Stories can shine a light in dark times
I’ve been reading a book called Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories, by Charlie Jane Anders. Anders has become one of my favorite authors. She wrote City in the Middle of the Night, a fantastic science fiction novel, and she also wrote Victories Greater Than Death, part of a YA sci-fi space opera trilogy (I’ve got books 2 and 3 but am sort of saving them; it’s silly, I know, but I like having some of it to look forward to). I’ve taught her stories in my creative writing classes, and her own newsletter, Happy Dancing, is one of my favorites.
“People will always try to control you by constraining your sense of what’s possible,” she writes in the introduction. “They want to tell you that reality consists of only the things that they are willing to recognize, and anything else is foolishness.
“But you can reject their false limitations in the act of conjuring your own world—and carve out a pocket of your mind that they cannot reach, in the act of world-building.”
Anders started writing Never Say You Can’t Survive in 2020, one of the worst years of her life, and a lot of our lives. I’ve been reading the book in fits and starts since it came out, parceling out morsels of it like the kind of chocolate you save for yourself or only share with someone special. I’m currently in the most nuts-and-bolts section of the book, “How to Use Writerly Tricks to Gain Unstoppable Powers,” but the reason I’ve been drawn back to the book lately is because of that part of the title after the colon: getting through hard times.
The world is a pretty dark place right now, isn’t it? War, climate havoc, genocide, political instability, the rapid erosion of individual rights… it would be so easy to let pessimism win the day. At this point we’ve had so many opportunities to start making things better, and each time it seems we go, “Nah.” It would be easy to just throw up our hands and say “what’s the point?”
Tempting as that is, I bristle at it. A lot of people can’t just say “I’m out” and cede the field, not when their home is underwater or their town is being bombed, or when they’re being attacked and endangered for an intrinsic part of their identity. Even though it’s hard for me to do (maybe especially because it’s hard for me), hanging onto some sense of hope in bad times is important. It may seem frivolous, at first, but taking joy in something, anything, is an act of defiance.
I like to think there’s always a point in resisting, even if it’s just spite. And I’ve got spitefulness in abundance.
I often wonder what the point of writing stories is—what the point of writing my own stories is—and I think it comes down to hope. Telling a story is an act of optimism: that someone is going to read it, and that someone may find something in it that they identify with. When I’m writing stories that focus on people that the mainstream tries to pretend don’t exist, it’s also an act of defiance. It’s a slap in the face of everyone who tries to pretend we’re invisible: Hey, we’re right here, and we’re not going anywhere.
What I'm reading
In addition to Anders’s book, I also just checked out Under Fortunate Stars from the St. Louis County Library. I came across it on a list of recommended science fiction books (I wish I could remember where!), and it’s still early days—I’m barely a chapter in. But I can say it doesn’t waste any time and hits the ground running.
What I'm working on
You may remember that when you signed up for this newsletter, you got an e-book of free stories. (Didn’t get it? You still can! Download it here.) Anyway, I’ve been tinkering with it lately and have decided to overhaul it completely with new stories, including one that’s never been published. (Granted, I could have tried harder, but then novels got in the way and one thing led to another and, well, anyway.) The new version is going to focus on the young adult stories I’ve written, of which there are a few, including “The Trouble with Billy,” which is a prequel of sorts to my YA novel The Unwanted (which is also available in all the usual places, I’m just saying). Even though the e-book’s normally only available when you first sign up, everyone on the list will get it once I finally get it ironed out.
And that’s it for now. See you next month!
