Note: We are introducing an ongoing series of guest posts, written by Dagan Books authors. Our first author, Nathan Crowder, wrote “The Fishwives of Sean Brolly” for Cthulhurotica.
I have a list of stories I want to write, contained within the pages of a little notebook I carry with me everywhere. As a writer, I feel compelled to keep it at hand so that I can jot down anything that inspires a story, as well as notes on ongoing projects. I’ll sometimes get in conversations with other people, writers and non-writers alike, who are a little surprised that I have more story ideas tucked away than I have time to actually write. The question that follows is invariably, “Where do you get your ideas?” The short answer? I pay a lot of attention to the world around me.
A shorter answer is simply this: tragedy.
Maybe you’ve noticed this, but the world kind of sucks from time to time. Don’t get me wrong. There are tons of things to be happy about, but more often than not, they seem like deliberate distractions to me. They are this civilization’s bread and circuses. It’s difficult for me to care who got “voted off the island,” when I read that there are organized rape gangs used by militants in the Congo to demoralize their opponents. Now, full disclosure time; I have a 9-5 job that involves working with a variety of charitable organizations so I’m keenly aware of a broad range of bad things going on all around the world. Add to that my natural curiosity and interest in world events, and let’s just say that I’ve seen some shit.
I deal with it by writing.
Susan Sontag once wrote, “Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.” Sure, there are exceptions. But a novel where nothing goes spectacularly wrong , thus motivating the plot into heights of peril, is a boring novel in my estimation. Sometimes they’re entirely imagined disasters, but not always. Most of the sci-fi tales that come to mind for me are cautionary ones.
But they needn’t be imagined tales of disasters yet to come, things we might yet avoid if enough people pay attention.
I was in New Orleans about five months before Hurricane Katrina and fell in love with the city. Somewhere during those few days, the architecture, the history, the people, the music, the food, Café du Monde, it all won me over in a way a city never had before. When the levee broke and flooded New Orleans, it was like a dagger in my heart. I wrote three stories about New Orleans to help me process the event, one of them being “None Left Behind.” A good, old-fashioned ghost story at its heart, the story was also a big-ol’ metaphor about how profoundly the flooding of the city haunted me. Writing it allowed me to mourn, and even 5 years later I can’t read it without tearing up.
I’ve dealt with the deaths of friends, personal medical fears, a miscarriage, issues of identity and insecurity, at least one divorce, and systematic bullying by writing about it. Exorcising those demons through fiction is a hell of a lot cheaper than therapy. And writing about horrors in the world at large helps me process my own feelings about them. More than that, the stories that are inspired by real world tragedy help connect you to other people touched by that incident. And they can help shed some light on real world ugliness that others people just don’t know about.
Andrew Vachss wrote his first novel based on professional experiences dealing with the children of abuse. He couldn’t find a publisher because they all felt it was too unrealistic, despite the fact that it was all deeply rooted in the real world; a world he had seen first-hand. But at the time, the collective mindset was that such things just didn’t happen. History has proven them wrong, and the book finally found a publisher.
The first Gato Loco novel, Greetings from Buena Rosa, was inspired by the unsolved murder of hundreds of women in Juarez, Mexico. I was outraged not only by the sheer number of murders, but also the corruption that led to people being tortured into confessing just so the police could show progress of some kind. A single NPR article set me on a trail of discovery that just got more and more frustrating the further I went. I wanted a simple answer. I wanted a hero to swoop in and sort it out. So I wrote one. Did it solve the problem? Of course not. But at least on one level, I could feel that justice was done.
Are you familiar with the firebombing of the German city of Dresden in WWII? Dollars to donuts says that if you are, it isn’t because of history class. It was bombed back into the Neolithic times but didn’t have any key strategic value, and was rebuilt relatively quickly. Sure, 135,000 people died in a matter of hours which is astounding. Sure, it was an atrocity. But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts you only know about it because one of the survivors wrote a book about incident. If not for Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, the firebombing of Dresden would be a footnote in a war filled with until then unimagined horrors.
At the rate the world is going now, I’m in no danger of running out of story ideas.
But there is hope as well.
As I write this, there is a series of demonstrations and protests which could, quite possibly, topple the autocratic government of Egypt. Imagine, an essentially leaderless revolution, organized from the ground up by the people, ignoring differences such as religion and age. A people united looking for a better world, using the tool of social media to make it happen. Now imagine it where the point of view character is an ancient djinn, or the leader about to be overthrown is a powerful but aging sorcerer. Imagine it in space. Look at the news and let your own flavor-of-the day inspire you.
And remember, just because the news might be tragic doesn’t mean that the story has to be. It’s your story, after all!
Links to references:
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/gunmen-carry-out-new-year-gang-rape-in-congo-msf/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_homicides_in_Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3605/the-art-of-fiction-no-64-kurt-vonnegut
About Nathan: Author, publisher, and lover of classic cocktails, Nathan can see the silver lining in any cloud, though this is rarely reflected in his writing. His fiction has ranged across many genres, but he is generally happiest in the urban fantasy, horror, mystery, or super-hero arena. His work has appeared in a number of recent anthologies, including Cobalt City Timeslip, Human Tales, Rigor Amortis, and Cthulhurotica. Nathan currently lives in the Bohemian wilds of Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood, where micro-brew beer flows like water and everyone wears ironic t-shirts and goatees – even the women. From there, he manages the small press Timid Pirate Publishing. Nathan shares an apartment with a cat named Shiva who is currently managing his career in exchange for fresh kibble. http://nathancrowder.com
