There Are Forces at Work Here
By Donald Maass | April 6, 2022 |
I grew up racing small boats on Long Island Sound. If you are a sailor on the north shore of Long Island or along the Connecticut coastline, then you know what that means. In summer, light winds. At times, no wind. The Sound is basically a big bathtub.
Being becalmed, though, doesn’t mean that your boat isn’t moving. It is. Always. It’s drifting, sometimes quickly. Why? Because hidden in the water are currents. Tides. Temperature differentials in the water. They push your boat in the direction they are going even if your sails are slack.
You can see the movement of your boat relative to landmarks on the shore. It’s like you are sitting still in the sea and the land is sliding sideways. It isn’t, of course, it only looks that way. Relative to the water around you, it appears that you aren’t moving but the currents know better. They have control. They take you in the direction they are moving and if you don’t like that too bad.
Sometimes the wind picks up. Sometimes it doesn’t. The point is, you are at the mercy of forces greater than you. Forces that no one can control. The same is true of our lives, isn’t it? Things happen not because we want them to or not, but because they just do. They happen because some forces are greater than millions, even billions, of us can collectively direct or stop.
Currently, we are living in a time of strong currents. (See the root word there?) So much seems out of our control. It’s a puzzle to me, then, that our fiction nowadays tends to forget the larger forces at work upon us. It’s as if the people in novels exist in a bubble. What happens is local. What influences their actions is entirely their back stories. Even antagonists are understandable. Fiction seems to say that we can with individual effort solve all of our problems; possibly we can even change the world.
I’ve projected that message myself. And it’s true that fiction opens our eyes and changes our choices. (There is, for instance, a verifiable effect called “moral uplift” which I discussed in The Emotional Craft of Fiction.) But is everything in our world under our control? Certainly not. The idea is ludicrous. What I want to discuss today, then, are the forces at work in our lives but also in your story world and how you can use them.
Those forces are going to affect your characters and what happens. You can’t get out of it, really, nor is it wise to try…although your characters might.
The Many Forces
On March 18th here on Writer Unboxed, my friend and our regular contributor Porter Anderson posted in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (“Evil and ‘The Age of Madness’, which you can read here.) He wrote about our denial of what might happen and, citing Bernard Levy, about “humanity’s bad shepherds”. Levy was talking about pandemics but Porter posed this question (what he delightfully calls a provocation): “How good are we at facing the fact of dumb, unpardonable, unredeemable, unreasoned evil?”
Evil.
Porter’s post stirred an interesting response. Our WU community had things to say but no one disputed that one force at work in our present-day world can be called anything other than evil. No one related a back story for Russian premier Vladimir Putin. (Well, Susan Setteducato asserted that it must exist but didn’t offer specifics.)
My point is, no one suggested that the pandemic or the invasion of Ukraine could have been stopped if only we’d done things better, or that those things could be undone if only we would take a hard look at ourselves. Nope. Those things are painful and murderous but are also unavoidable. Things like that happen just because they do. Just because there is evil.
The flip side of evil is good. (Embodied in WU comments by the late actress Betty White, which I can affirm. She once optioned a mystery series by a client of mine and probably was the nicest person with whom I ever have dealt.) According to a 2011 poll by CBS news, nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe in angels. A 2018 Gallup poll reveals that fewer than that believe in God—somewhere between 64% and 92%, varying by how the question is worded—from which I infer that while God’s absolute existence is debatable, there’s little dispute that we are also guided and guarded by a force that we term good.
Good versus evil is of course an eternal theme in fiction. However, there are many other forces that we can utilize in writing stories. Fate. Luck. Society. The sea. We can look at uncontrollable effects on our lives as representing, say, the forces of gravity or entropy, life or death. The weather and war have minds of their own, too. So many forces.
The personalities of people can affect a story with unstoppable force, as well. Bullies, saints, hot heads, wallflowers, observers, dreamers, realists, skeptics, reactionaries, joy riders, free spirits, professional victims, loyalists, iconoclasts, controllers and more are people who cannot necessarily help themselves. (If you want to explore the many immutable types of character, fish around on the website TV Tropes. Warning: Its habit forming.)
