What if.....

The greatest stories come out of “what if” questions. Personally, I really like speculative fiction, especially parallel universe and time travel stories. They usually come out of the biggest “what if” questions. What if the Axis powers had won World War 2, or the Confederacy had won the Civil War? What if JFK were never assassinated? How would the world be different?

“What if” questions are also why I write romance, when I write anything non-academic (an increasingly rare occurrence). Since most of my what-ifs revolve around my love life (or lack thereof), my story writing is a way for me to come to terms with my own what-ifs. The biggest one is, of course, the summer before I went to Slovakia. What if I’d stayed in the US instead? My life would be incredibly different right now.*

What-ifs often present themselves right away. You walk away from a situation thinking, “Oh, I should have done x or said y”. You torture yourself for minutes, hours, or days with different variants of what you could have done or said to make things turn out differently. But the thing about what-ifs is that you can’t really evaluate them until time has passed, until your life has progressed beyond that turning point. I don’t want to get all fatalistic about stuff, but if things are meant to happen, they will happen. What-ifs suck at the time – and for years afterward in some cases – but in the end you may end up where you are supposed to be, even if it’s not where you planned and imagined.

And that’s why I write romances based (loosely) around my what-ifs. I love my life right here, right now, but I need to explore my what-ifs, and give myself a chance – even if it’s a fictional chance – to live out the life I am not leading.

*Of course, the what-if in that case has nothing to do with my actually going to Slovakia, since that was all in place before the what-if moment. But it’s complicated to explain without going into details, so it’s easier just to blame the what-if on Slovakia.