The Idea I Thought Was Mine

Passengers on a short flight in Australia have an unsettling experience in “Here One Moment.” An ordinary-looking woman stands, moves through the cabin, and quietly tells each person the cause and date of their death.

Heart Failure. Fifty-five. Fate can’t be fought.

The flight lands, everyone goes their separate ways, but the predictions begin haunting the passengers’ lives. Yes, some come true, and the news spreads online like a spark landing on dry brush. The scene is gripping; one of the best I’ve read.

The novel then follows several regular folks with jobs, family, young and old grappling with whether to believe said random prophecies. This one moment changes relationships, impacts choices, and contemplates whether knowing your fate is a gift or a curse.

Liane Moriarty wrote a beautiful book. And a frustrating one because, damn it, this was my idea.

Hundreds of people claim they had the same idea first; go watch the Social Network. Those hulking Winklevoss twins settled in court over the ordeal. Me? I’ve never met Moriarty. She lives on the other side of the world.

But I do have receipts! I put pen to paper years ago. I’m a slow writer. Deliberate even. This stems from too many side projects, household duties, and, well, that day job.

It also shows that your ideas aren’t unique. Execution does matter. If you’ve read anything on this site, you pick up I love Dan Brown. He’s the pinnacle of grabbing an idea and building a thriller around said concept. The Da Vinci Code, considered blasphemous and revolutionary in the late 90s, wasn’t an original idea. Numerous papers and academic books had been circulating suggesting Jesus might have fathered a child with Mary Magdalene.

Nothing new. Heck, Dan Brown was accused, sued, and found not guilty for stealing the idea. I love his books. If I had to rank, Inferno is my favorite. But the latest, which I reviewed weeks ago, I’ll stand by my disappointment. Still, he’s committed to his process, bringing real-world edge theories to the page. In his latest, the magic of society is that we are subconsciously interconnected.¹ If we’re all receivers, constantly picking up signals from each other, that could explain Facebook’s rapid rise; why we’re all going crazy on the political front.²

We do share a connection. Which means we share ideas too—sometimes the exact same ones. The mystical muse might be a thing.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that an Australian writer and I had a similar idea. No, our books are not similar in execution. She ran circles around me. Neither is the plot. But we essentially shared the same concept. I suppose we can shout spoilers, but my short story has been in the wild for more than a minute. The essential question: What would you do if you knew the exact day you would die?

Or what’s known in dark circles as The Day Life Breaks. It’s a brutal question that cuts to how one spends their time. Would your answer change if that day is in forty years? Ten? Or what about next week? What would you do? What questions would you ask yourself? Here are a few; the kind that nag at all hours once they burrow into your head:

• Am I spending enough time with my kids?
• Should I be burning the midnight oil at work?
• What about those unused vacation days?
• What should be written on my tombstone?
• Where do I stand with the almighty?
• Who do I owe an apology to? Am I waiting for them to go first?
• Who have I been performing for instead of being present with?
• Do I have any roads not taken?
• What about the hike to Machu Picchu?
• Would I run this life back the same way, knowing what I know?

The Day Life Breaks Conundrum

Lordy, it’s easy to run yourself in circles debating life. As the great Captain America would say, ”I could do this all day.”

For my lead character, Elliot, he lived a negative life, always thinking the world was out to get him or worse. It sort of was, I guess. I think that’s why I struggled to reach the finish. Not on paper, but when I was supposed to be sleeping, finding myself staring at the ceiling fan wondering if I’d been spending my days on the right projects. You leave yourself on the page, and the page changes you back. One lives the life they live from the beginning. This made me hop on the nostalgia train again—back when winning and losing were simpler, measured in plastic balls and backyard bragging rights.

Games of Sport

When I was a kid, I played a number of sports. Baseball. Football. Basketball. Tennis. A little track and field. One of the best was Wiffle ball. Thin bat. Plastic ball. With the right amount of spin, you can make the ball dance in front of a batter. Bert Blyleven, eat your heart out. I’m sure Hall of Fame ballplayers played Wiffle ball as children (no empirical evidence here, just a gut check). I can still feel the weight of that plastic in my palm.

Summertime, we’d gather at the park and play until darkness crept. I marveled at the older kids. They hit the ball a country mile, crushing it across the street with ease (that was considered a home run). Trying any drill I could think up, I spent hours trying to catch up. I’d throw a tennis ball against the garage. Swing-weighted bats. Anything to find an edge and beat the other guy. In life, we set a number of goals based on what our peers accomplish. We admire the Porsche or Corvette in the neighbor’s garage. Envy a teammate’s promotion. Become jealous of what our high school classmates went on to accomplish.

I suppose this is fine, an operating system bug found in human nature. Eventually, I did become king of the Wiffle ball diamond. After it happened, the game lost its luster. So it went, until one day our team was soundly beaten by a ragtag group a few towns over. Dejected, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through all that effort again. Thinking back, it makes me ponder if, at times, I was playing the wrong game. Instead of fueling the envy monster, maybe trying to improve would have been the better approach. Self-reflection and measurement are the better answer. But damn, it sure was fun.

Eight Years of Reckoning

When I finished my story’s last page, I wondered if I’d been living on autopilot, optimizing for metrics that don’t matter. What have I missed? The apology I should make? The unused vacation days? Yes, we always say there is more time.

That’s why Elliot’s tale took eight years. Every time I sat down to write Elliot’s reckoning, I had to consider my own. Was I performing for someone instead of being present? What did I gravitate toward at age nine, long before the world started editing me?

Dangerous questions. The kind that make you put the manuscript away for months at a time. The kind that make you avoid that last coat of polish.

We chase the neighbor’s Land Rover, the teammate’s promotion, the home run across the street. But what if the day life breaks isn’t about winning someone else’s game? What if it’s about figuring out which game you actually want to play?

Different Fields

No matter, I did finish that haunting book. And yes, Moriarty wrote a better novel. Let’s be honest; her book is tighter, more commercial, hits the emotional beats with precision. She won this round.

But maybe I was playing the wrong game. That Wiffle ball problem all over again.

One can spend years chasing someone else’s benchmark—write the thriller that sells, craft the plot that hooks, nail the structure that agents want. Meanwhile, the real question wasn’t whether I could hit a home run across the street. It was whether I was even playing on the right field.

The Day Life Breaks forced me to ask: What am I doing with this book? And what does it say about me?³ And the answer wasn’t to write a bestseller. It was to tell a story. To write something true. Something that made people pause their life’s pursuit and ask themselves the hard questions.

Moriarty’s book sold more copies. Good for her; she earned it.⁴

But we didn’t write the same book. She wrote about fate. I wrote about waking up before it’s too late. Different games. Different rules. Different definitions of winning.

The important thing is to reflect. Not just on the project but on life itself. And maybe, just maybe, stop measuring your swing against the kid across the street. Part of me still thinks I need to go back and clean up that missed period in that darned Crimson Cone chapter. Slow the build-up for certain characters. And, oh, do I have more than a few lazy stereotypes. But that final boardroom scene is epic—I nailed that scene.

Hey, I won’t go back home again. But there’s always another book, and I’ve got three in the pipeline. Ever onward.

Footnotes