So, there are forces at work in our real world and forces that you can bring to bear on your story world. But how? And what will those forces do?
Bending Forces to Your Benefit
When forces beyond our control make things happen, we often call it “the will of the gods”. Meeting your romantic partner, in a similar way, probably is an event that you attribute to “fate”. It was destined to happen, or so it feels? At any rate, it’s lousy to feel that that meeting was actually purely random and that your partner today could easily and happily be living with someone else, unaware that you exist.
We need to believe that forces are at work. If they aren’t then Albert Camus was right and suicide is a rational choice in the face of our meaningless existence. And, honestly, who wants that? And who wants a novel without forces to feel at work and possibly to overcome? Making those forces active in your story is first of all a matter of recognizing them and then inviting them to stir or shake things up. Here are some prompts:
- In the larger world around your characters, what sort of things are happening? War? Witch hunt? Climate events? Disease? Political strife? Social change? Generational differences? Cultural revolution? Protest? Which class is embattled and in decline, which is empowered and rising? Which characters in your story are caught up in that? What happens because they are?
- What is the issue of the day? Whom in the story is swept up in that and how? What conflict results with others? What is an action that one character will take to defend the established order or to overturn it? What comes of that and what consequences are unforeseen?
- In your story world, what are the current trends in fashion, music, technology, transportation, sport, dating and courtship, language or slang? What is considered progressive and cool? What is thought to be old-fashioned and harmful? Who in the story is “with it”? Who is traditional? Which is better? How will we know?
- In your story world, there’s something in the past that has never been forgotten. How will that become active again in the present?
- One force in your story world is driving people apart. Another force is drawing them together. What are those forces? How do they work? What happens?
- In your story world, there’s something ironic about society. How will that irony play out?
- Who is in the grip of an idea? What will that character do that anyone else would not?
- Pick a character who has a strong personality trait, or give an immutable trait to a character who currently lacks one. What is something big that character can do which is driven by that trait, something that others would not do?
- What’s a piece of luck that someone in your story doesn’t anticipate? Grant it.
- What’s a disaster for someone in your story that isn’t deserved? Inflict it.
- Time is a scythe, a leveler, a Sower and a judge. What vast change can time impose upon your story?
- What in your opinion is the strongest force that affects us all? How can that force change what happens in your story?
- What do the gods or fate always do to people? To whom can they do that in your story? You know, just because?
No writer wants their story to drift but I’m pretty sure that most writers would like their stories to reflect the forces moving in our world. To do that, all that’s needed is to get your story out on the water and let it be pulled by the currents.
What unstoppable force is at work in your story world? How will we see that force in action?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
[coffee]
Good Morning Don
Since you mentioned Camus, I thought I’d add that Camus only saw suicide as a rational choice (& a choice often taken too late in life to be useful in avoiding suffering) in a world of cold logic, which is why he valued absurdism.
“I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death — and I refuse suicide… Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. However, it is good for man to judge himself occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so.” – Albert Camus
Thanks for the post.
See? There you go. It’s my fate to write something that sounds real good, only to learn that some smartypants read Camus not forty years ago but just yesterday and remembers exactly what Camus said. Fate. I should know that by now. Do my research. But, hey, you have to admit that Camus guy was pretty depressing, right? I mean, “my revolt, my freedom and my passion?” Come on.
Porter’s post was provocative…yours is also. For years I’ve had this image of a woman hanging out laundry, in the sunlight. It’s June, but it’s also war time. Has she read the headlines? Does she know that women, children are being gassed in Europe? She has to hang out her laundry. I incorporated the scene in one of my unpublished novels. But this week, because the currents are more roiled than ever, that woman might be me. Not hanging out laundry, but living, free of immediate evil. It makes me want to write. It also underlines that the world is close, but also far. And maybe that’s why we think more about angels–they can be human forces that send food, volunteer, tell us the truth so that our empathy grows. Writing? On an individual level, it has to be better than despair or fighting with someone who cannot call up understanding or empathy. This WU community is also a place to go. Because of you and Porter and all of us who know that empathy can fuel the world, even help that small boat get to shore. (Wow, it’s early. Maybe I need coffee.) Thanks for this!
