According to Wikipedia, it’s an English expression that came from a Chinese curse. I think it’s a silly thing to say. We’ve always lived in interesting times. The fact is if you don’t think of it that way, then you’re not paying attention. Below, I’ve added some of my favorite dialogue in any movie, but specifically from the movie, Adaption where Nicolas Cage’s character has to write a screenplay about a very boring book and he doesn’t know how to do it.

I fully agree with Robert, if you can’t find anything to write about, then you’re not working hard enough. Your very life, existence is a source of conflict. When you eat, breath, drink water, live somewhere, you are taking those opportunities from someone else. Do you deserve them? Well, that’s a question you have to answer yourself. Given recent events, we’ve learned that there are people that think they deserve everything in the world and there are people that are very angry about that.

There’s a story. A story that the news would become obsessed with, has and will. Think about your character’s journey. They see the injustice in the world and what do they do with it? Do they fight back against it or do they accept it? Do they join with it?

Going back to the concept of interesting times. I want you to consider how ordinary we think of birds. We see them doing their thing and going about their business. We daydream of being among them. One person imagines a young boy getting too big for his britches, his father making him a pair of wax wings and flying too close to the sun. Suddenly, we have a parable that lasts for all of time.

A pair of Jewish teenagers take the concept of Moses in the basket and the idea of flight and turns it into the first superhero. An image that has existed for near a hundred years.

Hell, two brothers create planes and open up the world for everyone to travel and see everything. They license those planes out to the post office to deliver mail, a post officer finds a bomb, throws it out of the plane and it blows up a building. The army who had once dismissed the military applications of the plane now create the air force.

Even if you think it’s boring, consider how your life could have changed if you made a different choice in that moment? You went out for a quart of milk. You see a baby carriage charging down the sidewalk towards a cross street. You jump in the path of it. You pull the baby out of it. Oh, shit, demon baby. The baby screams at you. There’s only thing to do. You dunk that baby in the local kids’ hoop. The baby is NBA jammed straight back to hell.

You could do something that makes more sense. A car pulls up with a beautiful person of the gender that you’re attracted to. They ask you if you want to take a ride. You wake up missing a kidney but having gained three livers. What happens now?

It’s such a big, beautiful world with so many stories and strange things in it. I want you to think about the weirdness and the ordinary and how you can turn it into a story that’s uniquely yours. There’s something you did today that’s worth telling everyone about.