A Writer’s Dilemma
How is your life going? Do you wake up every morning wondering how many problems you are going to face that day? Do you worry about how many fires you are going to have to put out? Do you like living like that? Do you ever wish life could be something other than one continual set of serial problems?
Many of us live our lives that way, especially now that Covid has decided to mutate on an accelerated schedule. I hate to say this, but I heard from many knowledgeable people that there is a real chance that wearing masks and social distancing will be with us for a long time. Some think it may be permanent.
So, what exactly is the dilemma for a writer here? Most writer’s like to escape into the world they create. Some like to idealize the world that is conjured up on the page. People who write about Utopias do this. They can slide right into the world they made and sit next to their favorite characters at a dinner table.
Of course, there is a problem. No one wants to read about characters who don’t have any issues, who don’t have any obstacles they need to overcome. If you are a writer and have a character you really like and admire, you have no choice; you have to have terrible things happen to them. They can’t be allowed to skip through life without a worry. How can anyone know what they are made of if their mettle is never tested?
This is how it goes; every main character has to have an arc. The central character has to change from the beginning to the end of the story. If a character is going to start as a terrible human being on a trajectory toward redemption, many times, the beginning of the story has to be rewritten. Why? Often, the character is not lousy enough at the beginning. The writer needs to adjust the character’s behavior to be more despicable at the beginning of the story: the bigger the arc, the more significant the impact.
There is one more writer’s trick that is necessary. The main character has to want something. Kurt Vonnegut (the late, great Kurt Vonnegut) once said that the character has to want as little as a glass of water, but they must want something. He went on to say that the next step is to have terrible things happen to that person. Deny them the water, make them work for it. Make the reader root for that tall, cold glass, knowing they won’t get it until they pay some serious dues.
So, what’s the problem? It is not easy to write a book with a world that a writer would want to escape to. I recently told Buford Lister that I couldn’t change his backstory; I couldn’t give him a do-over. I told him that no one would be interested in his story if everything came free and easy to him. Who would care to read about his life if he never faced any dire straits? Who would want to read about a guy born with a silver spoon who gets everything he ever wanted and dies happy?
The point is I can’t escape into the world of Buford Lister and Piper Pandora Pennington to get some relief from the daily grind of this Covid infested world. The problems I face in the real world are used as inspiration for the nasty things that will happen to the fictional Iroquois County inhabitants. I don’t get a sense of relief doing this; there is no outlet. It is not a stress reliever.
Until the last couple of years, I would lace up my shoes and run for an hour or an hour and a half. That is how this writer dealt with the stress of living in two exhausting worlds. As I have written before, I can no longer run. My right hip needs to be replaced. It is getting worse by the day. This unfortunate fact has created a lot of problems for me.
I wrote almost all of The Athena Chapters while running. I thought up almost everything I have ever written while running. I have a path through a cemetery, so I never had to worry about traffic. I could listen to music and think about the stories I wanted to tell. I can’t do that anymore. The best I can do is jump on my Nordic Trak skier and hope I can make it an hour or so before my hip insists I stop.
Maybe one day, I will write a Utopian tale. All the inhabitants will be happy and healthy. No one will work themselves to death, and everyone will have plenty to eat. Education will be free, and everyone will get as much of it as they want. No one’s body or mind will ever betray them. War and poverty will be long distant memories. Now that I think about it, who would want to read that story? What if I made it a futuristic dystopian tale of…
Well, you get the idea.