We’re all small boats, aren’t we, trying to get to shore against the forces of wind, waves, currents and tides? To get there before night falls? To be safe? To hang laundry even when it’s wartime? That image of yours feels like the beginning of a story. I hope you write it.
Beth, I saw on the news last night a woman who was planting flowers (I think in dirt-filled toppled tires) in front of her bombed-out building in a Ukrainian village. She essentially said that she was doing it because she needed something to go on, something to bring light. She also said she couldn’t show despair in front of her child, because she knows it’s catching.
There is something beautiful and terrible in that, but I hope those flowers remain her angels.
Tom, the strength and determination of that woman is what gives me hope. Thanks for sharing that.
Don, your reflections on unseen currents bring back good memories. I spent my dissertation painstakingly assembling a database of minor variations across dialects of ancient Greece, then running some complicated math on it to see what were the overall patterns of change. And since language change emerges from millions of small interactions over time– which nearby villages do you visit, and what do you think of the people there?– the result was really a map of social forces adding up over hundreds of years. Greece has always looked to the east.
(For an example in more modern terms, Bill Labov has done similar work on North American English, tying linguistic variation to social forces at all levels. Did you know that the physical boundary between New York and Philadelphia English correlates tightly with gas stations selling merch for New York instead of Phiadelphia sports teams? Wild. And there’s always the provocatively titled, “Yankee Cultural Imperialism and the Northern Cities Shift,” connecting the development of the dialect spoken in major cities around the Great Lakes to the construction of the Erie Canal and the Second Great Awakening. Powerpoint here: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/PowerPoints/YCI.Yale.ppt)
As I began my WIP, I started adding in all these little details of who spoke what to whom, and what these small-scale patterns of travel were, with no real thought to it other than verisimilitude. But as my protagonist began interacting with the world, people began talking about him, and those rumors gained legs, and now….hooo boy, does he have a real problem on his hands! Reputation is everything, and he is that guy who sang in a brothel. And spilled wine all down his shirt. Oops.
Gonna have a really fun time getting him out of that one.
Wait– did I really just say getting him out of that one? No. What I really meant, of course, was that I would enjoy digging that hole even deeper. Bwahahaha…
Greece looks to the east? Gas station convenience stores influence regional dialects? Whoa. Speaking of sports teams loyalties, the NY Times once created a map to show the north-south boundary line down the middle of New England to determine where support for the NY Yankees ends and support for the Boston Red Sox begins. That line went straight through my hometown of Orange, Connecticut. In fact, it went right through my childhood house. How else can you explain that I was a Yankees fan and my youngest sister is a Red Sox fan? Our conflicting loyalties are forces tearing us apart, but she is also my little sister and I love her. Of such stuff are stories made. (BTW, my sister and I resolved our differences. I began following ice hockey instead.)
Whoah. The clouds part. The Angel of Literary Light descends. Haha.
I have been resisting the urge to bring into my story the issues of gentrification and over development on Ocean beaches. It was a driving force in my previous novel. Solely because of that, I thought I should keep it out of this current novel. I was afraid I’d be rewriting the same story. But your post made me realize, come on, this is the biggest issue of every beach town at the Jersey Shore, which is where my novels take place. Even the tattoo shop that was two blocks from my home, that sparked the start of my story in my mind, has since moved across town due to rising rents. Six of their neighbor businesses lost their spaces when a developer tore down a perfectly sturdy (and beautiful) 100-year old brick building to build multi-story condos. This is definitely a current that affects everyone in this town. My characters are going to have to deal with it too. The tattoo artist is going to have to move shop, for one. That won’t be easy, since he’s a hoarder.
