It’s been awhile since I took the bait and wrote about one of the writing prompts over at John’s weekly ones on his The Sound of One Hand Typing site. He typically has several such prompts every Tuesday which are well worth checking out, especially if you’re feeling a little writers block.
Which I haven’t had that. In fact, it just seems I have so many projects, I seldom make it back to this page. But this week one really made me think : “how do real world events affect your writing?” It was already a topic I was dealing with in my mind.
As I mentioned in passing here before, I’m writing some fiction …I’m not sure yet if it will be one novel, or more likely a collection of short stories, maybe even a series of audios, podcasts or something. But I’m about 50 short “chapters” in and am quite pleased with the results thus far.
In brief, it deals with a modern-day couple and their circle of friends and family with sections devoted to looking back to their past and telling about their hometown and all its unusual people and goings-on. Although the characters and the town (set in Canada) are fictitious, it’s meant to come across as real and relatable and there are in fact some references to real-life people, places, events. They often hang out and drink too much coffee at Tim Horton’s, talk of real hockey and baseball players and teams, listen to real music you and I listen to, watch some of the same TV shows and so forth.
Some of that inspiration I actually took from Stephen King’s writing. Although I’ve outgrown being a regular reader of the Maine horror master, I did that in the past and marveled at how realistic and believable his make-believe towns in Maine were. I felt like I could see them in my head and could navigate my way around them if dropped off there. That’s a sense of realism I want to create in my writing as well.
Which leads me to my dilemma. Do I bother to wade into the muck that is the present day? My main characters are reasonably intelligent, can be opinionated, read newspapers (when they were readily found and thus available to be read), and I’m sure would watch some TV news. One is at least loosely associated with a radio station, which has a “news guy”. Elections take place, at home and in the ever-present land to the South, wars rage in various parts of the world, atrocities are being committed, and the news brings dozens of downbeat, depressing stories with it daily for every happy one of a school giving a party for its devoted 86 year-old custodian or a rare bird returning to a place it hadn’t been seen in decades. Do I touch that?
On the one hand, it seems hard not to write about daily news when my characters live in the modern world, have smart phones and are themselves smart. It seems unlikely they’d not be talking about what some politician said over dinner or about some building being blown up overseas while chatting with co-workers. On the other hand, I hope my stories will have a fairly wide appeal and if anything, do a bit to unite rather than divide people. And I want them to be, on the balance, positive or upbeat as much as a few individual bits of them are sad. Nothing wrong with hitting that emotional button on my reader every once in awhile as well but I don’t want to make my readers morose.
So far, my guiding light has been… no, not the Guiding Light, but another long-running TV show, Friends. Friends as most of you know, is among my favorite shows and one of the few I actually don’t mind “binge watching” with my sweetie. It was at or near the top of the ratings for its decade-plus at the turn of the century.
When the world changed, back on 9/11, it as a show had a huge problem. It was set in mid-town New York City. The characters could as likely as not have seen the disaster take place in real time just by looking out their apartment windows. Their jobs, at cafes and bistros and museums near the World Trade Center would have been impacted and in all likelihood, they would have known people who if not killed, at least were close enough to know casualties from it. We were all shocked and horrified; the Friends six would have been devastated, one must think. But, the show was also a comedy. People connected with the characters and cared about them, but they also tuned in every Thursday to laugh with them, and at times at them. It was 30 minutes of weekly escape from the problems of real life for the tens of millions of fans.
There were apparently many tense meetings over it with the NBC people and writers. They considered doing a solemn “very special episode”, maybe with them reflecting on life’s meaning, crying a lot and going to funerals or something. It might be appropriate… but it wouldn’t be fun. It would pile on to the real-life troubles, not lift people out of them.
So they made the decision to carry on business as usual. They did put in a few subtle signs of respect for the victims, like Joey wearing an “NYFD” shirt in one, a “I {heart} NY” design on the famous whiteboard in Joey and Chandler’s apartment in another, but for the most part, they avoided the elephant in the room topic.
Time shows they made the right choice. Ratings went up after that. People still needed, maybe more than ever, a respite from the grim news and 30 minutes to be ready to laugh every week.
So for now, I try to run with that as my way of dealing with what’s going on around us in my fiction. Treat it as a respite. But with each passing headline, I ponder the question more.
What’s your take on the question?
Everydave Life 