On alternate timelines

Or, the sliding bubble of life on the swirling vortex of time

I took a lot of creative writing classes in college—screenwriting, poetry, and fiction. (Let me pause here to complain that if you are teaching in higher ed, you need to tell the students what to call you. You want to be called Professor Terwilliger? Great, will do. Gonna show how hip you are and go by Dr. T? Cool, you earned that PhD. You want to be called Sideshow Bob? Weird, but okay.) Anyway, all of this to say that I had a writing instructor who my friend and I assiduously avoided calling by name in class but privately referred to as T.M.

T.M. had this concept that he referred to as the sliding bubble of life on the swirling vortex of time (I'm pretty sure that was the phrase; it's been two decades). TSBOLOTSVOT is essentially the idea that everything in your past brought you to the current moment. So everything in your character's past informs the current scene.

Dramatic re-creation of the drawing that always accompanied discussion of TSBOLOTSVOT

I think about this sometimes. You can't always trace everything back, but sometimes you can. Like, if I hadn't developed vertigo, I wouldn't have come home from Boise when I did, the job and apartment I got in Salt Lake wouldn't have been available for me to get, I wouldn't have gone to church where I did, and I wouldn't have ended up meeting my now-husband.

Maybe I would have married someone else and been as happy. This is not very Romance novelish of me, I'm sorry, but it's probably true. Or maybe we'd have met some other time, some other way, romance-style.

See, before we both lived in Salt Lake City, before I was in Boise and he was in Logan, I was in Arizona and he was in California. But he had a friend out here that he visited a lot. And as best as we can tell, we were both at the same Halloween party in 2004, five years before we met five hundred miles away. If life were a book or a movie, we would have been crossing paths all the time without the timing quite working out, until finally we did. (This is the plot of a book I read once, but which isn't the book of the week because I can't actually remember which book it was, just that I was impressed by how many near misses the author came up with.)

Sliding Doors does this. Sure, if she'd found out that her boyfriend was cheating on her she would have gotten the better haircut and met John Hannah sooner, but then she'd die, so obviously the way things happened in real life was better.

Book-wise, I have been thinking about this because of This Spells Love by Kate Robb.

See how the cover teases the dual timeline?

This is a fairly recent release with an interesting spin on the dual timeline. The main character does a spell to forget her loser ex, but as a result her best friend (whom she met on the same night) forgets her. So she resolves to make him become her friend again, but as she goes about it, she realizes the ways that failed relationship rippled positively through their lives. So then she’s faced with the decision of undoing the spell and going back to the timeline where they were just friends but his circumstances were better, or staying where they’re in love. It’s a fun take on the TSBOLOTSVOT and obviously whatever she choose, it ends happily (non-spoiler alert).

The moral of the stories is always the present timeline is the best timeline. Even if somewhere there’s a version of you with better hair or the relationship you want or John Hannah is your boyfriend, you’re always better off with the life you have. And everything in your past has brought you to the point you are now, even if you wish it had been different.