Guset Post: Nicola Morgan on 'Is Luck Real?'

Today, I have the lovely Nicola Morgan (author of Wasted) here to tell us a little bit about her new book and a main topic in Wasted, luck. Thank you very much Nicola!

"Nicola Morgan is an award-winning author for teenagers, with successful titles such as Fleshmarket, Deathwatch, Blame My Brain and Sleepwalking. She prefers to forget that she also used to write Thomas the Tank Engine Books... When she's not writing, she loves speaking in schools, and at festivals and conferences in the UK and Europe, She also enjoys messing around on Twitter or her blogs. Nicola blogs for writers at www.helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com and has set up a special blog about her brand new book, Wasted - you can join the activities and contribute in lots of ways at www.talkaboutwasted.blogspot.com"

Hello and huge thanks to Sasha for allowing me to invade her blog today!

WASTED is about how chance or luck rule our lives. Your existence is based on chance events: the fact that your parents met, and that their parents met, and their parents… Our lives are full of things that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t gone down that street, or missed that bus, or smiled at that person, or decided to go to that party…

But… there’s no such thing as chance. Not really. Everything happens because of something else, never randomly (though it may appear to). For example, why did I go down that street and not the usual one? Because something made me – I may not know what it was, but something made my brain make that decision. Nothing comes from nothing. Why does a coin land heads up? Because of physics, not chance, because of how it was spun, or the air currents, not because some random god controlled it. “Luck is just what we call it,” says Jack in Wasted. And he’s right. That’s what luck is – just our name for events that we seem not to control.

Jack thinks that most people don’t think enough about why things happen, don’t take control. He thinks about it, all the time. But then Jack has good reason to be obsessed by luck. He lost his mother, twice, both times by appalling bad luck. If things had been just fractionally different, she’d never have died. And both times it was, in many ways, his fault, even though he was a small child.

So Jack decides that you have to take control, make decisions, even if those decisions are tiny and seem unimportant. He knows that everything makes a difference: going down this street and not that one, or leaving the house five minutes later, or smiling at that person, or not, or eating in this restaurant and not that one. And Jack’s method of attracting luck to himself is to allow the coin to decide small actions**. He thinks that if he can throw himself on the coin’s mercy, like a sacrifice, luck will follow him.

And usually it does. But then, unluckily, one day it doesn’t. And the consequences are terrible. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been for that coin, Jack and Jess would never have met. Tiny apparently chance events came together for them to meet, fall in love, and spiral towards the end – and the end depends on you spinning a coin. If you dare take that chance…

So, can we control our luck? Lots of people think so – or at least that we can control it a bit. I blogged here about an amazing experiment that seems to prove this. Basically, the more opportunities you take, the more likely you are to be lucky and successful – so, do apply for that course, join that team or club, sign up for a new experience, read that book: you just never know where it will lead. You may not be able to control luck but you can open your life to its opportunities.
Good luck and let your life spin boldly!
** Do not let a coin rule your life: Jack is wrong about this – he’s damaged and dangerous. Don’t copy him!