It was after reading the book Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder, that I decided to write a similar book, but with football players. I studied the structures of the novels and discovered that it is in three parts: introduction, climax and outcome.
The recommendations of Ayn Rand and others helped me understand the importance of previously defining the theme, plot, and character characteristics. As an architect accustomed to Gantt charts, I made a graph of timelines, one for each character, to integrate their conflicts and final outcome.
My original idea was to do something similar to what Jostein Gaarder did with Sophie’s World, where he exposes the history of philosophy, in correspondence lessons within a novel plot, where the protagonist is a teenage woman. Instead, I would present objective philosophy, not in a correspondence course, but in philosophical meetings where three football player friends, in the style of Plato’s dialogues, would present objective philosophy with football metaphors, within a novel plot, where the protagonist would be an elite football player, who would play in Europe and win the 2018 Football World Cup in Russia.
I started writing it in 2016 in my apartment in the neighborhood of Las Cañitas, located on the streets of José Ortega y Gasset corner Soldado de la Independencia, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Due to my financial freedom, I was able to dedicate myself completely and I finished it at the end of 2017. I sent the summary to about thirty publishing houses in various countries who responded that they were not interested.
Although philosophical meetings were part of the plot, they were interrupted by the density of philosophical topics such as metaphysics and epistemology. I printed some physical copies and gave them to several people. They agreed that the plot was interrupted and that they had understood little or nothing about philosophy.
In 2018 I didn’t write anything, because I worked all that year as a real estate manager in Miami, but I took two physical copies to take them to two publishing houses, something I never did.
More and more the idea of separating the plot of the novel from the philosophical meetings took shape. I would have to write two books, a novel and an essay. The novel, would focus on the plot; the essay, in the content of philosophical meetings, but it had to be presented not as an essay, but as a practical reference manual.
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