Today was a quiet day of neccesary clothes shopping, handheld console price-checking to help me decide if I want a replacement DS or a shiny new PSP (if some are to be believed, this is a decision between a piece of technology and the path to transcendence) and general laziness. None of this is really blog worthy news.
Instead I feel compelled to talk about something that occured to me about my writing of Chain Fiction, or more specifically, New Fantasy Chronicles - Abolute (Chronicle IV) as found here. Last night, after updating here, I went on to post a large revelatory post describing major, dramatic events happening across Ouranos, our fictional planet, the stage of so much story-crafting and, ultimately, the single most important and well loved character of the series.
The events I described involved several large, fantastic creatures materialising over the world's major cities as a prelude to a war between such creatures. As they appeared they caused various kind of chaos, inbcluding a tidal wave and airships colliding with skyscrapers.
I'm sure, possible reader, that you are thinking now of the tidal waves of South East Asia last year and the World Trade Centre incident of 2001, or at least, now that I've reminded you, you're drawing up the similarities in your mind.
I thought about them too, but only after I wrote them. I merely wrote that which was logical for the events I was describing: the tidal wave was the logical way to introduce a giant whale-like creature and demonstrate its catastrophic effect on the city it had appeared at; the airship collisions were the logical consequences of said conveyances being batted out of the sky by another creature over one of the largest and most highly developed cities on the planet. In both cases I wrote the event and then thought, "I can't do that! No one will let me get away with it!" and then I posted them anyway, unedited.
No one complained, not that we have the largest readership in the world (current total, 4, maybe 5) so what's my point?
Well there are two things that I'm led to think about here: how disasters like the tidal waves and 9/11 affect our ability to stomach anything similar in fiction and how fascinated I am by disasters in general.
There is a reference to 9/11 contained within Stephen King's final volume of his magnum opus, The Dark Tower. It is a brave move and one which, when I read it, made me think exactly the same things as I did with regards to my post. The more I think about it though, the more I believe he did the right thing. We can't limit literature or storytelling just because the area it may venture into is a sensitive one. Sure, care needs to be taken, offence and upset can be caused, but if we steer clear of such areas utterly then literature's incredible power to explore the human condition, the world around us and the way we live in it is seriously hampered. It is through literature, through telling stories and relating to characters that we can work through the traumas and tragedies, joys and jubilations of the lives we lead, and that includes disasters, in fact I am led to believe that this is where fiction has a unique advantage.
Real disasters and tragedies always leave the survivors thinking that what they have just experienced isn't real. Most of us never experience such things and we believe that we are never likely to. Fiction enables us to enter a world of such improbability and, as we do, we can work through it and learn from it.
I think my fascination with disasters is sort of the opposite of this process. I have always loved the epic. I always long for a sense of scale greater than the one I am currently given. I want a bigger picture, a wider view. As a result I've always been a fan of fantasy fiction. It allows me to reach into places, via my imagination, that I could never reach otherwise. I get granted vistas, indeed whole layers of understanding, that I would never have had before. The disaster, as long as it is a distant event, is something my imagination longs to penetrate in this way. To me, having not experienced of the sort, the thrills and horrors of such things and how they effect the people who experience them fires my imagination and makes me want to know more.
In many ways there's a lot that's positive about this, but I'm always left slightly concerned by my desire to see greater and greater events happening in the world around me. Of course I don't want people to suffer or die. I dont really want the stability of my world to crumble around me, or around anyone else, but part of me secretly longs for that sense of fantastic scale to erupt into the world around us.
So, I guess that's why I write things like the post I wrote last night. It's a kind of catharsis for me and, I hope, it can be a similar catharsis for my readers. Many of us long to experience such drama, for whatever reasons, and maybe, if we keep it contained to fiction, we can reduce the amount we create them and can improve the way we handle them.
Hmm...
I think that was several dollars, never mind 2c.
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