Art & Creativity Quote by Lynn Johnston

Life-as-novel metaphors are usually a soft landing for self-help, but Lynn Johnston’s version has a cartoonist’s quiet bite: it admits the panel borders. “Part of it is written for you” concedes the hard ink of circumstance - family, illness, money, the era you’re born into - the stuff no amount of positive thinking can erase. Then she swivels: “part of it is written by you.” Not everything is agency, but agency is real, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of surrender.

The line works because it splits the difference between fate and fantasy. Johnston doesn’t sell the intoxicating lie that you’re the sole author of your life; she also refuses the equally comforting lie that you’re merely a character trapped in someone else’s plot. That balance is essentially the worldview behind long-running comic strips: you inherit the cast, the setting, the backstory, the ongoing continuity. Still, a single decision can change the tone of the whole series.

There’s subtext in the insistence on “the ending.” Endings are where meaning gets retrofitted. In fiction, a last chapter can redeem pages of chaos or expose them as wasted motion; in real life, we tell ourselves we’ll make sense of it later. Johnston’s claim is bracing because it’s less about control than responsibility: you may not choose the genre, but you’re accountable for the closing lines - the relationships you repair, the risks you take, the kind of person the reader meets in the final frames.