“When one door shuts, another opens.”
Various versions of this thought have been used in quotes attributed to several people over the years. It was one of my mother’s favorites. And it is something that all of us, writers included, need to keep in mind.
In real life, doors open and shut on us many times over the years– doors that lead to jobs, love, opportunities. What we need to do in these situations is to be aware when a door starts to shut, shove a mental foot in the way and then take some time to assess what we want the outcome to be. Do we want to stop that door from closing? So how do we do it? Or when we really think about it, does that door lead somewhere we really don’t want to go?
It is the same thing for writers. Our creativity sends us down a path in a story. We scribble or type away and, sometimes, we can almost hear a door creaking shut. If that door shuts, what will happen to our plot? Our characters? Is your hero or heroine trapped it a dead-end situation? Can you write them out of it? Is it a situation you cannot resolve and frankly don’t want to? Or could it be a doorway you want to stay open and you have to scramble to find a creative way to stop it from closing.
A friend once asked what I would do if I killed off everyone in my Lamb’s Bay Mysteries series. “There would be nobody left to write about,” she said. “What would you do?” I thought about it for a moment and said “Then I would just create some new characters and situations. That’s the advantage of writing fiction.”
It is our creative spirit that we need to flex when we see doors closing in our texts. One writer I heard speak at a conference was asked what he would do if his characters got trapped in a dead-end alley. He said he would invent a hidden door they could use to escape. We have the power over our writing to take it where we want it to go.
Similarly we have that power in our own lives. Sometimes we are so hung up on what is behind that door, things from our past and our current lives, that we hang on to the doorknob until the very last minute, until our toe is squished against the door frame and we are defeated by the closing door. What if we fail to see in our hour of extremis is that behind us, other doors are sitting ajar, beckoning us. We have choices. These choices can lead to unexpected opportunities.
My mother was a big fan of the “when one door shuts, another opens” quote. She was always repeating it whenever she faced a setback in our lives. And I thank her for giving me that inner core of resilience to fall back on.
We’ve all been faced with a slammed door at some point. But to move forward we need to be brave enough to walk through another. Think of this whenever you hit a roadblock in your life or your writing takes you down a dead-end plot line.
Remember the old quiz shows when you got to choose your prize by picking Door #1 or Door#2? That choice is still available. We can make that decision. Which door will you chose when the time comes? The door that leads backwards or the one that leads to the unknown and future possibilities? I’ve already made my choice.
