No one else will write your story except you
“The hero always comes out on top.” Or at least, that’s how Filipino soap operas always structure their stories.
You’ll rarely find local TV shows or movies where the hero ends up failing, making them very predictable— “di ‘yan mamamatay, bida eh.” (He’s not going to die, he’s the main character.”)
That’s how Filipino storywriters told it for the longest time. It’s why our brains have been wired to always expect a positive outcome, despite the challenges our heroes face.
And yet, for some reason, it’s an entirely different scenario when we try looking at our own life stories.
Granted, writing fiction is a much easier task vs. planning out our lives and following everything to the dot— plans rarely work out exactly as we expect it.
But what if we could suspend reality for a moment and try to write out each and every chapter of our lives? What if we could lay out the dominoes that needed to fall into place, helping our first push trigger a chain of events? Think about it: your own personal story, deemed worthy to be turned into a book or a movie.
How would it look like?