Practicing morally imaginative storytelling means scrutinizing the values and messages encrypted in the fiction we produce—but it does not mean passing a “purity test.”
In Marty Di Bergi’s 1984 rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the titular British heavy-metal band, faced with ebbing popularity and flagging album sales, embarks on a disaster-prone tour of North America in support of its latest release, the critically savaged Smell the Glove. During a stopover at Graceland to pay their respects to the King of Rock and Roll at his gravesite, lead vocalist David St. Hubbins comments, “Well, this is thoroughly depressing.”
To which bandmate and childhood best friend Nigel Tufnel responds, “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”
“Too much. There’s too much fucking perspective now.”
It’s a sentiment to which we can all relate, collectively endowed as we’ve become with a migrainous case of “2020 vision.” At the start of the pandemic, long before we had any sense of what we were in for let alone any perspective on it, I like many essayists felt the urge or need or even the responsibility to say something about it, despite knowing I had no useful or meaningful insight. I netted out with an acknowledgment that the months to come would present a rare Digital Age opportunity for quiet introspection and reflection—one in which we might expand our moral imagination of what’s possible, to invoke the exquisite wisdom of my mentor Al Gore, and perhaps envision a world on the other side appreciably more just, equitable, and sustainable than the one we had before the global shutdown.
Did we ever. Here in the United States, we are now wrestling with issues of economic inequality, structural racism, police brutality, environmental justice, and fair access to affordable housing and healthcare with an awareness and an urgency not seen in generations, and President Joe Biden—responding to the social movements of his times like FDR and LBJ before him—has proposed a host of progressive legislation that matches the visionary, transformative ambition of the New Deal and the Great Society.
With heartening moral imagination (certainly more than this democratic eco-socialist expected from him), Biden is attempting to turn the page on the Randian, neoliberal narrative of the past forty years and write a new chapter in the American story—one founded on an ethos of sympathetic coexistence, not extractive exploitation. With our continued grassroots support and, when necessary, pressure, he might even be the unlikely hero to pull it off, too—our Nixon in China.
As for me? I spent most of the pandemic thinking about narrativity myself. Doing nothing, after all, was a privilege of the privileged, with whom I am obliged to be counted. So, I used the time in self-quarantine to think and to write about the stories we tell, and I arrived at the resolute conclusion that we—the storytellers—need to do a lot better.
We’ve certainly had our fun over the past two decades indulging “storyless” fiction: nihilistic dystopias about a back-to-basics world unburdened by things like laws or civic obligations (The Walking Dead), intertextual superhero “universes” that mostly just serve as hyperviolent wish-fulfillment fantasies for adults (#TheSnyderCut), and an endless buffet of empty-calorie “legacy” sequels to 1980s-era favorites (too numerous—and dispiriting—to list).
But I’ve come to believe that the storytellers need to start practicing as much moral imagination in their writing as they do commercial imagination, and that means examining some of the unchallenged tropes embedded in so much of our popular fiction and certainly our cinematic blockbusters.
One of the problems with so-called light entertainment today is that somehow, amid all the gaudy special effects, people tend to lose track of simple things, like story and meaning. They stop noticing the moral lessons the director is trying to push. Yet these things matter.
David Brin, “‘Star Wars’ despots vs. ‘Star Trek’ populists,” Salon, June 15, 1999
And that particular observation, a response to George Lucas’ The Phantom Menace, was made over twenty years ago, before postnarrative television and “shared cinematic universes” established a new agenda for our popular entertainment—one by which expansive worldbuilding supplants prescriptive storytelling. Fiction used to help us make sense of reality; now making sense of the fiction itself—through a subscription-engagement strategy known as “fan forensics”—is the entire purpose of narrativity. Consequently, a subject as topical as ecological collapse isn’t a theme to be explored, merely a plot point to be exploited—for maximum superhero action! And as soon as it’s fulfilled that function and outlived its narrative convenience, the crisis itself is summarily swiped to the left:
Viewers cannot help but cheer when the Avengers vanquish Thanos and thwart his plan.
But what about the environmental problems that prompted Thanos’ actions, problems everyone accepted as real at the beginning of the story? As nothing is said about them at the end, are viewers being encouraged to think that these problems, too, have been vanquished?
Michael Svoboda, “Cli-fi movies: A guide for socially-distanced viewers,” Yale Climate Connections, May 7, 2020
I don’t suppose those filmmakers meant to conflate environmentalism with ecoterrorism; more likely, they were only motivated by spinning the most entertaining, high-stakes spectacle possible—with exercising their commercial imagination above all other considerations. Isn’t that precisely the problem, though? For when storytellers and audiences fail to interrogate the messaging encoded in the narratives they produce and consume—when they are more concerned with storyworld crosspollination than subtextual motif—a lot of questionable morals get unconsciously promulgated and assimilated.
The X-Files and Scandal, for instance, were both supremely entertaining, must-see melodramas that broke new ground for the medium of network television. Unlike most of the tidily arced procedurals up till that point, The X-Files engendered a certain comfort with ambiguity; Mulder and Scully seldom if ever closed their cases with a definitive assessment of the anomaly du jour.
And in Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), Scandal offered a Black female lead who consistently surprised us with her incongruous dimensionality: She was an ideologically liberal, strategically savvy political “fixer” surreptitiously engaged in one of the most self-evidently ill-considered scandals in Washington—an affair with the (married Republican) president. The commercially imaginative storytelling of both series fueled much morning-after watercooler chatter.
But they were also predicated on an uncontested presumption of pervasive, sinister, and organized conspiracy at the highest levels of government—Mulder investigated them, whereas Olivia covered them up. The principal antagonists on both shows were clandestine, unaccountable, omniscient cryptocracies (the Syndicate and B613, respectively) whose existence somehow no one but the series’ valiant heroes had even managed to notice. Seems improbable, right?
And yet recall when one Trump supporter outside the Capitol on January 6 applauded the president for exposing a conspiracy—the “massive election fraud” responsible for his loss to Biden—of which the American public had been theretofore kept willfully ignorant by the Powers That Be. While shows like The X-Files and Scandal were holding us rapt with the latest left-field plot twists, they were also less conspicuously habituating us to accept their far-fetched (and often patently illogical) conspiratorial scenarios as possible, even plausible.
Were these zeitgeist-seizing shows purposely promoting a beware-the-deep-state agenda? Baby boomer and X-Files creator Chris Carter came of age in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and all the sociopolitical upheaval that ensued, so it’s likely his mistrust of government is an innate (perhaps even passive) consequence of that.