Thank you, Don. I should have realized that what I was resisting was exactly what was needed. Sometimes it takes a prompt from you to see what my subconscious has been trying to tell me.
When I lived in Brooklyn it was in a heavily gentrified neighborhood (Williamsburg) which has once been Polish-American and later was home to Italians, Hispanics and (still, in East Williamsburg) conservative Jews. But the force of gentrification–represented by white hipsters like me–was driving up prices and pushing them out. On a sidewalk was spraypainted “Gentrification is Genocide”, which I though was an exaggeration, but I took the point. But, hey, hipsters need a home too, right? Even if they are funding their emo band, jeans repurposed as beach bags or experimental theatre with their trust funds? And the Jersey Shore needs more vegan pastries, doesn’t it? Come on now.
The primary setting of my current WIP is underwater so I’ll dive your post again later for water-related words to use in the next draft.
And now the challenge for another provocative WU post: does free will exist?
Here comes the tsunami.
Yes, free will exists. But so does luck and fate. As you say, here comes the tsunami…and your next story.
Hi Don! I appreciate what you are saying and it makes so much sense. At the same time, I remember the late Sheldon Leonard insisting that on the Dick Van Dyke Show that they not use current events, fads, current slang, or anything that would date the show. He said if they could do that, it would be watchable any time, and that turned out to be true. It’s why the show is still revered to this day. Probably the only current storyline they had was the episode in which they had Chad and Jeremy on the Alan Brady Show and groupies tried to find them. True, the roles of men and women in a marriage were different then, but you did have Sally on the writing team.
So I wonder how you balance those seemingly opposite approaches – or if you simply can’t, you pick one and run with it.
Who can argue with Rob and Laura Petrie? Seriously, the humor on that show–like on Seinfeld–is timeless. And yet, the show could not entirely escape the gender roles of its time. You raise a really interesting subject and a timely one too, and wouldn’t you know? My next post for WU is going to be on exactly the subject of topicality versus timelessness. Great minds?
I’d like to read that post as well, Don. I was just talking about this with someone who was asking what I thought was the difference between literature that lasts generations and books that are perhaps widely read when they come out and then are forgotten. My thought was that those that last ARE often very specific to a particular time (let’s say, The Great Gatsby) but are not tied to that time because the focus is not on the particular news events of that time but the attitude of that time, and at the same time they are saying something about human nature that is timeless. So Gatsby is clearly tied to 1920s high (and low) society and exhibits some of the social problems of the day. But we read it still today because of how truthfully it talks about ambition, greed, longing, self-deception, etc.–all of which are essentially unchanging.
I agree with Ada Austen–the clouds parted and the Angel of Literary Light descended. In the opening paragraph of my WIP my protagonist is steadying his dugout canoe against the tug of a sluggish current. But, until reading your piece this morning, it never dawned on me that the creek can be a metaphor for Jim Crow racism underlying my story. Many thanks.
Brilliant metaphor! Makes me want to read the story.
Excellent post, as always, Don. The truest test of one’s character is not in how well we plan that which we can control but in how we face and react to what is beyond our control. The people we create through our fiction are no different. As Joseph Campbell pointed out, the hero not only wants dragons to slay, he needs them. Fiction without “dragons” gets pretty boring, in my opinion.
There’s been a feeling in recent years that the dragons are all inside us. (The term used is “demons”.) While that’s true in part, there are nevertheless dragons out there in the world and they’re full of fire and care not a bit about us. So naturally, we need to write stories about facing and fighting them.
The most memorable novels I’ve read seem to tell at least two stories, one that tracks the personal world of the main players and one that reveals the bigger picture in which it all transpires. I set my YA tale in 1978 because of the themes I want to explore, which have to do with how we got from the social consciousness of the 60’s to the madness of here and now. My MC is looking for love, acceptance, and a normal mother, but her efforts to get these things brings her more into sync with that bigger picture. Another of my themes is the question of those currents we don’t see and can’t control. The tension that results as we begin to notice them and attempt to change accordingly. My ‘craft’ file got bigger again today. Thank you for the questions, Don.
