“Keep Writing”
“And I think that wraps that up.”
Alan thought for a second, then said, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s move on. The next question is ….” He looked to the right and scrolled on a screen out of view. “Ah, this is a good one. PlumPain212 asks, ‘How do you find motivation to write in these dark times?’”
Alan sat back and tapped his finger tips a few times. “This is a good question, but there isn’t really an answer. First off, if you’re watching this AMA that probably means you’re familiar with, if not a fan of my work, and probably know I’ve spent the last few years openly mocking and warning people against the … ‘Pedophile who must not be redacted,’ and since your question was spelled and punctuated correctly, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that PlumPain212 is not a fan of the barely sentient shit stain currently in the Oval Office who seems to spend his days trying to come up with newer and dumber ways to make the world worse. Even outside of him, there is still a lot of bad stuff going on in the world, all of which can make it difficult to write. Why work on your fun, YA fantasy novel when next week a destructive wildfire will be supercharged by our decades of ignoring climate change into an apocalyptic hellscape. And we could also be at war with … France, for who knows fuck why?
“Now the expected response to this question is to say something like art helps us through the tough times, and how ‘It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,’ meaning if you give up your writing dreams because the fascists make you angry, then the fascists have won. Which is all true, but also misleading. For example, I am an enemy of the pedophile’s regime. But I’m also a white, heterosexual cis male, meaning I’m only like number 48,723,904th on their enemies list. My life is,” here Alan air quoted, “‘threatened,’ but not so much to impact my daily life. I can still go to the supermarket and buy food with little worry some Gestapo assholes will kidnap me. But if PlumPain212 is a black, trans woman whose day job is investigating and taking down fraudsters, then they’re going to be much higher on that list, to the point their life may actually be threatened.”
Alan paused for a moment. “Tangent. Speaking of the regime’s enemies list, who is Number One? Truth? Justice? The American Way? Common decency?” Alan nodded a few times. “Anyway, I-” He snapped his fingers. “Accountability. That’s the regime’s Number One Enemy.”
After a few seconds of thought, Alan continued. “Anyway, getting back to the question. As someone with enough resources that – if things really hit the fan – I could most likely flee to a safer country, even I have had days where there is so much wrong that it feels like it’s pointless to spend time on my next novel.
“About six months ago – so a few thousand impeachable crimes ago – I was so depressed I didn’t want to write. But I was told decades ago that a writer needs to write every day. So, to write something, and to lift my spirits, I started a story where he died. And I made it the dumbest, most embarrassing way possible. And since then, when there have been bad days, I’ll just open up this file and write a new dumb way for him to die. Most of these aren’t even stories, some are just a newscaster trying to say with a straight face that he died on a golf course because some deranged groundskeeper tried to kill a gopher with explosives.”
Alan smiled. “If you don’t get the reference, um, ask your parents. Or,” here he muttered, “God,” before continuing, “your grandparents.” He sighed. “It sucks getting old, but as they say, it’s better than the alternative.”
“But back to my happy tales of his death, about a week ago I was working on a story where he was killed by a horse. Not that way.” Alan paused for a heartbeat. “Not that way either. Anyway, I fell into a rabbit hole of messed up medical stuff, and I realized, ‘This is fun, but I’m not producing usable words.’ Don’t get me wrong, playing some stupid game on your phone can be a way to relax and unwind from a stressful day, but it can also be a thing that wastes hours of time you’ll never get back. You have to figure out the best balance. In the same way, you can have fun writing … exercises, I guess you could call them, that serve no real purpose other than stretching your writing muscles, or you can have a productive word count.”
Alan frowned. “What was the question again?” He went back and read, “‘How do you find motivation to write in these dark times?’”
Alan thought for a moment. “I did say there really isn’t an answer to this question, but if I stopped myself from going off on tangents and had to actually give an answer, then I would say that no matter what, just keep writing. Writing stories that inspire people to be better is great, but there are other, easier ways to make the world better. And if you’re angry, or terrified of the world as it is, but can’t think of a way to change it with your writing, then do something else. Volunteer, join a protest, run for office. There are thousands of non-writing ways to make the world better. It’s like the old saying, ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ When you think of yourself as just a writer, you want to write your way out of every problem. But nobody is just a writer. We’ll all husbands, and wives, and allies, and … pissed off voters.”
After a few breaths, Alan said, “I don’t know if any of that makes sense, or is useable to anyone, or if I’m just talking in circles. Again, this is why I prefer to write out my random thoughts, and then edit them into something coherent. But that’s not how these things work. So, on to the next question. Ah, Yargrob asks ….”
Go back to the main Quarterly Story page, or the main page of my website.
If you didn’t get the reference, it’s to the movie Caddyshack.
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.
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If you liked this story, you might want to check out Political Pies, my collection of forty stories of a political nature.