As for Gen-Xer and Scandal scribe Shonda Rhimes, I suspect she was unwittingly regurgitating the very tropes from all those political-paranoia thrillers of the 1970s she’d been fed, like the rest of us, throughout her upbringing. Somewhere along the line, those unchallenged folkways imprinted on her psyche; whether or not she subscribed to them, she accepted them, even if only as “benign” and narratively useful genre conventions—the stuff of “light entertainment.”
It happens. That’s the power of narrative: Tell a story often enough—the deep state is “out there” plotting against us!—and it becomes accepted truth. Trump understood that, and harnessed it—unsuccessfully, thank Christ (at least for now)—to galvanize a coup. And don’t think our side—the “urban elites” on the left—is any less impressionable: As a well-educated, well-read liberal friend of mine said to me about his steadfast belief that both COVID-19 and the vaccine were synthesized intentionally and simultaneously in a lab in order to enrich Big Pharma, “How many times do you need to see this plot in a spy thriller before you realize someone actually did it?”
That same friend, funny enough, was shocked to hear me opine when Ready Player One came up that I thought it was the worst, most dramatically inept movie (adapted from a bestselling novel of the same name) Steven Spielberg has ever made—a disgraceful and embarrassing stain on his celebrated filmography.
“Yeah, okay,” he conceded. “It’s not, like, a great movie or anything, but it’s at least fun.”
Fun? Maybe. Immoral—even downright evil? Definitely.
Author Ernest Cline (born 1972, putting him squarely in the demographic whose formative years coincided with the Golden Age of Deregulation, that lamentable period during which Ronald Reagan engineered the corporate cooptation of children’s entertainment by toy manufacturers) takes pains to establish on the very first page of his novel that its dystopian setting, Earth of 2044, is one devastated by economic collapse, climate change, global warfare, and pandemia (way to keep your bases covered, Ernie), catalyzed by an energy crisis that ensued when we exhausted our supply of fossil fuels.
(Inexplicably, no mention whatsoever is made of renewable energy sources emerging as a viable, as well as decidedly welcome and readily available, alternative to oil, but I suspect Cline’s comprehension of energy policy begins and ends with the prologue from The Road Warrior.)
To escape the misery of this existence, the world’s population has retreated into the OASIS, a massive multiuser VR simulation where most of life’s business, including work and school, is now routinely conducted. The OASIS was created by the late James Donovan Halliday (1972–2040; kindly note the year of his birth), a socially awkward genius–cum–deified software engineer, as a tabernacle to 1980s ephemera—all the videogames and movies and RPGs he grew up on in Reagan’s utopian America—within which he has hidden a maddeningly elusive Easter egg; the first person to find it wins control of the OASIS, as well as Halliday’s vast, trillion-dollar fortune.
As such, a significant section of the public—including the teenage protagonist, Wade Watts, a geek outcast who pines for a bygone era and culture he himself has no memory of—spends all its time and energy (while the world at large, mind you, is going to hell in a handbasket) sifting through the meaningless minutiae of D&D modules, Atari games, and movies like Blade Runner, digitally reconstructed by Halliday in psychoneurotically meticulous detail, for arcane clues to the location of the MacGuffin. (Wade keeps notes, fittingly enough, in his “grail diary.”)
On page 195, Wade asks his virtual assistant, Max Headroom (naturally), “Any news I should know about?”
To which Muh-Muh-Max replies, “Just the usual. Wars, rioting, famine. Nothing that would interest you.”
Bear in mind: Max isn’t issuing a criticism here, merely stating a fact. No one in this world appears to give a fuck about anything or anyone save playing this game and winning Halliday’s fortune, as evidenced by Wade’s immediate response: “Any messages?”
One would think, at this point, Cline is teeing us up for a pointed commentary about nostalgic escapism. Given that, let’s review the story’s coda: After an indulgent orgy of pop-cultural puzzling—The Da Vinci Code for eighties geeks/gamers—Wade wins the contest, with a little help from some friends, heroically declaring on page 371 (in a sudden reversal of his hitherto social apathy, precisely the altruistic epiphany one would expect from an overnight trillionaire): “We’re going to use all of the moolah we just won to feed everyone on the planet. We’re going to make the world a better place, right?” (Scintillating dialogue, no? Fuck you, David Mamet. Fuck you, Aaron Sorkin. You no-talent poseurs.)
Here’s a more salient question Wade might’ve pondered: Why couldn’t his personal hero Halliday have arranged, à la Bill Gates, for his fortune to be willed to causes/charities/organizations that would’ve directly addressed issues like food insecurity, wealth inequality, climate change, and catastrophic pestilence? Why escrow it in a videogame, thereby incentivizing the entire world to comb endlessly thorough the stale pop culture of his own pathetic adolescence? (To say nothing of running the risk some greedy asshole or rapacious technocapitalist, not a “gamer-geek with a heart of gold,” would claim the bounty?) Not only is his money doing no one any good, but all of humanity’s attention has been diverted from one another—from reality itself—into a time-capsule recreation of Halliday’s onanistic fantasies.
But Wade never asks those questions because Cline never bothered to ask them. Like his repugnant avatar, the malignant narcissist Halliday, Cline doesn’t give a shit about expanding his moral imagination—or yours. He dreams not of a better future, but a better past. Ready Player One is, after all, a regressive fantasy that glorifies and rewards nostalgic yearning and obsessive fanboying, not challenges or—Sorceress of Grayskull forbid!—censures them.
The result is a stunted-adolescent story in which there’s nothing greater than being an authority on Family Ties, Dungeons & Dragons, WarGames and arcade classics like Joust and Pac-Man, to name only a few of the myriad properties about which Wade proudly boasts he’s an expert. To be a true champion in Cline’s novel requires an encyclopedic knowledge of the stuff that the author himself thinks is the apex of human civilization—namely, the video games and sitcoms and teen comedies he grew up adoring. . . .
Even for someone who grew up in the ’80s, and who loved many of the games and films that Wade himself reveres, Ready Player One resounds as the work of a man-child who—subpar prose aside—believes that his most cherished old-school cartoons, comic-books and video games aren’t just worthwhile; they’re all that matters, and should naturally be the cornerstone of society.
Nick Schager, “How Is Steven Spielberg Going to Make a Great Movie Out of This God-Awful Book?”, The Daily Beast, December 31, 2017
I’ll second that. Because it’s not enough to write fiction that’s fun; we have a moral obligation to make sure the values our stories espouse withstand ethical scrutiny. On the subject of cherished 1980s novelties, the buddy-cop action-comedies I grew up on are arguably the most fun movies ever made, but in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last spring by a police officer only three weeks my senior, I took an uncomfortably critical look at them and was appalled by what I saw.