There have been some excellent essays and editorial pieces about exactly what you are pondering: How we got from peace-and-love to nuke-the-others. Why are we so childish now? Or were we childish then? I love what you say about stories tracking on two levels, how great when that’s true.
Hey Don — One of my favorite topics. I’ve always been drawn to playing with unseen forces. It’s like the gravity of my storytelling instincts to have characters at first in denial of the currents that tug at them. There’s always a reluctance to accept societal dogma, but if enough people are convinced, frightened, or cowed into believing, the result is a force that demands reckoning.
I feel like my trilogy naturally falls into a pattern around it. In book one, both Vahldan (fairly fatalistic) and Elan (fiercely clinging to freewill) find it in their best interest to swim with the current of fervent dogma. Book two has them willingly submitting to it, to “go with the flow,” and only in book three do they see that their submission to it is a submission to meaningless; that even as they are fully in the flow to the inevitable roaring falls of their doom, they must fight for meaning–if only for those they love who are wading the current’s edge. In the process, I think they find their own, shared spiritualism–one that they strove to forge rather than surrendering to.
There’s such wonder to be found along the way, isn’t there? So much to notice, even when we feel we’re becalmed. Maybe especially then. Wonderful essay and inspiring prompts, as always. Thanks.
There are huge forces at work in your epic. One is the tide taking fierce tribes in the direction of confederation, but then also pulling them apart again. The greatest forces at work on Valdhan, ask me, are the tides inside himself. He is pulled powerfully toward honor and revenge, but also toward love and the wider world. Which is more important for a leader? Either way he wins loyal followers and bitter enemies. It’s what makes your story one for the ages.
Brilliant post and so very helpful for me right now as I try to determine how to link together some standalone novels with a trilogy. (Yes, that’s the backwards way to write, but it’s where I am.) I’ve written down “What larger thing is happening?” and posted it front and center to keep me focused, and your list of question prompts will help tremendously as I brainstorm a solution to my plot problem. Thank you!
How interesting! You’re right that what makes trilogies great is the feeling we get that when the story is over…well, it isn’t really over, not yet. The problem you solve today is only a subset of a much larger problem. To solve that one will require the purchase of two more volumes. I can tell you as an agent that I love that. (And, yeah, as a reader too.)
I thought I was writing a story about climate-change with a time-travel device. Then . . . “Time is a scythe, a leveler, a Sower and a judge. What vast change can time impose upon your story?” Whoa. Wait, a minute.
I’m not writing a climate-change story with a time-travel device. I’m writing a time-travel story about climate change as an unstoppable force. Is that the same or different?
I’ve already argued with myself on the page about whether climate change as we’re watching it occur is stoppable. Because if we can’t stop it, where is the hope in the story?
I’d thought yes, we can still stop it. It’s anthropomorphic. We caused it. Alternative energy. New tech. There is hope that the worst may yet be avoided.
But now, I’m thinking, no. The climate has always changed. It’s always going to change. The degree to which we’re involved isn’t absolute. We’re a factor, but not the only factor.
Time, on the other hand, is indisputably unstoppable. We cannot change that. Unless we have a time machine and even then, can we stop time? (((brain explodes)))
On the subject of unstoppable forces, I cannot miss an opportunity to mention STORM by George R. Stewart. Written in 1941, it was reissued last year. Totally thrilling.
Thanks for column! I’ll be thinking about how to show these forces in action. (Fire, for sure.)
“The climate has always changed. It’s always going to change.” I really don’t need to add anything to that, except to hope that your novel (finally, next in my queue–hooray!) in some way transcends our current anxiety and lets the effect of time on our planets show also.
And STORM by George R. Stewart? What? How have I never heard of that one? Must look it up right now…
Interestingly, I had just commented to a fellow writer in email this morning that most of my near-future SF (which I am explicitly now saying is NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT our world) involves political undercurrents where the protagonists are opposed by fundamentalist evangelical politicians tied into personality cults. And that includes the series written BEFORE a certain person was elected in 2016.
