Life vs. Literature

I worked 4 long years to earn a Bachelor's Degree in English.

I've read authors from Homer to Virgil, Jane Austen to Mark Twain, Christina Rosetti to Bram Stoker, John Milton to Shakespeare and countless others in between. I've met reckless heroes I've fallen in love with, headstrong heroines I've learned valuable lessons from, kindhearted secondary characters I've found remarkably relatable, and foul villains I secretly hope find the good in themselves.

I've bled into dozens of papers, 1000 words to 15 pages long, analyzing 4 tiny stanzas through a single theme spanning 5 books. In all of my readings, I've been trained to pull out and qualify character motives, logical theme progressions, heavy symbolism, location relevance, and repetition. I can slash chapters down to a single sentence of summary and write paragraphs about the particular usage of a four-word phrase.

You can't point out an object, place, name, action, dream, color, time period, buffer scene, rhyme, alliteration, or exclamation point that I can't find meaning in.

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I think that to a certain extent, my analytical nature can be helpful for self-evaluation, determining why my feelings may be hurt, or why I might be acting irrationally, even how events of my past have helped me to grow into a functioning adult.

But too often, I find myself analyzing my life, the people in it, and every major event like I would one of my stories. What could he gain from saying this?  What about her character would motivate her to act that way? Why are you wearing that color to this event? Why choose this particular phrasing to make your point?

Books are written with a purpose - to entertain, to feel, to inspire, to teach, giving us role models perhaps absent in the real world, or allowing us to travel without being able to afford a plane ticket.

But people are not characters. Life is not a novel. There is no careful revision process involved in everyday circumstances where only the details that matter make the cut.

Real people are not eloquent, many (like myself) unable to muster the command of the spoken word at a moment's notice. Actually, most of the people I know don't even have a brain-to-mouth filter. So I can't analyze their words, actions, or choices with as much relentless fervor as I would Jane Eyre's.

I need to take a moment's thoughtfulness (no matter how small), a kind word (no matter how simple), or an act of decency (no matter how standard) at a higher value in real life than I would an act of the same magnitude which might take pages to express in the confines of  a novel.    It is much simpler for an author to create that which is admirable in a character than for a person of good character to express himself as a best-selling author.

Real. Life. Is. Not. A. Book.