On the other hand, when the time had come last summer to start hating on Hamilton, I applauded its earnestness—its courage to be a little corny, and to assure us that even though both Enlightenment democracy and cathartic storytelling are endangered right now, we shouldn’t give up on either institution.
As such, I’ve been writing a novel in quarantine about a municipal animal-control officer whose community is being terrorized by a monstrous entity in the woods. And to be sure: It’s a fangs-on-flesh chiller in the spirit of the horror-comedies that influenced me—it’s certainly meant to be fun—but it’s also about how much we depend on honorable, everyday public servants (those without benefit of superheroic abilities), and why we shouldn’t take them for granted. That seemed like an idea worth promoting as we try, as a culture, to excoriate the science-denying, expertise-averse ethos of the Trump era. I have attempted, to the fullest extent of my skill set, to infuse as much moral imagination as commercial imagination into my fiction.
I encourage every storyteller to be equally circumspect, if for no other reason than when we refuse to lean on lazy plot clichés—the tentacled government conspiracy observed by only the outsider hero; the inevitable overnight collapse of civilized society against any of the boilerplate apocalyptic stress tests (global pandemic, EMP holocaust, AI revolt, zombies); the put-upon supercop amidst an otherwise uniformly inept/arrogant police force (Die Hard, written by Jeb Stuart), as opposed to a team of dedicated and “merely” competent law-enforcement professionals (The Fugitive, also written by Jeb Stuart)—we open our minds to inspired creative solutions. In short: We tell better stories, not just more socially responsible ones, when we challenge our moral imagination.
But here’s the thing: It’s crucial to stipulate that morally imaginative does not mean morally immaculate.
Star Trek, for instance, was appreciably more progressive—more woke, if you like—than most of what was on television at the time, but not everything about it has aged flawlessly; it is, in some respects, still a product of the times it at least had the moral imagination to catechize. Same can be said of The Next Generation, an equally noble series.
Yes, “Trek” can at times seem preachy, or turgidly politically correct. For example, every species has to mate with every other one, interbreeding with almost compulsive abandon. The only male heroes who are allowed any testosterone are Klingons, because cultural diversity outweighs sexual correctness. (In other words, it’s OK for them to be macho ’cause it is “their way.”) “Star Trek” television episodes often devolved into soap operas. Many of the movies were very badly written. Nevertheless, “Trek” tries to grapple with genuine issues, giving complex voices even to its villains and asking hard questions about pitfalls we may face while groping for tomorrow.
Brin, “‘Star Wars’ despots vs. ‘Star Trek’ populists,” Salon
In that same spirit of exegetic critique, I’ll cop to being a little bothered by the fact that each female character of significance in Hamilton is defined nigh exclusively by her romantic association with the protagonist. Could Lin-Manuel Miranda have aspired to greater creativity in this regard—to the same sublime degree of moral imagination that inspired him to reframe the founding of America as a hip-hop musical?
I don’t know—perhaps. I mean, he had to compress almost thirty years of history—an extraordinarily eventful thirty years, at that—into a three-hour stage show, so even a project that creatively ambitious is bound by some practical limitations. Regardless, I don’t consider any narrative shortcomings, be them perceived or legitimate, among the show’s numerous virtues adequate reason to dismiss Hamilton altogether. I honor its commercial and moral imagination—for its willingness to attempt to move the needle, not affirm the status quo.
A work of art is valuable insofar as it advances the cultural conversation, as Star Trek once did so reliably, rather than whether it has “all the answers”—whether it stands for all time as some unimpeachable specimen of enlightened thought. (Even a document as forward-thinking as the Constitution of the United States left considerable room for periodic improvement.) That’s what we learned when we recently reappraised Millennial favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The series wasn’t, as we’d previously regarded it, the summit of feminist storytelling, merely a stepping stone in the right direction.
The point is, challenging the limits of one’s moral imagination is exactly that—an ethical creative exercise. It isn’t a checklist of criteria one must meet in order to pass someone’s moral-purity test. The only person an artist is answerable to is himself. I have to look at every piece of fiction I write, every blog post I produce, and ask if it’s the best I can do. If it’s sufficiently artful and ambitious. If it was conceived and written with requisite moral imagination. If it meets those self-designated benchmarks, then the work’s existence requires no supplemental justification. And on the basis of his gracious response to the overheated calls last year to #CancelHamilton, it’s apparent Lin-Manuel Miranda feels likewise:
Because as much as I believe scribes should question the values embedded in their fiction—I’ve spent a year now advocating for it—I’m also obliged to concede that such a worthwhile practice carries with it the risk of “getting inside one’s head.” It’s possible to get so caught up in making sure we’re being culturally sensitive and morally imaginative, it becomes creatively paralyzing. We wouldn’t write anything if all we did was fret we might offend someone with a cultural assumption or historical oversight or unintentional bias or reductive representation. Exercising mindful compassion is not remotely the same as people-pleasing. That distinction can sometimes become less clear with, in David St. Hubbins’ words, “too much perspective”—the kind that results from the remarkable collective awakening we experienced over the past year, the one we’re only now beginning to process and appreciate with 2020 hindsight.
Storytellers who wish to imbue their fiction with greater moral imagination—greater cultural sensitivity, greater human compassion, greater egalitarian values—can start by practicing those virtues in their everyday lives. Share freely your things of value with those around you—your time, your attention, your skills, your expertise, or even as “little” as a friendly greeting to a stranger on the street—and trust that that ethos will self-manifest in your work. Here’s former Los Angeles Dodgers field reporter Alanna Rizzo on how a momentary act of kindness on her part—a few encouraging words that cost her nothing but perhaps thirty seconds of her time—changed the course of someone’s life for the better:
If thoughtfulness comes naturally to you in your social interactions, it’ll come just as naturally to your creative imagination. After, as of this seventh-anniversary blog post, a full one hundred prolix essays on narrative craft, the following two-word grade-school slogan is perhaps the best piece of writing advice I can offer: Be kind.
Sometimes the most useful skill we can apply is to not overthink things—and don’t for a moment assume that’s any easy concession from someone known for 3,000-word screeds on esoterica ranging from the moral bankruptcy of Ready Player One to the manipulative neoliberal economic programming of comic-book multiverses. Just be generous when you can, gracious when you have to be, and kind no matter what. The stories you tell will reflect that bighearted spirit, and if we start telling enough like that, that’ll be our new truth. As Fox Mulder would say: I want to believe.
I am thankful my characters are so ancient, their biggest problems were procreation and survival. None of the other stuff.
You know, Jacqui, there’s probably a lot to be learned from the ways the hunter-gatherers lived — when the community wasn’t a place so much as a pack, and codified laws were less necessary because crime was less possible: How do you steal a neighbor’s property (to the extent that there was private property, at least as we understand it today) in a tribe of people no bigger than the average grade-school classroom? Absent the trappings of contemporary society, prehistoric fiction can give us a window into a purer mode of cooperative coexistence, as opposed to the I-got-mine-Jack, every-man-for-himself ethos of our late-capitalist culture.
Thanks for checking in, Jacqui! Wishing you a pleasant and productive week to come…
A fascinating post, as always, Sean, with reflections on storytelling and the art of living, and how they’re entwined. One thing I’ve noticed about my television-watching preferences is that they continue to change. Post-narrative endlessly dystopian meanders aren’t holding my attention, replaced by more human stories, not without their drama, but with way less senseless brutality. This leads me to think that, like everything else, change is the one thing we can depend on.
I like your vision too, that we have an opportunity to be thoughtful about our stories as we unpack our unconscious belief systems and givens, and take a more truthful view of the problems and unhealthy attitudes shaping our world. We have another opportunity to turn away from some of the negative tropes that infiltrate our stories, to bring challenges to light, and applaud the heroes that create change. There’s plenty of drama in there. 🙂
Hey, Diana!
As screenwriter Bryan Edward Hill notes in the tweet I embedded above — and as I myself argued last November in “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga” — it appears as though we are transitioning from a literary/cinematic cycle of “grim deconstruction” (as Hill identifies it) and into one of more aspirational storytelling (as I implored in “Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). I certainly hunger for the latter, and didn’t realize quite how starved I was for it until I watched Ted Lasso last year (I can’t wait for season two); I suspect there are many others out there like me. The “storyless” fiction of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead was fun for a while, but the smug nihilism and pointlessness of shows like that, while often entertaining, is in no way inspiring. We need a new (old) kind of fiction for the decade ahead — a lamp to light the way as we continue the project of civilization into the 21st century.
As for the values we lace into our fiction: I write mostly genre — supernatural horror and magical realism — and there’s a tendency to assume “anything goes” in those genres (mostly because that beleaguered genre has also been subjected to the storyless anarchy of postnarrativity, as evidenced by dreary multimedia franchises like A Discovery of Witches). What I try to do instead is create an emotionally and procedurally truthful world, then inject a very concentrated element of the supernatural or fantastical. So, for example, in the WIP I referenced above, I set out to create a very believable drama about a modestly sized city in Upstate New York in which there are many committed professionals — an animal-control officer, a mayor and chief of staff at City Hall, a forensic veterinarian at the university — who have lives and problems and interpersonal conflicts that are truthful and (hopefully) interesting in their own right… and then a monster shows up and complicates all of that!
But despite the presence of the monster, I don’t let the story detour from reality; instead, I ask myself, “What would the civil servants responsible for handling public-safety crises do under these (admittedly fantastical) circumstances?” I have tried, to the fullest extent of my moral imagination, to avoid the clichéd and dispiritingly common portrayal of unethical scientists, corrupt authorities, and conspiratorial politicians that has in its subversive way contributed to our present culture of pervasive institutional distrust. I want to show decent people make a good-faith — if imperfect — effort to perform their civic duties. Like you said: There’s plenty of drama to be exploited without resorting to archetypal tropes!
For those unaware, Diana just released a brand-new standalone novel this week: The Ferryman and the Sea Witch. Learn more about it here.
Sean
“It’s possible to get so caught up in making sure we’re being culturally sensitive and morally imaginative, it becomes creatively paralyzing. We wouldn’t write anything if all we did was fret we might offend someone with a cultural assumption or historical oversight or unintentional bias or reductive representation.”
Is this the current state of the writing rooms in the entertainment industry? I feel like creativity is being restricted to ensure nobody gets offended. “Representation”–which is a positive thing–is becoming more important than good storytelling or realistic characters. Just my two cents, but hey, what do I know? I read books for entertainment and because they are fun. 😉 Stimulating essay, Sean! I enjoyed reading it.
Thanks for joining the conversation, Wakizashi!
Gosh, the state of the entertainment industry is a thorny subject, and I don’t want to get too far into those weeds for fear of imposing on your time and attention, but I think the biggest problem with Hollywood right now is that it’s gone all-in on transmedia mega-franchises — “shared universes,” as they’re also known — that are designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, and that are overseen not by artists but by brand managers. These mega-franchises aren’t about anything other than their own sprawling mythologies; our “job” as fans is to crosscheck the continuity and make sure it all adds up — which means watching (read: purchasing) each new product in the franchise. Hollywood multimedia initiatives, after all, aren’t designed to challenge the status quo, but rather to uphold it. Most of what Hollywood produces doesn’t even qualify as a story in the classical sense — because stories are purposefully designed to shed light on the human condition — so much as a “movie-length advertisement” to buy the next offering in the franchise.
Further complicating matters is the congenital oversensitivity of many Millennials and members of Gen Z — the same ones who lobbied to #CancelHamilton last summer. On the subject of whether a novel like Lolita would even be publishable today, Dan Franklin, who’s published projects by Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie at Jonathan Cape, said this:
Such is why I ask everyone to take a deep breath, and let’s debate the merits (or faults) of each work of narrative art on a case-by-case basis. Let’s call out stories that have no moral imagination — like that piece of shit Ready Player One, and Kirkman’s The Walking Dead — and let’s not censure morally imaginative fiction, both new works and old, for not meeting every late-breaking standard of wokeness. These days, a storyteller that has the courage to actually try to say something meaningful with his fiction practically qualifies as avant-garde!
Thanks for reading and commenting, Wakizashi! I always enjoy your wonderful book reviews.
Sean
As is the case with all of your posts, Sean, you’ve given readers a lot to think about. (And for me, that includes thoughts while reading as well as, I predict, continued thought over the next few days.)
For now, I’ll simply share some thoughts of my own without any overt attempt to make them flow or fit together. They do in my mind, but I don’t know if I have it in me at the moment to craft prose such that this will be obvious to others.
When I think about stories depicting the future—whether relayed in books, movies or TV shows—I can’t think of a single one that shows things getting better for humanity. Wall-E. The Road. Children of Men. Ready Player One. In every instance, the storyline is that things get worse, despair mounts and things run the “obvious course” to cataclysm. That is, every story about the future is dystopian, never utopian (or even close). And those which seem at first to depict moves toward utopian society… always turn out that what everyone thought was so great was really just an illusion cast over an all-too-trusting society to hide some deeper, darker, nefarious underbelly (i.e., humanity at large only thinks things got better when, in fact, they’ve still gotten worse).
I wonder why that is.
On the surface, an obvious reason presents itself: “Stories need a problem to solve.” And “with all the good problems already taken,” it seems a natural jump to imagine a future that presents new problems for people to face. Seems logical and, as far as motive, fairly innocuous.
However, you are absolutely right that, whatever the reasons, stories not only reflect societal mindset, they begin to create and propagate it. They form expectations of inevitabilities, which is where the real problem enters; because we then perpetuate the age-old phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy. The future is not something we can experience in the present. So in a very real way, humans can only think about the future through story. (Whether that story is a book or the imaginations of an inspirational speaker, it’s still “story” based on a whole lot of what-ifs.) When the vast majority of those stories essentially repeat the message that it’s a foregone conclusion that we as a race are doomed to fail miserably, that is what we expect. And no one who expects that failure is imminent bothers trying anymore.
I also feel strongly that the issues you present in your post as far as storytelling motivation and responsibility have a chicken-or-the-egg component. I’ll try to illustrate with a quick anecdote.
A few nights ago, while having dinner with friends, we got talking about my own writing. Prior to 2016, I had always said that my writing is “for everyone.” And in some ways, that’s true, because as is the theme of all of my writing, “You always have a choice”; and “you” means “everyone.” However, the other night with those friends, I said something aloud for the first time. And I couldn’t deny that it was against the backdrop of the recent stretch of “bad years.” That is, what I write, while it applies to everyone, will only be received and acted upon by a certain type of person. Perhaps ironically, that certain type of person is one who has already experienced at least a taste of the power of choice (or the benefits of quietude, or the joys of real connection through meaningful conversation, or the challenges of extending empathy, etc.). My writing, then, largely serves as a reminder or expansion tool. But I have to accept that the people I most wish it could influence for change—those who perpetually value things over people, or who have no idea what a deep relationship feels like, or who have never really done any self-reflection or had a time of commitment to personal change—would never even be drawn to pick up one of my books or read one of my posts. And if they were somehow cornered into it by outside forced, it would read like a foreign language. Because there would be no tether to their own experience or reality thus far.
In the same way, storytellers naturally infuse themselves into what they write. Many writers can imagine details (e.g., new worlds, magic systems, creatures) that they’ve never seen. But it would be rare indeed to find one who could write outside the scope of their own experience, their own expectations, their own morals and worldview as to underlying themes. At least not convincingly. It would feel like a formulaic sham, because it would be.
In other words, how do you encourage writers to be consider “morally imaginative storytelling” that goes beyond their own moral experience? The only people who would even understand what you might mean by “morally imaginative storytelling” are those who have experience being both moral and imaginative. Hence the chicken-or-the-egg syndrome.
A friend of mine bought a subscription to “Master Classes.” I wound up watching the entire “course” by Judy Blume with him. She was truly inspiring. And it wasn’t because she gave some recipe for writing success. She didn’t. In fact, she frequently said things like “This is what I do. That’s all I can share with you. Take what works for you and leave the rest.”
One of her stand-out moments for me was when she said, “People often ask me to tell them what the ‘theme’ or ‘moral’ of a story of mine is supposed to be. And I’m like ::shrug:: … I actually hate the idea of ‘theme.’ I don’t think that way. I’m just telling my stories.”
And yet Judy’s stories have certainly been fodder for much discussion about life, people, morality. In other words, a reader can certainly extract themes from Judy’s stories, whether she intended for those themes to be present or not. Why? Well, from what I can tell, Judy herself is a person who cares deeply about other people, about the underprivileged and misunderstood, about fairness, about letting people be “real people” instead of sanitized perfect models of something. And because that is who she is, those things come across in her storytelling, without her even trying.
I think that every story teller gives themselves away through their stories. We see who the creator is through the creation (even if they try to hide it). We see their values.
Even storytellers who write characters whose morals differ from their own do so in ways that reveal to the perceptive person who the storyteller is. Here, I’ll use our mutual friend Diana Peach. Her characters are gripping and three-dimensional. And many of them aren’t very nice people. We need such characters to tell our stories. But Diana’s approach and language and “packaging” if you will reveal who she is rooting for, what she believes about what’s important in the world. You don’t have to water down the bad guy/girl to do this. And it doesn’t require slamming people over the head with our morality. In fact, it’s the ostentatious morality-slammers I’ve always most suspected of having the opposite values at their core.
By way of analogy, we’ve all received a gift from someone at one time or another. Let’s say that the gift is $100 in cash. Most of us accept as undeniably true that Joe might give us $100 and Vera might give us $100; and while the gift is “the same,” they can feel very different based on intangibles. Like “perceived motive.” You can’t always put your finger on it, but one gift of $100 feels joyful and brings us closer to someone or makes us tear up, while another gift of $100 feels uncomfortable, heavy, laden with expectations or superiority or what have you.
The giving of a gift is a mini-story. It has setting and characters, plot and motive. And as with more traditionally told stories, we just “know” how to read that story between the lines. It’s not just about the gift. We see the giver.
Well, as I said at the start, I won’t fight to draw a fine-point conclusion of all of this. I’ll just leave it out there for what it is and hope that it sparks new thoughts.
Erik! So nice to have you here! I hope you’ve been well, sir!
Star Trek was a notably utopian (I refer to it in the past tense because its present iteration has abandoned the series’ “prime directive” of prescriptive storytelling in favor of brand expansion), depicting a future point in human history in which we’d conquered not only space travel, but many of the ills that plague our society today: economic inequality, food insecurity, ecological collapse, and so on. The writers on the series even had a derisive name for the creative limitations this put on their storytelling options: Roddenberry’s Box.
In Roddenberry’s vision of the future, achieving utopian existence wasn’t an endpoint — far from it. Getting our shit together here on Planet Earth was the very thing that allowed us to venture outside our own “limited” solar system, and continue the project of civilization on a grander, more cosmic scale (which I happen to believe is the reason Mother Nature gave us consciousness in the first place: so She could better know Herself).
But precisely because of the creative restrictions of utopian storytelling, science fiction more often veers toward dystopian scenarios:
Most of our recent postapocalyptic fictions, however, in no way aspire to be self-preventing prophecies. Quite the opposite:
As to your second point — How does one encourage moral imagination in storytelling when all writers are limited to some extent by the scope of their own moral experiences? — I would very much recommend you read the Mythcreants piece dellstories linked to below: “Why Social Justice Is Intrinsic to Storytelling.” The author argues that we need to challenge cultural narratives, particularly are own:
There’s no question this takes applied effort, Erik, and you’re right: The audience most receptive to this particular post’s message is probably already practicing morally imaginative storytelling (to one extent or another), whereas for anyone else, this will just read like a bunch of academic nonsense. In the month since I posted “In the Multiverse of Madness,” I’ve privately wondered how many institutionalized “hostage buyers” it would really sway? Not a lot, I suspect. Most fanboys would dismiss it as scholarly impenetralia, I’m guessing, and the ones that might actually read it all the way through would just say, “Okay, but I’m no hostage buyer — I genuinely love Star Wars and don’t want to live without it!” I imagine the only folks my thesis might actually persuade are those who’ve already come to the same essential conclusions on their own.
Writing a story — or an essay — is no different, really, than giving a gift. In both instances, we’re essentially saying, “Here’s something I think will add value to your life.” You’re giving it to someone with the hope that they take value from having it. And we’ve all received gifts we didn’t know what to do with — that either ended up in the back of the closet or got re-gifted at some point — and the same is true of so much of the media we consume: For whatever intangible reason, the experience of watching this show or that movie didn’t add any appreciable value to our life. Such is probably the reason folks have such a hard time letting go of the characters and stories that deeply resonated with them at one point in their life: because you realize how uncommon it is to experience a work of fiction that really sticks to you. We value it for having had meaning, even if it no longer does (which is its own problem, one I’ve covered elsewhere on this blog).
But I have seen the power of messaging, particularly with respect to my climate activism. I’ve seen the power of disinformation campaigns waged by polluters like Exxon, and, on the other side of that coin, I’ve witnessed firsthand that narrative get wrested back by a generation of young people who are insisting on a livable planet. Their moral imagination has inspired Joe Biden’s moral imagination; he has moved so far to the left on the issue of climate change in such a short period! No, President Biden’s position on the climate crisis is not morally immaculate, but it’s morally imaginative. Hamilton is a story about heads of state who were morally imaginative if unambiguously far from morally immaculate. All we can do is keep telling the stories that are important to us with as much moral imagination as we can muster, because you never know who — or what — those stories might inspire.
Great to have you back, Erik. I hope the stretch of “bad years” to which you refer is receding into the rearview. As always, you have my friendship and support to call upon at your pleasure.
Sean
Maybe Cline never asked those questions because he modeled the character on real-life billionaires who really don’t give a sh*t about the rest of the world. Any one of them could use their money to make actual positive change instead of building self-congratulatory spaceships to Mars or hosting comedy shows, but they don’t (and I don’t consider having a charitable foundation that much of an effort when you have enough money to pay off everyone on your continent’s school debt and not even feel it). Rant over lol. Personally, I do try to write with a moral purpose and create characters who strive to better the world around them, more because of my relentless optimism, but I don’t know how realistic that is. I’ll keep doing it regardless, because it makes me happy:-)
Suzanne, you are more than welcome to park yourself at my blog to rant about capitalist hypocrites any time you like! Haha! Consider this a “safe space” in that regard.
I absolutely agree with your perspective on Halliday vis-à-vis our real-life billionaires, and in the spirit of narrative interrogation, it’s worth asking how, exactly, are we meant to judge the character? What does Cline hope to impart as our moral takeaway from Ready Player One?
The answer lies on page 364, during the exchange Wade has with Halliday’s avatar upon winning the game:
Say what?! That advice is objectively and indisputably antithetical to every action Halliday ever took in his lifetime! If he were sincere about it, at the moment that revelation struck him, while he still had time left on this earth, he would’ve destroyed the OASIS immediately with his failsafe Big Red Button, and put every dollar of his estate into rebuilding the world outside his window, not meticulously reconstructing the fictional realities of the motherfucking 1980s! But because the story, in its final tally, deifies rather than rebukes Halliday, Cline leaves us with that phony, hollow bit of redemptive moralizing as his closing argument — and then asks us to actually take it seriously!
We know we’re meant to interpret it earnestly because the final line of the book, eight pages later, is as follows: “It occurred to me then that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS.”
Bullshit. A few “wise words” from the sociopathic and utterly insincere James Halliday, and all of a sudden Wade’s interests and addictions and very raison d’être just go up in smoke? No, sorry, Ernest — you didn’t earn that ending. (And you don’t really mean it, anyway.)
Here’s how the exact same ending could’ve been made to work: Upon hearing Halliday’s sophism, a lightbulb sparks over Wade’s head. “What a sad little malignant narcissist you are,” he responds, and forthwith rejects Halliday’s pernicious worldview by pressing the Big Red Button himself, destroying all vestiges of the 1980s — and Halliday’s demented, sadistic psyche along with it. GAME OVER.
What a powerful commentary on nostalgic yearning and technocapitalism Ready Player One might’ve been… if Cline had practiced even a scintilla of moral imagination versus that token, obligatory, and disingenuous nod to enlightened thinking he shoehorns into the final pages.
As for your closing comment: We need more relentless optimists, Suzanne — especially amongst our storytellers. I proudly consider myself a pragmatic optimist. Ignore all the naysayers, doomists, defeatists, cynics, and assholes too irretrievably addicted to their own sanctimony to ever recognize the moral imagination of someone (like, for instance, Joe Biden) who doesn’t pass their selective purity test with 100% impeccability. Optimism takes courage, vision, and imagination. Optimism inspires. It isn’t the naïve belief that everything will work out in the end, or that the virtuous will emerge victorious, or that justice will be served; optimism is merely the moral belief that those virtues are worth the effort — worth the risk of trying (and often failing) to attain. We’re gonna need all the optimism — and optimists — we can get as we continue the project of civilization into the 21st century.
Rant over!
Me: I am a pessimist, a cynic. even a defeatist and a doomsayer. No matter what you do, in your personal life or in the world at large, you’ll never make anything better. Things’ll only get worse. Give up
Them: Yeah, but I don’t see YOU giving up. You’re working so hard to make things better, both in your personal life and in the world at large. Why do you do that if you’re a pessimist and you believe that doing that is useless?
Me: I do that because I am a pessimist. So I expect to be wrong
There you go — productive pessimism!
As both an artist and an activist, I spend a considerable portion of my time appealing for peoples’ attention, be them prospective agents (Will you review my manuscript?), policy advisers to elected officials (Will you bring this environmental initiative before the borough president and get him to adopt it as a formal resolution?), and so on. And you know what painful, awful, hateful word I hear in response more than any other?
Yes.
They all say yes. Often enthusiastically. Handshakes and/or thanks are exchanged. And then…
Crickets. Nothing happens. Follow-up reminders get sent, only to plunge into a bottomless abyss. Eventually you realize there are only so many times you can ask for a favor — and be promised so many times that it’ll get done — before you’re faced with the reality that, despite their assurances to the contrary, they don’t wanna do it.
I find that particularly galling, because when I agree, of my own freewill, to do a favor, I feel a nagging responsibility to actually do it. The problem, as I see it, is twofold. The first is we live in a culture in which no one wants to say no, but no is a courtesy we pay another person — and, more to the point, ourselves — when we just don’t have the bandwidth to take on a given favor. Instead, these days we say yes with zero intention of fulfilling the request… and we just hope the other person will get so busy themselves they’ll forget they asked. To that point…
The second problem is that in our present era of nonstop digital distraction — of phones that ping constantly with the latest updates from CNN, from Gmail, from Twitter, from Instagram — no one has free time anymore. The old “I’ll get to that when I have a free minute” adage has no meaning in an always-on world of telecommunications technologies that make sure every “free moment” is occupied by scrolling our smartphones. You just can’t get anyone’s attention anymore. Believe me: I’ve tried.
The other day, someone was asking me about my WIP — specifically, if I plan to submit it to prospective agents and publishers when it’s done. I was a momentarily taken aback by the question, and responded with these words exactly: “Uhhhh… I mean, I’ll submit it, but no one’s going to read it.”
“That’s not very optimistic,” she said, sparing an amused chuckle for my “pessimistic” outlook.
“That’s the definition of optimism,” I corrected. “Knowing in advance a project you’ve invested years and untold passion in likely won’t amount to anything, but nonetheless considering it worth the effort to bring to completion. To try, even when succeeding is a long shot.” I couldn’t be — wouldn’t be — either a writer or an environmental activist if I wasn’t a sucker for hard-luck cases.
I’ve said this before, Dell, so forgive the repetition, but my favorite thing about the Indiana Jones series — the trilogy and the TV show — is that almost all the stories end in a failed resolution: He never comes home with the thing he almost broke his neck trying to get. Yet he always answers the next call to adventure…
Are you considering self-publishing?
I don’t know from personal experience but there are two options here
Traditional:
1. You get a professional editor. From what I understand book publishing is different from screenwriting. The editor might suggest changes, but those usually ARE to improve the book, and they don’t make changes w/o your approval
2. They have marketing departments, etc. to put some muscle behind your book
3. They handle audio, foreign language, and movie rights sales. You don’t have to do each of these yourself
4. They handle things like book cover image, back cover blurb, etc
5. They have distribution departments to get your book actually in the bookstores and in the mail to customers,
6. You have no financial risk; in fact, you get an advance before the book is published, which you don’t have to pay back if the book flops
Self:
1. You can still hire a professional editor. Mythcreants, for example, has freelance editors
2. Publishers have many different books, and might not devote as much effort to you as you would to yourself. Many publishers these days seem to expect authors to handle their own publicity
3. While book publishers might not be as bad as Hollywood, the fact is that you give over certain rights, whereas if you self-publish, you retain EVERYTHING
4. You have 100% control over things like book cover image, back cover blurb, etc. Your cover art won’t make your Black man White, or your heavy-set woman thin. And your blurbs won’t be misleading or spoilers, unless you yourself do that
5. Self-publishing is faster. You don’t have wait for the editor to say “yes” and you can publish as soon as you’re ready. W/ traditional even after the book is “ready” it can still take literally a year or two to hit the bookstores
6. If you use Kickstarter you might not even need to put up your own money
When I was a kid “self-publishing”, or more properly vanity publishing, was little more than a scam except in a VERY few cases. But these days, w/ Amazon and Kickstarter and other direct sources, it is a valid option
As I said, NONE of this is from personal experience. You’ll need to do your own investigation
Indeed, Dell — ditto to all of the above. What you’ve outlined is actually quite a concise comparative analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of legacy- versus self-publishing. (Friend of the blog Diana Wallace Peach, who’s gone both the traditional and indie routes, can speak to this from experience, I imagine.)
I’ve more or less decided to self-pub the current WIP (about the animal-control officer), but I’ve got a bit more time to think it over because the manuscript is only half-finished, and will then require further editing (from a professional) and revision, etc. I’d hoped and planned to have a completed draft last year, but the pandemic disrupted my productivity (and I’ve resolved, in an act of self-compassion, not to censure myself for that), and then I got distracted throughout the fall, winter, and spring with a life-altering personal matter (nothing bad, and I’ll tell the whole story here on the blog in the coming months). My hope is to power through the remainder of the first draft this summer, then start to think about publishing it myself.
I’m actually quite excited to self-pub, despite all the additional responsibilities it entails. As you said, the stigma associated with the vanity presses of yore is moot nowadays, and eBooks make it so easy to publish and disseminate one’s work. And the notion of having 100% creative control is very appealing to someone who spent most of his career as a Hollywood screenwriter, in which 90% of my time and effort went into managing egos — i.e., implementing the idiotic story notes of producers and managers (the latter of which should be banished from the industry for very legitimate reasons, flagrant conflict of interest being the primary one). And here’s the kicker: Despite all the artistic compromises I made, not one of those projects ever got produced (my screenplays) or published (my comic-book scripts)! So, it’s not like my creative capitulations even yielded commercial success! Such is why this quote from John Carpenter resonates so profoundly with me:
What’s WordPress, after all, but self-publishing? Over the years, I’ve submitted numerous essays to absolutely no response from the editors of all manner of print and online periodicals, but on my blog I get to publish whatever I want whenever I want. No, I don’t have the reach or readership of, say, Salon, but nor do I have any restrictions on content. I’m not beholden to publication schedules or editorial vagaries, either; when I write something topical, like “Trick-or-Treating Is Canceled?”, I can post it while it’s still relevant rather than letting it “expire.” I’m incredibly proud of this ongoing project — meaning my blog — as well as my in-progress novel, and I have a means through which I can make those writings publicly available. Beats waitin’ around for the approval of some agent or editor who will likely only frustrate the process, anyway.
The fact remains, whether an author goes traditional or indie, it’s a tough business — and only getting tougher — and few writers make a living from their fiction. I kind of find that liberating, in a way, because I’m no longer chasing commercial success with my writing, merely taking pleasure and satisfaction from the writing itself — like I used to when I was a kid, long before I “turned pro.” Except the difference now is that I have something to say about the world, and I’ll say it to whoever wants to listen; I’m only too grateful and delighted to have their audience.
There’s a saying in sales:
A quick “No” is better than a slow “Yes”
Hear, hear. Every so often, I’ve mulled the idea of dedicating a post to the kindness of saying no, but haven’t yet gotten around to writing it. Perhaps soon…
>In short: We tell better stories, not just more socially responsible ones, when we challenge our moral imagination.
Mythcreants.com has stated from the beginning that “social justice is intrinsic to storytelling” (https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-social-justice-is-intrinsic-to-storytelling/). Look at any post about writing there and nine times out of ten you’ll find a mention about how observing social justice would improve your story
In “‘Star Wars’ despots vs. ‘Star Trek’ populists” (Salon, June 15, 1999) (https://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/), which you and I have both referenced, David Brin implies that the moral failings he sees in Star Wars are the result of the character of Lucas himself
I have mentioned Adam Lee’s Daylight Atheism site (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/)
here a couple of times, discussing his review of “Jesus and John Wayne” by Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2021/03/book-review-jesus-and-john-wayne/), and referring to his essay on hopepunk (which certainly suits your self-declared pragmatic optimism) (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2019/09/prelude-to-commonwealth-iii-hopepunk-dreams/)
He also did section-by-section reviews of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/) (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/the-fountainhead/)
He argues repeatedly that while Rand had a certain pulp-action skill, her extreme beliefs and philosophy ruin her characters and plot, not that those were actually her concerns anyway
Similarly, over at Slacktivist (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/), Fred Clark eviscerates Left Behind, the book series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins about Post-Rapture Earth (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/category/left-behind/)
Clark has stated that “Bad Theology Makes For Bad Fiction”, that LaHaye and Jenkin’s “stunted theological/ethical outlook” (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2006/06/25/lb-todays-gospel-reading/) causes the bad prose, poor characterizations, and nonsensical plot, which all in turn fuels their life “morality”
(I would quote extensively from both Lee and Clark, but Patheos.com has disabled right-clicking for their sites. This won’t actually deter pirates, but it makes things harder for those of us who want to reference their sites for legitimate uses)
So, yeah. Being a better person just make you a better writer
Hey, it’s worth a shot
As always, Dell, you curate such a wonderful assemblage of relevant links to the topic at hand. Thank you. Chris Winkle’s post is terrific — one of the best I’ve read from her. They do really excellent work over there at Mythcreants.
In a way, those criticisms Adam Lee levels against Ayn Rand — that despite her proficiency for pulpy sci-fi, her demented ethics actually retard her prose and plotting — could apply just as equally to Ernest Cline re: Ready Player One. As someone who came of age on all the pop-cultural touchstones Cline references, I can appreciate (even sort of enjoy) the novel’s quest-driven adventure, but Ready Player One is strictly grade-Z garbage, same as the 1980s-era cartoons and comics he venerates — those Reagan-approved manufacturer’s catalogs masquerading as children’s entertainment. I mean, that’s the problem, after all, with elevating those poorly written “program-length advertisements” to capital-L Literature: It becomes your baseline for what constitutes narrative excellence.
The key difference, of course, between Rand and Cline is that her science fiction was at least written with a conscious (if pernicious) sociopolitical agenda — to promote Objectivism — whereas he is simply regurgitating (and celebrating) the unchallenged folkways from all the Reagan-era narratives he so voraciously consumed in his youth. Cline is the personification — even, arguably, the apotheosis — of the unwitting Gen X “hostage buyer” we discussed last month. What is Halliday’s OASIS if not the digital realization of the Multiverse of Madness, where spending all your money, time, and attention pursuing pop-cultural Easter eggs is the very reason for waking up each morning.
And to that point, what I argued in “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse” — a case Cline (via Halliday) himself makes, albeit disingenuously — is that when we have the courage to step outside the comforting safety of our “private parallel dimensions,” be them our own concerns and problems or even interests and hobbies, and make time to contribute to worthy causes from which we ourselves do not directly or measurably profit (volunteerism, activism, community service, or even just engaging our neighbors in substantive conversation), we become better people in the process — and, in turn, better writers.
Over the past three years especially, I have become an exponentially more compassionate and socially conscious citizen and artist as a result of taking an interest in things outside of my own life; inspired by the innate goodness of my magnificent wife, I have given myself over to causes that have nothing to do with the things I’d for so long considered important — most notably movies and screenwriting — and, consequently, I’ve finally been able to let go of some old grievances. I redirected a lot of energy I was wasting on myself and donated it instead to the L.A. Animal Shelter and to the Climate Reality Project. I’m a much happier person for it.
And definitely a better writer. My aforementioned WIP about the animal-control officer meets and even exceeds my own strict standards of both commercial and moral imagination. I wouldn’t necessarily say it has an overt social-justice agenda, but it is, I hope, a humanist story; it’s about people who value life, as well as democracy and science, even when they disagree about how and when to use those tools. Trek was the kind of science fiction neither Rand nor Cline aspired to: It was humanist. There was a seat at the table for everyone in that universe. Conflicts weren’t conclusively resolved with phasers so much as philosophy. The best episodes of Trek, along with the best eps of Young Indiana Jones (like “Paris, May 1919”), proved that diplomacy can be just as dramatic as derring-do in the hands of morally imaginative storytellers.
But it was only once I got out of my insular Hollywood bubble and started talking to people with real problems — folks in South Central L.A. with oil derricks across the street from their homes; budget-strapped pet owners forced to choose between feeding their animals and medicating them for life-threatening ailments — that I fully realized the things I care about, while intensely personal to me, aren’t the be-all/end-all. (And I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit that publicly.) That’s why I find RP1 so fucking offensive, because it’s the work of a privileged white manchild who’s never given a moment’s thought to anything or anyone outside his limited ken. Even the end of that stupid book invokes the White Male Savior trope, as newly minted trillionaire Wade, with the stroke of his signature on a check, is now going to save the wretched masses too feeble (and/or insufficiently literate in 1980s pop culture) to lift themselves out of destitution. Fuck off, Wade. Save your quarters for the arcade.