I kinda know how those things work, thanks to being involved in the early days of the politicizing of evangelical faith back in the ’70s, and having exposure to certain cult sorts. As a political organizer, I was very distressed to see that I was one of the few paying attention to this phenomenon back in the ’80s.
Well, now it’s here. And I have the experience to write about it–which I’m doing.
“The politicizing of evangelical faith”. There have been a number of non-fiction books chronicling that trend but, IMHO, what’s really at work is a force that has long been with us. It’s the force inside us that says, “I know the right way to live…and that means that everyone not only should but MUST live my way.” Couple that with an immutable faith, doctrine and text which, when read your way, affirms that your way is the ONLY right way and what do you get? Animal Farm. The Handmaiden’s Tale. The Hunger Games. America now.
The larger world and its forces? For one protagonist, it’s being a Junker in East Prussia on the eve of WWII with dreams spun from her readings from the German suffragettes. For the other protagonist, it’s being family that includes the East Prussian and the Gen Z close-knit circle of cousins who are a mix of African American and white, set in the uneasy racial tensions of 2018 Twin Cities. There are days I think this story is too complicated for me to write, but I keep discovering fascinating layers of story. If I can keep a steady frame…
A dual-timeline story? Excellent. No better way to show that the forces working on us then are the same as the forces working upon us now. Write on!
Excellent piece. My story people have faith even as they are pushed by the undercurrents of their time and although not explicitly said, I see Romans 8:28 at work in their lives, even if they cannot see it themselves.
Ah yes, the deep dark rabbit hole of TV Tropes. I believe I am the bad influence who introduced you to that particular time suck.
And stop picking on poor UI Camus! It’s not like he said suicide is our only option — not by a French-Algerian country mile — but rather that the “benign indifference” of the universe and the absurdity of human existence oblige us to confront and create our sense of meaning and morality on our own.
Poor Albert. Always a sourpuss, never the affable chatterbox at the bar. (Caution: literary joke.)
On the subject of great forces: I wonder if Greer McCallister doesn’t have it just right: forget the present – too complex, too opaque, to rapidly changing. Write about the present by focusing on the past or a fantastic “future.”
I say this because the utopian near-future in my current WIP looks increasingly like the present or recent past. Events move too swiftly for this snail-pace writer.
But the forces at play are good old-fashioned greed, Randian selfishness, and lust for power, salted with cultural resentment. The trick was to find a way for my two lone protagonists to stand up meaningfully to such a hydra-headed juggernaut. (Caution: mixed metaphor.) That might have been the hardest problem in the book, but I think (read: hope) I figured it out.
BTW: a relatively recent novel that deals with such larger forces admirably is A Gentleman of Moscow by Amor Towles. Of course, it’s historical fiction. Sigh …
Camus. Canoe. Kangaroo. The voices…the voices…WHY WON’T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE! Sorry. Little freak out there. It’s over. Fighting the forces at work in the world seems a kind of madness, doesn’t it? And yet we are mad. We choose to fight even though, in the long run, we cannot win. We are Camus. When a story like yours grapples with the Big Forces, we cannot but cheer even as we head down the hill to roll the rock up again. (See? Clever Camus allusion.)
On another subject, have you completed your move yet? Will you be at ThrillerFest?
The move is complete — pics up on Twitter and FB — but I neglected to do anything about signing up for anything at Thrillerfest. But I could come down and see you — and would love to do so.
Hi David. About Meursault: I have a character who sees being rejected by his community for telling what he sees as the truth as analogous to being condemned to death, not for killing someone, but for having failed to cry at his mother’s funeral.
I think assigning The Stranger to high school kids (because the French is relatively simple) is like assigning them quantum physics. And yes, being ostracized and forced to play the outcast is a kind of death. (But the Camus character I was winkingly referring to was Jean-Baptiste Clamence from The Fall)
I second your admiration for Gentleman in Moscow. You can open it anywhere and read. We’re all stuck in a hotel.
