“Sink to Their Level”
When Holly came home from work, she found her wife Jane staring blankly at her laptop. Walking up behind her, Holly asked, “Are you staring because you’re exhausted from a day of writing, or is this a Writer’s Block Stare?”
In reply, Jane just groaned.
Holly kissed the top of her head, and said, “Come on.”
Once they were curled up on the couch, Holly asked, “So what’s the problem.”
“It was a simple idea.”
“Isn’t that how most of your writer’s block stories begin?”
Jane muttered something.
“Sorry, sorry. You were saying.”
“It was a simple idea. I’d do my patriotic duty and write a short story to help make sure that treasonous shitweasel, and all of his ilk, lose in November. The first version, was to have some guy recording a YouTube video ranting about how America had fallen into tyranny. The ‘twist’ was to have it just be a world with honest, sane people in government. The guy being one of those, ‘If a Democrat does it, it’s tyranny,’ bozos. But to be a short story would require a great deal of just telling people how good things would be if politicians who respected people and believed in reality were running the government. To really show all of that would take a novella at least.”
“Isn’t there a clip,” Holly asked, “probably from The Simpsons, of a world without lawyers and it just shows a bunch of people dancing in the streets for, like, two seconds?”
“Are you saying I should give up writing and take up a more visual media?”
Holly let the pause go on a bit too long before hurriedly saying, “No, no, of course not.”
Jane groaned.
Holly gave her a bit of a hug, and said, “You said that was the first version, meaning there’s at least one more.”
Jane let a slow breath out her nose. “The second version would be a twist on the twist and it would be some guy angry that – after being elected to go after ‘those’ people – the President King went after ‘his’ people as well.
“But that quickly led to a third version, where a group of four guys are recording a podcast. At first they seem normal, talking about the Big Game or something, but when they turn to politics we learn they’re the ‘America is doomed because I’m not allowed to hate gay people anymore,’ types. The point readers were to take away from it was, if we don’t vote for honest, sane people – which these days just means Democrats – assholes like this will be choosing the President.”
After a moment, Holly asked, “And the problem with that was ….”
“I realized that instead of writing these four characters as actual people with their own thoughts and views of the world, I was – to make a point – painting them with a thick coat of asshole paint. They were all like your stepdad, cranked to eleven.”
There was a lengthy pause before Holly asked, “So you wanted to write a story about why some assholes don’t deserve power, by showing that the people that vote for them are assholes, but you don’t want to call them assholes, in the rare chance some of them are just … misguided in their assholery? Am I understanding you correctly?”
“It’s not ….” Jane took a few calming breaths. “If someone like your stepdad wrote a story about why gay people are ‘bad’ for the country, it would be full of outright lies and the most homophobic stereotypes and would be utter bullshit. So if I write a story about why people like him are bad for the country, but if instead of using actual, truthful characters, I use caricatures of characters, isn’t that like me … getting into the elevator that will take me down to their level?”
Sitting up, Jane continued. “Even the most reprehensible people have some twisted logic for their actions. And if we want to bring them over to the Light Side, we need to have some understanding of why they’re doing what they’re doing. But just calling them assholes doesn’t help, and actually just makes it easier to hate them because, ‘They’re just assholes.’”
Holly sighed. “It is a noble sentiment to think that no one is beyond redemption, but a more realistic sentiment is to think that only those who attempt to make things better are deserving of redemption. There are many who have chosen the asshole path and will follow it, no matter what.”
After a moment, she asked, “Question: are you going to watch a bunch of YouTube videos of people like my stepdad so you can see things from their side so you can write your characters as real people?”
“Oh, God no. My recommendations are screwed up enough as it is.”
Holly quirked an eyebrow at Jane. “You just didn’t want to write this story, did you? So you just dug around until you came up with some plausible reason not to.”
Jane snuggled back up to Holly before quietly saying, “Maybe.” She quickly added, “I just wanted to do something simple, something I could hammer out in a day or two, before going back to more important projects. But the only way to do it so quickly would be to take the shortcut and break out the asshole paint.”
Holly hugged Jane. “Write up your ideas, then set them aside. Maybe someday you’ll figure out how to make a quick story out of them that don’t take too much time away from your important projects. Until then, let them go. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
Jane chuckled. “You’re very wise.”
“Then how did I end up married to you?”
Jane sat up. “For that, you’re making dinner tonight.”
“So, pizza or Chinese?”
Go back to the main Monthly Story page, or the main page of my website.
For each story I publish, I like to give the backstory, or anything interesting that happened while writing it. You can see what I wrote for this story on my Published Works page. And if you’re wondering, this was The Simpsons clip.
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If you liked this story, you might want to check out Seventh Story Stockpile, a collection of fifteen of my stories.