“I don’t know the meaning of life,” one of my mentors once said, “and I don’t know the purpose of life. But I do know the answer to life.
The answer is: Solve The Problems.
This week is Cheltenham Week.
Cheltenham was my “home town”, being the nearest town to the village where I was raised. It is also home to the National Hunt Festival—the biggest jumps race meeting of the year.
I’ve been maybe four or five times over the decades. One year, six of us had just one winner between us over the six races that day. 36 bets, 35 losers. In one race the champion jockey stormed home in champion style—on a horse that none of us had considered, let alone backed—at 20/1.
Picking winners at Cheltenham is hard.
Which brings me to Fluke, by Brian Klaas, the book I am currently listening to on my daily walks. It is fascinating and I thoroughly recommend it. One point that Klaas makes is that we humans are hard-wired to try to make sense out of chaos. We seek explanations. Reasons. We impose our need for patterns on whatever is going on around us. We find them, whether they are there or not (and they usually aren’t—but that’s humans for you).
Listening to Klaas reading his own book, I realized that he has made a very strong case for something I have always believed:
Stories make sense. Life doesn’t.
This is, I think, why I enjoy creating stories so much. Setting myself the problems, and the what if’s, and accompanying my characters through the chaos. Until it all becomes clear in the end.
A story is a bit like an iceberg. As readers, we don’t see the nine-tenths of it that are underwater. That is where the work is done. I believe it is the writer’s job to do that work, not the reader’s. All the reader has to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.
Book Three in the New Rock series, New Rock New Rules (to be published in November 2025), was quite the challenge to write. I must have discarded at least two hundred pages as various possibilities led me off in various wrong directions. Nope, that doesn’t work, dead end, go back, figure it out, try again.
“The Answer” is presented in Chapter Nine (of 40), in a few simple lines of verse. Yes, that’s what it says, but what does it mean? Well, that is the challenge facing our heroes, who soon have not one but two overwhelming threats to deal with—and little time in which to discover how to do so. So they have to go off in different directions, to new lands, to see if they can figure it out and Solve the Problems.
Looking back, once they reach the end, it all makes sense.
And this is why we, who live in a world of chance and chaos and confusion, love and need stories.
Life doesn’t make sense. Stories do.