Mornin’ Don,
Since the metaphorical backdrop of your post is water, as I read, I was whimsically changing Mark Twain’s little ditty about a boy named Huck and wondering how it might have fared in the literary world if Jim was white. I suppose it wouldn’t currently (see what I did there?) suffer being banned in schools more than a hundred years after it was written. What greater testament to a story is there than that!
Characters working out personal struggles in the context of a larger world issue ads an exponent to the author’s possibilities and the readers engagement. So much more can be tested and drawn out of the characters. My passion is to place my stories in a bigger world conundrum where the characters’ bravery or growth DOESN’T solve the stakes typical thriller authors’ protagonists also seem to pull off. Even when issues get resolved, there is a whiff of a sense of dread. To me, that is more lie reality. Happy and yet… it ain’t over, madam.
I agree, both about life and stories. We all are grappling with our own problems, yet in another way grappling with problems facing all of us throughout time. When a story enacts that, it gets very real. Thanks for chiming in.
What a great post. Thank you!
In addition to the over-arching concept of good versus evil, I think we have to consider what we believe are the proportions of good and evil. That is, are they 50/50 forces pitted against each other (dualism), or does one or the other have the upper hand? Is good (or God) sovereign and in control, or is evil more powerful? Are good and evil distinct, or are they two sides of the same coin (yin and yang)? Important questions for both our story milieu and our own perception of “life, the universe, and everything.”
Well, what do YOU think? Does once force of the other have the upper hand? I think it depends on the day. Some days days evil wins. Some days good wins. I prefer those days, of course, yet we wouldn’t feel so happy about them if we didn’t have the other days too.
Romans 8:28 – “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (New International, my preferred version.) God also calls *us* to work for the good, I think. Don’t you?
Absolutely! All that is good, true, beautiful.
Don, I think I reached some level of Outside Forces influencing personal lives/stories with my debut, which was set in three timelines (1860s, 1960s, and present-day Detroit) and centered around one family’s interactions with the changing (and not-always-changing) relations and rules about race. War, displacement, injustice–these are things that act upon individuals and families and communities and we can do some thing to fight back and make things right, but we cannot fix any of it single-handedly (and similar fights must be fought and struggles endured in each generation). Most of my subsequent work has been smaller in focus–family struggles, personal struggles–but often with a larger problem in mind (like what happens after we die or how does abuse get perpetuated generation to generation and person to person, and how can we stop it).
The book I’m about to hand back to my editor continually taps into the news, tv shows, and music of 1989-1990 to ground the setting and emphasize certain themes, but it’s not taking on some bigger problem. It’s just using those outside issues to highlight or reinforce the issues of the main character. But I will be thinking about this subject more for a future project that’s been forming in my brain. There are ways to make it bigger and bolder and the Good-Evil dichotomy is a great way to start thinking about it.
Erin, as I’ll be saying in next month’s post, topicality doesn’t limit a novel’s longevity. What makes a novel timeless is something else. More anon.
Don–About fate: Jung said that “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Perhaps story itself is the one refuge that writers alone get to occupy. If she/he can keep from being overwhelmed by external events, there it is, the story, waiting to be imagined and shaped. What I’ve done in my current project is to examine a world that has in many ways sealed itself off from “out there.” It’s an upscale Florida community whose residents have silently agreed to turn their gated world into an enclave, a golf and cocktail party pleasure dome. When one of the members violates the code by writing about human folly and error (as he sees it), he is shunned. In other words, he is punished for letting the outside in.
Sounds like what you’ve created is a microcosm. Those gated community folks may have isolated themselves from the outside world, but nothing can keep away human nature. Interesting story idea!
“We’re all small boats, aren’t we, trying to get to shore against the forces of wind, waves, currents and tides? To get there before night falls? To be safe? To hang laundry even when it’s wartime?” Gold. I am taping this to my writing wall.