A few months ago, one of my authors introduced me to something called eternal recurrence.1
This is an idea that apparently goes back a long way, and was popularized by Nietzsche. It asks you to imagine that you discover your life will play out over and over again, forever, with every detail exactly the same. It seems to be about embracing fate. There have been philosophical arguments about it.
But for our purposes, the important thing is this: I misunderstood it when I first heard the concept.
The eternal recurrence test
Some philosophers argued against the idea that we are fated to relive the same life without a chance to vary anything or make different decisions, but I took this idea another way. As a tool for deciding the big stuff in life.
If I come upon a choice that I don’t have a perfectly rational way to evaluate, I can look at it through this lens. If I’m going to have to live with my decision not just now, but over and over again for eternity, will I be happier with what’s behind door 1 or door 2?
In other words, writers write.2
On the aptly named interview show Hot Ones, Aaron Paul said that when people approach him for advice, asking how they can get into acting, he asks them, “Are you doing it now?” If they say “no” he says “don’t.” Because if they were an actor they would already be acting, one way or another. That’s a little glib, but there’s truth to it.
There are a lot of different styles of writing and ways of approaching it. Some people outline and others just start. Some write every day and others in bursts. Some people love the feeling of the process and others suffer through it for the satisfaction of having written. Some write in secret and some in the open. Some write academic tomes and some write flash fiction. But they all have one thing in common—at some point they realize that they have to write.
So that’s the only question: are you the kind of person who, if your life was going to be played on repeat, wouldn’t be able to live with the version in which you didn’t write?
That was a heck of a segue, huh?