpico