According to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, “For more than 15 years, Gabriel García Márquez worked on a story about the Buendía family and the town of Macondo. In the fall of 1965, with support from his family, friends, and members of the literary group La Mafia, García Márquez quit his job and locked himself up in his studio to write the novel that would bring him world fame.
While writing One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad], Gabriel exchanged letters with friends and writers in Latin America and Europe, giving them updates on how the novel was going.
After so many years of setbacks and unsuccessful attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad], in 1965 García Márquez wrote to his friend, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, about his new novel: ‘I’m very happy with it.’
At home, he read passages and chapters of the novel in progress to his close friends and visitors and received their opinions. Concerned that the novel would not sell, he tested the novel with different publics by publishing excerpts of several chapters in magazines read in more than 20 countries.
As a result, international expectations about the forthcoming novel grew. When One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] was published in May 1967, it became an immediate global success and soon changed the course of world literature.”
Now, why am I relating all of this to you?
Because Gabriel García Márquez, with all his preparation to get the novel into the hands of people who might read it, made a very interesting choice.
He divided the book into 20 sections, but these “chapters” are unnamed and unnumbered.
Did that choice make the novel less readable, compelling, or praise-worthy? Maybe not.
But it did make the novel harder for most of our brains to categorize. It made it harder to recognize patterns. It made it harder to reflect on and share our favorite parts.
Unlike García Márquez, who left his readers to navigate without numbered or named chapters, we have the opportunity to add clarity and structure to our own stories.
This week we’re finishing up a quarter of a new century. It’s been 25 years since December of 1999 and all the Y2K hullabaloo.
Perhaps this is a good year to look back and add some structure to some chapters of our own. Chapters we will name and number.
I can’t wait to hear about it.
If you want an activity to get you started, click here to download my brand new Chapter reflection exercise – hot off the press.
And don’t worry, if you want the same January letter I offer every year, I’ve got that, too!
Do one or both or neither, but in some way, PLEASE, look back and give yourself some credit for the year you’ve had, reflect on where you are right now, and look ahead to where you’re going.
It’s worth it. I promise.
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